I was in an IG testing group playing aginast those museum decks all day, it was grindy and intense, but I won’t say it’s boring.
In fact, despite all the pain and upset it left me, I still think the mumbad IG deck (aka superfriend IG) has something acceptable and exciting in it. This is a net-kill deck that doesn’t rely on being lucky to draw all combo pieces or runner making a wrong guess about the remotes. It is as serious as Weyland supermoderism and more justifiable than NBN butchershop. It is a bit insane in the power level, yes, because of mumbad city hall. But jinteki finally has a tempo kill deck instead of just guess right mushin is something we should all be happy about.
It certainly denied some of the popular deck and narrowed down your runner choices. But the match up isn’t boring even when you are on the perfect counter deck. It’s actually a good training of thinking ahead.
The anarch dominence isn’t that bad either. Shaper has been doing well in a number of regionals, Hayley especially.
That being said, netrunner isn’t perfect, glacier and criminals both need huge help. Faust and pancake are too broke. MCH is bullshit. I just hate people quit netrunner claiming that it’s boring when in fact they just fail to adapt to the meta changes.
It is stressful but not boring.
I’m sure I remember a time when no-one played asset decks because run-heavy criminals with Desperados, Bank Jobs and so on came along with their mate John Masanori to Security Test all your servers and make you cry? They might not be best placed on central accesses or net damage prevention (although they do have expose effects), but as far as the “stop the Corp building board state” line of thinking goes against IG, surely criminals have something to offer? Especially since Drive-By and Political Operative are now here to help out too.
In my testing, it’s maybe good enough with Andy, but perhaps you also need Scrubbers. It’s not clear and quite early game scramble dependent - if a Crick goes up early on Archives it can really go wrong, quite fast.
The bigger problem is that you really can’t build something to control IG’s board out of Criminal and hope to have a shot against HB/Palana/Blue Sun, because you’ve filled your deck with conditional economy that is now dead. So it’s tough to justify building an IG hate deck out of Andy when Whizzard does it better, and doesn’t just fall apart when there are no more open servers.
Siphon is nice, since a broke IG can’t trigger Snare or a Cerebral Overwriter, but I don’t think Security Testing is very good right now. IG may spam endless unguarded remotes, but glacier corps won’t; if that’s turing off a big piece of your econ, then your runner is in trouble in those match ups.
We can compare Sec Testing + Desperado to Whizzard. Both provide 3c/turn, but Whizzard doesn’t have to spend a click to get them. Provided the runner is spending at least 3c/turn trashing assets, Whizzard is better. Also, Whiz doesn’t spend influence for Imp or Scrubber if he really needs them (he probably doesn’t).
If we take away IG, Noise and Whizzard are both solid against other corp matchups, while criminals are still struggling, particularly against glacier (though Pol Op does help).
I feel like Geist would be a good counter to IG, since he not only gets the Desperado/Bank Job engine, but has tons of clickless draw and usually a Levy. He has a decent Glacier matchup too, but is weak to Fast Advance.
I had a game of IG versus Geist yesterday. I don’t know if it is a case of it seeming worse than it actually is, but as the Corp I certainly didn’t like the feeling of Spy Camera! Especially since I tend to put a bit more ICE in my IG.
I think criminals are arguably better placed than anarchs. As an unashamed assets spam player (IG before it was ‘cool’ and now Gagarin), in my opinion the best way to deal with the spam is to have a crazy burst start and a load of run econ. AKA be Gabe.
Could just be a touchy subject for a number of them. I don’t believe netrunner is boring, but I feel like how the game is in this very instant is not what a lot of people want.
More people than ever have been looking into making new variants, playing cube drafts, and generally not playing with the card they think are unfun. This IS happening for a reason. The game has such lopsided match ups currently. A lot of people talk about countering IG, and it’s just like when plascrete was introduced, playing against that match up feels almost pointless once the runner is set up. It’s not to say that the game auto plays, or that the sides are fundamentally imbalanced, there’s just not a lot of room for creativity unless you concede that you are playing a deck that will fail to what most people are playing as their “go to” deck. I think there’s a lot of anticipation for the few cards in this cycle yet to be unspoiled, and I’m hopeful that things will be duly shaken up on their arrival, but if the meta is still pretty much what it is at the end of fear the masses as it is now…people will just be playing a different kind of netrunner more than they are now.
At the end of the day though, no matter how upset at the state of the game people are, it’s still the finest card game to ever be designed, we’re all just so deeply invested in it.
Plascrete was a silver bullet 2-3 factions needed to function, it costed 0 influence, it didn’t hurt 3 faction runner meta.
Clot was a silver bullet 1-2 factions needed to function, it costed 2 influence, diffused by tutoring and recursion, it didn’t hurt 3 faction meta.
Film critic was a silver bullet 2-3 factions needed to function, it costed 1 influence, it didn’t hurt 3 faction meta.
Whizzard is a silver bullet 2-3 factions need to function, it costs 26 influence, it’s gonna start to be a drain on the idea of having a 3 faction meta.
