I’ve been following this thread despite MaxX being the only anarch I don’t play, and I have to say “I don’t get it”. RAMaxX sounds good, and when I play against it I feel the pressure, but I pretty much never lose to it. I’ve only been to one regional so far, where there were no MaxX in the top 8, and I haven’t really seen much otherwise IRL beyond the two RAMaxX I beat in Swiss. Confirmation bias aside, I see Kate in force in the top cuts, and find it overall more consistently difficult to beat.
What I’m trying to ask is, essentially, is RAMaxX just so hard to play that only ~8 players in the world are good enough to consistently win with it? Is it just a deck that @mediohxcore, a very talented player, happened to find just suits his playstyle? What’s the honest assessment of where RAMaxX is right now? Appreciate the insights, no pitchforking intended.
It’s a deck with a very high skill ceiling that punishes the runner’s poor play mercilessly. I am not good enough to get good results with it consistently yet, but I’ve seen what happens when you do.
I played it in store champs, and it was consistent, strong, and has stable draws. A deck with those components, as long as the power level is sufficient, offers a super high power ceiling. Being maxx and having to figure out how to interact with the ID makes decisions a little more narrow/close on timing and how much cash to float, when and where to attack, such that the better player you are, and the more familiar you are with the deck, the better you’ll be.
I think PPVP kate is much more accessible, and insanely powerful, but RAM forces inexperienced corps to react in ways they might not be used to (not as straightforward as shaper matchups), and good corps have to play snug to keep up with the ice destruction and access potential of datasuckers and the fixies.
After 2-3 months playing the deck, I still felt like I room to grow, and I’ve been playing this game for quite a while. I firmly believe that you can be stronger in more matchups, and less play-aroundable as RAM than PPVP Kate.
I definitely think skill is a factor, but there’s another that puts off players from sleeving up MaxX imo. It’s the same reason Jinteki PE was not played that much during its heyday, despite being very strong. MaxX might be very consistent overall but you occasionally end up being locked out by a chronos project, a blackmail or just because you milled all your recursion. It’s not as common as you might think when you start playing the deck, but when it does you can be left powerless and I think that’s a big deterrent for many players.
If you draw more than her ability you should get at least one of the recursion tools. I’ve had maxx games where all of my recursion other than one clone chip was in the trash but still eeked out a win against good opponents. You have to install breakers a little earlier and just play more carefully. It isn’t easy piloting her for sure.
The problem isn’t having a Deja Vu to recur a Kati because all three got milled by turn four (along with most of your other econ), it’s how horribly inefficient it is.
I won a Store Champs this season with MaxX and I’m a believer in the deck. Kate doesn’t have Imp, or Medium, or D4V1D, or a whole free card every turn.
I also think it is legitimately that hard to play that it scares off people who aren’t Dan. I love MaxX but I have serious concerns that at Regionals my mental stamina won’t hold up 8 or 10 hours in, I’ll mess up, and you don’t get a second chance with MaxX.
With Kate you can facecheck something unexpected and just SMC the answer, or just lose your programs, take a pile of damage, and just recover with your 3x Clone and worst case you play a discounted Levy and reset it all. It’s so safe and comforting.
Kate can spend all her money on some ill-advised run, giving a huge scoring window, and then just Lucky Find from $0 to $9 again with your PPVP and Stimhack into the remote to take the agenda anyway.
With MaxX you spend the few Clone Chips you draw just building your rig in the first place - you lose a breaker and you’re just praying to JHow that you draw just one more recursion piece or a way to Levy. MaxX spends all her money on some ill-advised run and you’re clicking for credits like a chump to play your Liberated that costs $6 up front to play.
Now @mediohxcore is a guy who used to play classic Andysucker with 1x Corroder, no recursion, and simply saying - just don’t lose your Corroder!
MaxX is the same way - just make all the right decisions and you win. That’s the deal.
It is a next level ID. Probably the most powerful Anarch ID. The fact that it immediately spawned two strong archetypes lends to the idea of its strength.
Maxx has the highest raw power level of any runner, by far. I went 22-1 with my doppelganger version during store champ season, and the only reason I didn’t play it at the ANRPC tournament was because there was a ton of blacklist in the room (played against 8 copies in 5 rounds). She is open to mass haterade, but if you reliably dodge everyone playing it, like Dan does, it’s certainly the best deck right now.
I don’t think it is that bad. I’m a guy who used to run Criminal aggro and always said the “just never be wrong” game was a sucker’s play that few if any of us could pull off. So I ran 2x Corroder, 1xCrypsis, just in case. And that paid off: I never lost a game due to a misplay on breakers.
MaxX certainly can bone you in the odd game here and there through self-mills, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as risky as the 1xbreaker, 0-recursion surfing-the-razors-edge stuff. Part of it is you have to draw more: the early game can be tight-chested until you hit an SoT/Deja, so you draw, build board position, and practice Safe Running™ to scout.
With the sheer amount of recursion in the deck, I don’t think it is super-punishing of minor mistakes. It’s not shaper-safety-blankets safe, but it trades some of that for aggressive potential.
Two hypotheses:
aggressive running is harder than ever to pull off, and
making all the right decisions and you win is true for pretty much any deck tier 2 and up :).
Net ready wasn’t around then, but no, I haven’t updated. I have a feeling that I might try it without levy if I decide to squeeze NRE and doppel into the same deck.
There really isn’t much to spare in the average case. On an average first pass through the base 45 card Reg MaxX, after 11 turns you see almost exactly half your deck (5 initial cards, 11 free draws, 7 extra draws = 23 cards seen, with 22 dumped into heap by MaxX).
That means by the time you draw your entire deck, you have an expected value of 1 of each breaker, 1.5 Clone Chips, 1 Deja, and 1 SOT for recursion with a lot of variance around those figures.
The first Clone Chip you see is basically a Special Order since you’re fairly likely to miss one breaker, meaning you have on average 0.5 Clone Chips of safety blanket - and you’d much rather use that margin to do instant Parasite or fetch the Medium than to actually recover from a mistake.
Same with the SOT, on average you get one but you’re also only 50% to see your Legwork so I often want to blow the SOT on playing Legwork which doesn’t leave it for recovery.
Sounds about right, and that’s what leads to that tight-chested early game I was talking about. That feels like plenty of recursion: 2 things that can secure a LARLA, 1-of each breaker plus 1.5 chips to cover fails. That’s way more protection than the 1x-breaker crims ever had :). Definitely have to play to not lose on the recursion, which does sometimes cost the tempo MaxX gave and is different than the way, say, Shapers play it.
EV after ten turns is the full breaker suite and about to Levy to transition to full lategame control is a pretty good place to be in the current meta, I think. Sometimes you get +EV and huge tempo gains from her power, sometimes you’re fighting her power and you have to rely more on skill and how good red cards are now.
