At Worlds this week, Team UK where almost unanimous in mind that a Weyland card would be designed if one of us won. I had an interesting conversation with Lukas about Weyland - he seemed to think a missing 3/2 agenda was perhaps part of the puzzle, and one would be great, but I’m leaning more towards a stagnant and narrow ICE suite being the problem. All my hard work was undone by @Marsellus coming up and banging on about how great Weyland was for half an hour, but nevertheless… How do we make Weyland good?
Look at the split of IDs from Worlds (both in general and Top 16) and I don’t think anyone can dispute the assertion that Weyland are the whipping boys of the Corps at the minute (by minute, I mean for months).
HB does economy better. NBN does murder better, insultingly by nicking Weyland cards. Jinteki shell game is probably better than anything Gagarin can come up with.
What’s needed for Weyland to become a contender again, and not the laughing stock of the tournament scene that it currently is?
(The one caveat is King of Servers, @groober added a Junebug and that apparently fixes all the problems)
I don’t think Weyland is actually that far off right now. They’re certainly better off than they have been in months after Corp town, public support, and food come into play. But they still lack upgrades, and midrange, solid ice, ie. Architect, Ichi, Eli.
All their tag punishment is meat damage, which NBN does better, in addition to having closed accounts, psycho, QPM, breaking news, etc.
They need a way to focus a game plan in faction. They are 100% reliant on out of faction cards for an executable, winning strategy.
They just need a shot in the arm for some of their unique mechanics.
Advanceable Ice
Maybe an asset/upgrade that makes ice with advancement counters on them uninstallable/can’t have their strength lowered? Right now advanceable ice is a money pit and a literal/figurative waste of time in the parasite heavy meta. Something that makes it stick and turns it in to a worthwhile investment.
Meat Damage
As mentioned, right now NBN is the meat damage faction since they have a much easier time landing the tags needed to do meat damage. I would enjoy seeing cards that do meat damage without a tag, maybe even something that scales with Bad Publicity since so many of their cards deal it out.
Right now it seems like they lack everything. Economy is unreliable (contrast with Sundew, Celebrity Gift, Sweeps, Adonis/Even, NEH asset spam). Scoring puts very little pressure on the runner apart from the points (contrast with Astro/Nisei). Remote lock is very easy. Ice is non-threatening and non-taxing.
The result is that the only viable strategy is rush, which is what we’ve seen.
The thing about scaling with bad pub is that it really restricts future design options. If something like that existed, profiteering, Grundle, takeover, grim, etc make it very easy to ratchet up the BP quickly.
Nicole’s deck from the BABW finals had Junebug too, maybe it really is the secret to a good Weyland deck right now!
A second 3/2 would certainly help, right now anyone playing against Weyland only has to steal a single Atlas and they can safely ignore anything unadvanced in a remote for the rest of the game while being pretty confident you can’t score out. Either that or some sort of ash/caprice style protective upgrade is absolutely required, late game just gets so depressing with no FA threat or any way to protect an agenda besides MOAR ICE.
Agree with the comment about mid-range ice, their options in the 4-6 credit range are pretty limited, and they also need more stuff that can’t just be bounced off without the runner needing to invest any resources.
any playable code gate for less than 9 to rez wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
Constellation Protocol really should have been unique but able to move advancements onto agendas. Being able to score unadvanced 4/2s or atlases with tokens would go a long way to making Gagarin playable.
Oh, and Blacklist should absolutely have been a green card.
As far as advanceable ICE goes, I want them to either go all the way and print some crazy strong cards or just never print any. All they’ve done so far is make some only marginally playable cards if you ignore the bits where it talks about advancement.
Either go all the way or not at all, because this half-toying with the idea at the moment does naught but weaken Weyland’s overall card pool. It’s the same problem that Crim has with Connections, there are a bunch of card slots printed for an archetype that doesn’t exist.
One of the core problems for in weyland in my mind is they have some amazing stage 2 cards and shitty stage one 1 cards for their strategies.
By this I mean:
Plan Kill
Stage 1. Tag the Runner
Stage 2. Punish Tags
Plan Rush
Stage 1. Have sturdy server quickly (good ice, upgrades)
Stage 2. Score an agenda that’ll snowball the game in your favour in said server
But you always want more stage 1 cards than stage 2 cards for any given plan, so it’s easier for other factions to take Weyland’s stage 2 cards than for Weyland to import stage 1 cards because you need more of the latter in your deck than the former.
Weyland doesn’t need more headliners, they need more good stage 1 cards for Killing/Rushing. A defensive upgrade for remotes, a way to make tags happen etc.
Another weyland problem is a large portion of their card pool being devoted to the hugely overcosted advancing ice strategy, but thats more than one card can fix.
I think the main issue that you raised is that Weyland would kill for an in-faction Ash. Blue Sun basically has no flex influence because it needs to splash for Ash, a playable high strength Code Gate (Tollbooth), Jackson, and GFI. You also either need to splash Adonis or play Launch Campaign, which is fine econ but it’s no Adonis. It feels like all of the essentials are out of faction, and it’s a sad contrast to Jinteki who have the best 5/3, Sundew, and Caprice in faction, or HB, who have 6 3/2s, excellent econ in-faction, and Ash in faction.
Thankfully, Weyland’s agenda suite is improving. Oaktown is the best thing ever and they have a passable 5/3 now, even if they have to splash for it. That’s one piece of the puzzle down. Weyland econ is almost there, but their best option is Oversight which is ID-specific and conditional.
Honestly, I think an in-faction Ash/Caprice replacement is the biggest thing that’ll push Weyland closer to tier one viability.
Yeah they really missed the mark on balancing Adv Ice. The ice is asking “Is the effect I get from doing this worth 1 click + 1 credit + the opportunity cost of not spending that click on one of the cards piling up in my hand” and the answer runs from “hell no” to “meh*” when it should be running from “no” to “yes”.
There have been so many bad to meh Adv Ice printed that won’t rotate I think the only way to salvage (lol) them will be a really pushed ID power like double satellite grid for all servers. A single powerful Adv Ice card will just be ported into other factions…
Weyland is happy to kill for a lot of things :). Even something on the Red Herrings/Old Hollywood Grid power level of defensive upgrades would be pretty nice.
Do we want to make Weyland Tier 1 or do we want to make Weyland more fun to play and more powerful?
For Tier 1 stuff, rush seems to be the only viable strategy, mixed with the fear of meat damage. Porous ice that actually do stuff like Archangel and Architect are way better than… firewall and can do stuff for Weyland. Also cards that manipulate the deck of the corp (since this is a facet of the game that has not been explored yet). a Fast track that can bring what you need and install it face up or something like this for Rush tactics.
However, I believe that rush tactics are not very good for the game as an experience. If the corp manages to rush out behind an ice and the Runner does not have the opportunity to actually play, then no fun, no game.
Another aspect that Weyland does best is program destruction (power shutdown), Asset destruction (contract Killer, CorporateTown) etc.
If Ice and cards appear that can bounce or destroy specific kind of breakers so that it will strengthen the corps defences, or assets that can actually defend the agenda, then maybe something is there. I am not asking for another Caprice or Ash, just something to mess with the rig of the runner, make it more difficult to him to make runs unhindered. I wish Archangel was in Weyland but it isn’t…
My $0,05
Edit: I got ninjaed by @Xenasis for the Defensive assets.
Giving Weyland more control elements could be interesting with it having powerful tutor effects, but you run into a needle threading design problem - corps have such limited deck slots that if the control elements are too weak/focused they won’t get played and if they’re too strong/versatile they’ll be nicked by the factions who have influence to burn.
I’ve been messing around with a BWBI deck recently with Hollywood Renovation and have come to the conclusion that some of it is over costed. For example, Asteroid belt is a 6 strength barrier with one subroutine that rezzes for 9. If I were to design Asteroid Belt it would have been 4 strength and cost 4 to rez. In that way you benefit from the first advancement by lowering the cost by 3 but are disincentivized from advancing further thus bringing the cost of the ice in line with similar barriers across other factions. Apart from that, a protection upgrade would be great.
I know I it feels like I’m teasing here, but I am really very close to completing my massive article on what I think Weyland presently needs. It’s going to be hella exhaustive, but the the major, overarching categories I’ll be touching on are:
Ice
This section will focus on how impotent much of Weyland’s ice that isn’t named Archer is, with particular reference to the failed advanceable ice. Proposed ideas of how to augment Weyland’s ice pool, both with revitalized ice and other tools to combat popular Runner meta choices.
Agendas
I note here that the recent Oaktown Renovation is a huge step in the right direction regarding agendas. However, their lack of any ability to fast advance (both because of no in-faction card that does so, and because they have but one 3/2) or reliable protection upgrade ultimately makes scoring their agendas that much harder. I give my suggestions.
Meat damage
NBN takes our best cards and uses them better because in-faction Jackson, broken-as-hell ID, all the tagging cards, yada yada - you know the drill. Proposed solution.
If I weren’t working on said article, I would be allll amongst this discussion though. Keep the ideas flowing, y’all.
corp rushing doesn’t mean runner cannot play. just need to adjust his game. if your runner deck is not ready for it, it’s not corp’s fault. rushing 7 points behind ice is not easy either, that’s why it fits perfectly in weyland scorch backup kill. id love rushy weyland archetypes to be more explored (did i miss any thread about it?).
my guess is that weyland’s strength is to be able to adjust to meta a lot and have plenty of silver bullets. it’s just hard to quickly come up with decks that counter given meta as meta shifts a lot and noone will risk playing untested pile of cards if they have answers in other factions ready.
Then give it a high influence cost, something that should have been done with the Crisium Grid IMHO but it only costs 1 inf, so all the corps that need it according to their meta, the play it.
Well some builds like @marcelous’s build that rides the Atlas Train can really be uninteractive and sometimes a single mother goddess can break the game. Yuo either find the rest of the Agendas first or you lose. IMHO, not a very fun way to play the game.
The trouble is that at this point Weyland is loaded down with weak cards that don’t rotate. Unless they print a Core Set 2.0 they have to print a constant stream of powered up Weyland cards that make the faction competitive but can’t be stolen by other factions.
That’s going to be really, really tough to pull off consistently.