Going Against the Grain: Reg-Ass Maxx

[spags]

@BJester

What about that 70 card tower deck, that makes 3.5 versions

All hail @anon34370798.

[hhooo]

Is this a game of thrones thing?

I’m just saying it’s the best deck, but I would have been so sad if I had played it at the last tournament. Decks running blacklist and ways to get out quickly can just beat you regardless of player skill sometimes.

[mediohxcore]

@PeekaySK

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 think I have Deja’d Kati one time ever. You have enough economy that you do fine most games where you don’t draw her. You have to sit on Kati about 8-9 turns before she pays off vs clicking for credits, so only Deja her if you’re playing a game thats very likely to go long, you have plenty of recursion, you have little other money, and you milled all 3 Katis quickly.

@Yoshi

He should have had the same rule for his Mimic

TBF, I wanted to install Femme rather than Mimic that game because of a Komainu on the table, but by the time I got Femme my deck was so small that I thought I needed to play riskier/faster to have a shot. Not losing Mimic wasn’t winning me that game, I don’t think.

@hhooo

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 played 2 opponents packing blacklist and just trashed them all. It’s not as sky-is-falling as it seems. Unless you stash it behind grails or Lotus with both Yogs or NREs trashed, you can get to it. It’s a pain but hardly ever a hard lock.

@hypomodern

2. making all the right decisions and you win is true for pretty much any deck tier 2 and up :).

I don’t think this is necessarily true. Maxx’s power lies largely in consistency; the fact that you draw and see so many cards means you have a shot in almost every game, whereas a Kate player who doesn’t see PPVPs fast is going to have a hard time and there isn’t much you can do about it. Other decks also tend to have shittier matchups somewhere. Maxx feels at least 50% vs everything on good play.

It also helps that Regass plays a slow, controlling-type game as plan A, which means you have plenty of time to find what you need, but has Medium, which is also easy to find when you need it and one of the best hail-mary cards in the game if you do fall behind.

Going back to the high-variance deck discussion in the other thread, Regass feels like an extremely low variance deck that has a relatively low power cap. It’s for this reason you need to play so tight; most games are going to be somewhat close because of how consistent your power level is, so if you don’t squeeze out every inch of value you can easily put yourself from barely-win into barely-lose territory.

[Jdalart]

Here is an segment from a richard garfield talk about balancing games. Most of it is not very relevant to this discussion however there was one part where he talks about spectromancer that I thought was very relevant.

SpectroMancer Balance

The key point is that the most balanced and consistent class was most preferred by experts due to the fact that it rewarded play skill better than any other class. However, it experienced a drastic downturn with the intermediate before reaching the expert spike.

[hhooo]

I agree that most if the time it’s not a huge deal, but I was playing against people playing 3x blacklist and putting it behind tollbooth and caprice/ash. It was really crazy. I assume that this is not the normal way people play the card, but on the day the blacklisters were going HAM.

[GhostLooper]

@kiv

If you have an updated list I’d be interested to see it

I second this. @hhooo DoppelList? Pretty please?

[mediohxcore]

You can’t fit Doppel and NRE. @hhooo came off doppel.

3 Clone Chip
1 levy
2 NRE
2 inf left to go fuck yourselves with. Play legwork.

[spags]

He’s talking about going Levy-less.

“can’t” is such a strong word.

[hhooo]

ghettoblaster

MaxX: Maximum Punk Rock

Event (15)
2x Déjà Vu
3x I’ve Had Worse
1x Knifed
1x Levy AR Lab Access •••
1x Queen’s Gambit
1x Spooned
1x Stimhack
3x Sure Gamble
2x Wanton Destruction

Hardware (5)
3x Clone Chip ••••• •
2x Doppelgänger ••••

Resource (10)
3x Daily Casts
3x Kati Jones
3x Liberated Account
1x Same Old Thing

Icebreaker (6)
2x Corroder
2x Mimic
1x Yog.0
1x ZU.13 Key Master ••

Program (9)
1x D4v1d
2x Datasucker
2x Imp
1x Medium
3x Parasite

This is what I ran most recently for doppelmaxx, it’s still very good, and will be as long as RP is a big thing. Crick hurts a bit, but that’s true for every runner. Second David is probably wise in the current meta.

[Argamas]

Dan might be a little stressed for the Regionals

[Yoshi]

@mediohxcore

TBF, I wanted to install Femme rather than Mimic that game because of a Komainu on the table, but by the time I got Femme my deck was so small that I thought I needed to play riskier/faster to have a shot. Not losing Mimic wasn’t winning me that game, I don’t think.

Interesting to hear, I think I’ll re-watch the game and keep that in mind, best way to learn right?

[clercqie]

@mediohxcore

Regass feels like an extremely low variance deck that has a relatively low power cap.

This is an interesting quote to me. How would you (loosely) rank the potential of Maxx among other consistent Tier 1 runners such as Kate or Andy? Maybe this is off-base, but as Kate also (usually) draws her whole deck and Andy’s start allows for earlier pressure, is the consistency between these 3 not fairly comparable on average?

So if the other 2 are easier to play AND more powerful, why would you play Maxx at all? In a tournament, against lower-level opponents, you’d win based on skill difference, even if consistency of Kate and Andy is lower, and after the cut, the increase in potential for K&A could mean the difference between win or loss. This is assuming that your skill and experience with piloting all these runner decks is the same.

I’m not such a good pilot myself, but I played Maxx this weekend in a small tourney and while losing every game, I always got to 6 points. This would indicate to me that Maxx’ potential is really high though. So maybe I’m misreading you, but I’d love to hear you expand a bit on the topic.

[mediohxcore]

@clercqie

This is an interesting quote to me. How would you (loosely) rank the potential of Maxx among other consistent Tier 1 runners such as Kate or Andy? Maybe this is off-base, but as Kate also (usually) draws her whole deck and Andy’s start allows for earlier pressure, is the consistency between these 3 not fairly comparable on average?

I think that Maxx has far more consistent starts than Kate or Andy but is worse than Kate or Andy if they have a good start. A Kate hand with an SMC, a PPVP, a Diesel, and a Gamble is going to be better than just about every Maxx hand, but Kate has the ability to fall flat without PPVP, whereas Maxx relies heavily on Clone Chip only and can do just fine without them as long as you’re drawing pieces that you need. Andy, similarly, does great when she has turn 1 Desperado, Gamble/Laundry, Testing, but without that start, she can often get locked out of Sec Testing value and have very little shot against something like RP. Andy used to be considered consistent because her starts were always pretty good, but the threshold of how good her starts need to be is a lot higher than it was a year ago, and as a result, she no longer can consistently get starts that are good enough to beat the best decks.

@clercqie

So if the other 2 are easier to play AND more powerful, why would you play Maxx at all? In a tournament, against lower-level opponents, you’d win based on skill difference, even if consistency of Kate and Andy is lower, and after the cut, the increase in potential for K&A could mean the difference between win or loss. This is assuming that your skill and experience with piloting all these runner decks is the same.

I believe Andy to have about 35% of draws and Kate to have about 25% where you have next to no shot of beating highly skilled corps with the best decks. I don’t have this issue with Maxx, as she draws herself out of the mediocre starts the vast majority of the time.

@clercqie

I’m not such a good pilot myself, but I played Maxx this weekend in a small tourney and while losing every game, I always got to 6 points. This would indicate to me that Maxx’ potential is really high though. So maybe I’m misreading you, but I’d love to hear you expand a bit on the topic

Her potential for winning is really high, but her potential for power level is low. If you can just barely lose every game, that probably means that you could have played it a little bit better and won a lot of those. Still, you could very easily have won by the skin of your teeth in all of them. That’s what I mean by “her power level cap is low”. You’re not going to win blowout games like you would have with Andy where you get up Testing-Desperado, RDI, and all of your breakers by turn 4 and the corp has no time to defend. You have to fight for every win because she never does anything totally busted like that.

[Calimsha]

I’m also gonna add that every single mistake can cost you Way more with Maxx than Kate or Andy. I keep joking about the ABT gambit but smaller mistake like unloading Kati one turn too early, firing levy one turn too late or insta parasiting an ice instead of fetching the breaker can somehow end with you on the losing side of the game.

[jerklin]

@mediohxcore

Her potential for winning is really high, but her potential for power level is low. If you can just barely lose every game, that probably means that you could have played it a little bit better and won a lot of those. Still, you could very easily have won by the skin of your teeth in all of them. That’s what I mean by “her power level cap is low”. You’re not going to win blowout games like you would have with Andy where you get up Testing-Desperado, RDI, and all of your breakers by turn 4 and the corp has no time to defend. You have to fight for every win because she never does anything totally busted like that.

Damn, now I want to play some Regass

[steve_houston]

Please come play Regass or any old decks Jesse, you are missed! You have enough time to practice to repeat the Philly 1-2 with Dan.

[hypomodern]

@mediohxcore

You’re not going to win blowout games like you would have with Andy where you get up Testing-Desperado, RDI, and all of your breakers by turn 4 and the corp has no time to defend. You have to fight for every win because she never does anything totally busted like that.

@Calimsha

I’m also gonna add that every single mistake can cost you Way more with Maxx than Kate or Andy.

I gotta say, my empirical experience diverges from these POVs. Andy never blows corps out anymore, whereas I blew people out with MaxX at SCs and the regional in about half of my games.

Kate is way more resilient than MaxX—by which I mean her tolerance for mistakes is higher. You have more recursion. MaxX recovers from minor mistakes and bad draws better than any Criminal: if the blowout doesn’t happen, with current Anarch shell her natural draw tends to get you in a robust board control state. Andy can get set up early, but the SecTesting/Desperado shell is dead to low-remote glacier play and even JRP can rush past stealth now.

MaxX is extremely vulnerable to perfect-timing Blacklist or surprise Chronos Project; so far those have been really rare events; Kate is also somewhat vulnerable to those effects as well, but to a lesser degree.

Andy doesn’t care, but a single bad misread on destroyers/damage is a massive tempo hit that you have no built-in tools to recover from. If it takes out your sole remaining breaker of a given type, you have no recursion to fall back on.

Man, now I have a blog post I want to write on robustness vs. fragility in Runner archetypes.

[Basoon]

Yeah I have to agree that it feels way easier to make a critical error in Andy these days then it does in Maxx for the most part. Probably the main reason I stopped playing it at this point. And when I say critical errors, I mean spending money on runs and not finding agendas. But I think this is more of a commentary on Andy’s ability to econ without Account Siphon, which seems to land less and less these days, then it is about the relative complexity of her game plan compared to Maxx.

[hypomodern]

@Basoon

Andy’s ability to econ without Account Siphon,

and how easy it is for, say, and HB/Blue Sun glacier to turn off SecTest/Desperado.

[mediohxcore]

Maybe Andy is a bad example; I haven’t played her since worlds. It could certainly be the case that Andy loses a lot just because she sucks right now… Though I maintain that missing on agendas is not the sort of critical error you make that loses you the game, that’s just the sad reality that your deck isn’t good enough to win without somewhat lucky pulls.

Still, playing as RP, Andy draws with Econ/Testing/Desperado feel like uphill battles whereas starts without Desperado and Testing in the first 3 turns or so usually feel pretty easy, and there isn’t a lot the Andy player can do besides mull well.