There are no deck slots available in PE to make matters worse. You sure don’t want to swap the houses or gila hands with chronos. It’s a binder card right now
I think cp is intended for a type of jinyeki play not (that) often seen. Bluffing a score ready agenda as a trap for multiple turns.
I think both unorthodox and cp are intended for this style of play. Mush an up leave it. Drop a paper wall (or what have you). When you drop the agenda score the up. Is like the jinyeki version of astro train.
In those circumstances I think cp has more utility. Score it when:
A) when a shaper has exhausted his deck and plans to Levy.
B. To prevent recursion using test run and clonechip.
C). Noise is very strong in the meta now. Use it to prevent the recycling of data sucker Lamprey and especially cache.
D. Finally a lot decks include some ability to recover whether it’s Levy, clone chip, test run. Scavenge or retrieval run or deja
Exiling cards after hitting a psychic field or komainu lessons the Value of these recovery cards.
That said I think this card is too janky will occur significantly enough to change the meta.
2 Likes
Now I’m actually having to start thinking about what decks I’m going to build with this set, I really like it. It’s got me building totally new decks - varieties on Cerebral Imaging, big ICE decks out of NEXT Design, Quetzal blitz, I’d be building a stealth deck if I played Shaper and a connection deck if I played criminal - rather than rehashing my old stuff. The only downside is the Weyland cards. Wendigo is a bad Inazuma (allbeit influence free) and Crisium Grid looks more useful out of CI than it does out of any Weyland ID. Shattered Remains is a bit more like it though.
I think the jury is still out on Chronos Project. I think the mechanic is something that needs to exist - although possibly not now and possibly not in quite such a high-variance form.
What runner decks don’t rely on some amount of recursion now though?
Shapers are the obvious faction. Clone Chip, Test Run, LARLA, etc.
Anarchs are playing Siphon + SoT, or virus recursion with Deja Vu and sometimes clone chip.
Criminals play SoT too, for Siphon and sometimes Indexing spam, but also sometimes just Inside Job or Sure Gamble.
I think the question is not will this card be a dead card. The answer is no, most of the time it will do something. The real question is, how much of an impact will it make? Against criminal, probably not that much. You cut off a few options probably, but unless it’s late game and they have multiple SoT’s out and no events left in their deck, they will probably be fine. You can probably do some damage to Noise. Hitting all three Cache or a couple Parasites while they’re in archives will hurt em. Obviously Shapers suffer the most, and you might be able to catch them with a key breaker in archives or something like that.
Overall, only Jinteki will probably want this. It’s just not enough of an impact versus something like Gila Hands or Profiteering for most decks that want neutral 3/1s, but in Jinteki it improves the matchup against Deus X recursion by a huge margin. I am really focusing on tuning Kate because I think she can stand up to RP and NEH, and the black tree matchup is as close to a bye as it gets, while Noise and Andy sweat bullets the whole time. It’s just 10 times easier with Deus X recursion, and Chronos Protocol puts PE back in the game against Kate.
1 Like
But a card that won’t work well against Criminal isn’t generally going to be worth playing. right now. Hitting Anarchs mildly and Shapers hard is nice, but the cost of scoring a 3/1 for most people is painful. PE likes it most, but it’s not Gila Hands, as you said, so it’ll still have to fight for slots. Might do well against Kate in PE if scored at the right time, but it’s very much a silver bullet.
Even if it has potential, a card that’s mostly useful for one faction (that isn’t overly dominant) mostly against one other faction (that is good, but not necessarily the best by any serious margin, if at all)… isn’t going to ruin the meta entirely, or anything.
They accidentally printed Chronos Project in our universe, instead of in the bizarro alternate universe where The Collective is currently sporting a 90% winrate. That universe instead got a card to nerf the already-underpowered NBN.
3 Likes
In other news, I can’t wait to splash for Eliza’s in Blue Sun. It will be like if melange mining were excellent instead of mediocre.
When we get Bifrost Array, I if a HB attrition deck is going to be workable? Keep recurring those Project Chronoses and put their key cards where Clone Chip can’t save them.
(Thankfully Bifrost isn’t neutral - imagine it as a 3/1 pseudo-Astro!)
It couldn´t copy astros ability anyways. Copying Astro would put a counter on Bifrost Array, but you couldn´t spend it on anything since spending the counter is not a “come into play effect”.
I’m actually excited to try out manhunt in an NBN taxing deck. It seems like it could be good at the right time.
I don’t think so:
When you score Bifrost Array, you may trigger the "when scored" ability of another agenda that is not a copy of Bifrost Array in your score area.
So in this hypothetical scenario, you’d trigger the “when scored” ability of Astro, which puts an agenda counter on it.
Well, the argument isn’t that you don’t get the counter. It’s that you can’t use that counter for anything.
1 Like
Place 1 agenda counter on AstroScript Pilot Program when you score it.Why would that counter go on Bifrost Array?
That’s true! I suppose it would indeed work. I rescind my previous statement.
Because you replace the reference when you copy it, I believe. [Self] remains as [Self], even if it was written otherwise, I thought. That was the argument given for it being no good with Efficiency Committee or Vitruvius, which are in-faction options.
But… you aren’t copying anything. You’re triggering an effect on another card.
1 Like
I was told that triggering the “when scored” ability would cause it to be self-referential. If that is wrong and Bifrost works as I first hoped, then yeah, it’ll be amazing.
1 Like
Bifrost causes an already scored agenda to effectively trigger again. Anything that is self-referential on the other agenda you are triggering is still self-referential and works as you would expect - i.e. you get counters on Efficiency Committee and, in the hypothetic situation above (which I guess could occur in a draft environment in the future) you would get an extra token on Astro.
I really, really hope that’s right. it’s what I thought Bifrost did, and it makes Bifrost SO MUCH BETTER for HB.
The Vitruvius interaction I’m still unsure of, but having Efficiency Committee and ABT fire again is already lots.