Not to disparage anyone’s success with the deck (I like the ID & played Gagarin Ash a lot upon first release) but I still am unconvinced by any Gagarin build. I will eat my words if it takes a Regionals or two, but I don’t foresee this deck consistently winning against good players playing good decks. People have said this deck has a good Geist match-up; I’ve even beaten it as Geist. I think I’ve lost once as Whizzard, my first time against the build. I don’t play Shaper but I can’t imagine losing if you have Shrike or Parasite in your deck. I’ve yet to see a build that could score quickly, and the deck inevitably loses one or two agendas from centrals early. Then the Runner waits to run RND in late game and wins. I’ve seen well-timed early Legworks end games, too.
Is anyone convinced this is tier one? Maybe no one is. I would say it’s decidedly tier two, but there are a plethora of tier two decks on both sides right now. If Regionals were this weekend would anyone play Gagarin Temple ? @CJFM? @IirionClaus would you play your GT Gagarin? Just curious; I’m happy to see Weyland success, I just don’t want people to think Weyland’s card pool is fixed because some Gagarins won Store Champs.
I would play mine, sure. I might be able to get to top 8, but I don’t think I’d be able to win it. Last time I got 15th/16th, but I had begrudgingly played butcher shop and performed terribly with it.
I do think that very skilled Criminals may have the deck’s number. Honestly, the question is whether you’re going to run up against Shapers with R&D Interfaces or Shapers with Maker’s Eyes. R&D Interfaces are how I most frequently lose, while my SC deck shuts down Maker’s Eye variants (because of that, it has a pretty damn good Geist matchup!. Also knowing to stack ice types is very strong against Geist.)
I think if the meta settles down, and decks become more predictable, then Gagarin will do very well. If it’s still full of weird silver-bullet decks, then probably not so much.
Despite playing the game since release the tier system still eludes me. It seems to be some sort of weak mechanism to quantify a deck’s popularity. I have yet to see a clear definition and I’m guessing that the concept was imported from Magic: the Gathering. The differences are that 1) MtG has two decades of gameplay and theory, and 2) MtG has a caste of dedicated, professional players who play the game as their full time job and are capable of reducing the space of potential decks significantly. Android: Netrunner has neither. As such, I think that we (as a community) are very far from fully exploring the deck space, and tier definitions are mostly meaningless. Therefore I am not convinced that any Gagarin build is tier one, or that any tier one Netrunner decks even exist.
Regionals is not THIS weekend but it is actually in three weekends and I am planning to take either my Gagarin build or a comparable Industrial Genomics build (I still need to test Mumbad City Hall in IG). I have said this before, I will say it again: right now I’m planning to take Gagarin all the way to Worlds. I started playing this deck after Worlds. Since then FFG released Mumba Temple, Museum of History, and now Mumbad City Hall and Commercial Bankers Group. FFG has also spoiled Jeeves Model Bioroids, which promises to make this deck even stronger. Meanwhile no significant new counters to this style of play have been released.
I’m completely fine with being the only buffoon who brings Gagarin Deep Space to Minneapolis in November.
Weyland is fine. Weyland has been fine since Worlds. Yes, it is likely that Weyland has been the weakest Corp in November. Starting with Democracy and Dogma I no longer think this is the case. MCH opens up Gagarin and Clone Suffrage Movement promises to boost Blue Sun significantly. Corporate Sales Team is an important addition to rush decks, which Weyland can perform rather well.
There have been a couple of threads complaining that FFG has not spoiled any Weyland cards. Well, now we saw a bunch and they’re incredibly strong. In my opinion, the faction as a whole and Gagarin in particular are heading in the right direction.
Actually, wait, wait, no. No. I take everything back! Weyland is awful. Gagarin is awful. MCH is a crutch or a trap or whatever. Nothing to see here. Move along
Interesting opinions. I will certainly be pulling for you at Worlds if you make the Top 4 with Gagarin! I don’t personally see the power of any new Weyland cards so far, but I’ll be happily surprised if someone can demonstrate their power. As a heavy Blue Sun player, I’m not sure how Suffrage Movement helps BS at all, since it needs to be undefended. I don’t know the rules well enough to know whether you can bounce a rezzed ICE and then rez CSM to get its trigger. Even if this is possible, I’m not sure it’s better than Adonis. Returning Oversights seems good in theory but in the past 3 months of heavy BS play most of your money does not come from operations in BS Glacier. The Oversights are very unreliable these days, past the first few turns.
The idea is to install + OAI an ice on top of it. Start of your turn, bounce the ice with BS, then use Suffrage to get OAI back. Rinse, repeat, wipe hands on pants.
I feel like this type of thinking stems from the fact that Museum decks naturally attract new/inexperienced/casual players, and that makes test games against decks like Gagarin high variance when it comes to the caliber of opponent you are going against.
If you play against inexperienced players on this Gagarin deck and you are a highly capable Whizzard player, you are going to win a ton of games. But that can be true of any matchup, it’s hair the disparity in player skill that is skewing he results of your testing.
All this aside, my personal opinion is that @CJFM Gagarin is a viable deck that crumbles hard to tech cards. I would not be surprised if I saw it at regionals this year, but it’s not NEH fast advance. That said, this can all change with the next pack, which releases counters to the two most popular decks in the meta, which could give Gagarin a relative power boost.
Off topic, but I’ll bite.
Tier 1 is anything I have to beat in deckbuilding
Tier 2 is anything I can beat in gameplay
These are my personal definitions, and really they’re more categories than tiers. To elaborate: Anything that significantly affects either my deckbuilding or deck choice is Tier 1. If I want to bring something to a tournament (for serious) but immediately get nagged by thoughts of “but I lose to X” then X is probably Tier 1. Tier 1 doesn’t necessarily mean a good deck though! Scorch decks were “Tier 1” (by my definition) for a lot longer than they were good decks as long as people kept running Plascrete Carapace. Once good players realized they could reliable out money the corp and that was enough to beat Scorch decks, they stopped considering them in their deckbuilding, and the Scorch decks dropped to my Tier 2.
My Tier 2 is anything that I can beat with my deck, without teching specifically against it. Of course sometimes it’s hard to tell if your specifically teching against something or not. For example, if I’m packing grip-increase to beat Net damage decks, isn’t that also tech against Meat damage decks? It’s a fine line. Once again my “Tier 2” isn’t necessarily bad. I consider Cerebral Imaging to be Tier 2 against my Noise, but that’s absolutely a deck I’d watch out for at tournaments.
These definitions are all relative to decks, and I say that’s fine. Strength is a relative measure after all. Things that are strong today will be weak tomorrow without they themselves having changed.
Speaking seriously I don’t think I would try and alliance in jeeves. If you wanted his effect I would like some lists go down to 2 jackson, then I would cut the 2 GFIs in favor of a 11 2 pt agenda suite. That opens the 3 inf for jeeves and he can still be searched out by Mumbad City Hall.
I ran an 11-2 pt list at my sc and while it does up the agenda density its still pretty dense. I used the 3 inf for an architect though (which did real work).
I suppose you don’t have to meet the alliance requirement necessarily. You probably don’t want to if it is a big stretch.
I wonder if Weyland’s other alliance card is going to be decent. The one that was revealed is pretty underwhelming.
I also keep forgetting that Mumbad virtual tour is an alliance card and very easy to meet the alliance requirement in Gagarin.
After all, I love me some +5 trash cost that I can install on the fly and use to protect my museums. Make Whizzard pay 6 actual credits to trash that museum!
Protecting remote assets with Virtual Tour in Gagarin? Not gonna happen easily, since accessing cards in Gagarin’s remotes is optional. Probably most you can hope for in Gagarin for the Virtual Tour is to protect trashable cards from Medium R&D digs a bit better / make them keep their money pool low.
It won’t trigger, because it has ice protecting it “when your turn begins”. It doesn’t mattter that you remove the ice, “when your turn begins” trigger already happened.
Not true. The way these triggers work is all “when your turn begins” triggers are collected, and then they are resolved in the order of the player’s choice. This means you can’t add a new trigger via an ability (e.g.Supplier installing a Daily Casts), but any conditions for that card’s effect are evaluated when that card effect is resolved.
The canonical ruling for this is installing a Dyson Mem Chip off of The Supplier with an Underworld Contacts on the table when you had 1 link at the start of turn. Because the condition (2 link) isn’t checked until the card (UC) is resolved, Underworld fires that turn.
Looks like each person has his or her own definition. Fine with me, just means that person A cannot answer person B’s “is this tier 1?” since the definitions differ.
Right now I’m planning on 3x Team Sponsorship, 3x Viper. I would not pay 9inf for Jeeves if I can pay 6inf for Jeeves.
I’m also planning to test an eight or nine agenda suite and see whether that works out. Probably not but worth a shot. Deck slots are tight.
Also it’s potentially Click, Click for 5c with Product Recall.
That’s an hilarious way to punish Employee Strike, though
Both Blue Sun and Suffrage are “when your turn begins” effects and therefore the Corp chooses their order.
