What do you think of Grail ICE in the usual RP glacier decks? Is it worth the influence? I know it’s not as taxing as Tollbooth or Eli, or the usual suspects, but I believe maybe it deserves consideration.
Maybe the cheaper rez cost is enough to make it viable, and also the fact that now you need a full rig to run securely, or you risk program trashing and net damage from ICE usually not able to dish out that kind of punishment. Will that be enough to slow the runner down so you can still score securely behind less taxing ICE?
I know I’m going to try it at least, but was wondering what more experienced players thought on the matter.
It’s worth a shot, but I don’t think it will work better than any existing RP archetypes which are already very good.
You also don’t need a “full rig” to run against grail ice in RP, you just need Ice destruction or a Knight. You can’t assume the Runner is going to be slowed down but forcing them to install multiple breakers because typically that isn’t a situation you can really force as the corp, at least not early.
The Current RP Archetype is good in part because cards like Tsurugi are as immediately good against AI as they are against traditional breakers, and cards like Tollbooth and Wall of Thorns are very resilient in the face of Parasite.
Don’t forget that to get the advantage of the Grail Ice you need to hold reserve Ice in hand, which likely means including more Ice than usual in order to have enough Ice to actually install to protect all your servers. This means that in order to play grail Ice effectively the Corp may need to cut operations, assets or upgrades to make room.
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This is actually an interesting idea, but I’d think it won’t be quite as effective as elsewhere. Certainly not before the full cycle is out. The obvious inclusion is going to be Excalibur – eating a Knight permanently to avoid being unable to make more than one run/turn and making all the other Grail Ice all the more annoying? Handy. (You can, after all, have one in play and one in hand.)
That said, the big edge of Grail Ice is being cheap three subroutine stuff, which isn’t particularly easy to do in RP (compared to the Foundry or NEXT Design). If you can do that reliably, sure, it’ll be pretty good/taxing until it gets parasited. If not, well… might not be worth it.
While I believe every idea is worthy of consideration, I think grail and RP doesn’t mix very well.
I think Grail can be good in decks that can exploit early advantages but in my experience pretty much all RP-decks are all in it for the lategame.
Usually, being taxing to the runner comes at the cost of two resources: clicks and credits. Grail ICE partially moves this to a different domain, namely HQ slots (and influence). You want to be able to always reveal two pieces, and ideally choose the worst subs for the runner at the moment (so you probably want to be holding more than two pieces, in order to have a choice). So we’re arriving at a scenario where your hand size is effectively n - 3, because you don’t really want to install or ditch those pieces. I’m having a hard time imagining an RP deck where these would be advantageous enough to warrant using the influence on. RP has other things they want to be holding in HQ over these.
Side note: The biggest synergy with Grail ICE is to be found with CI, in my opinion - it’s taxing without costing credits, the handsize isn’t an issue, and it further serves to dilute your HQ agenda density. Profit!
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