For pete’s sake it’s not that solid, competitive players can’t beat the decks, it’s that it isn’t any fun to do so and actively drives the non-hardcore competitors out of the game. Even if you know what you need to do it is still often a riveting competition to see if you can draw your outs before the game state is locked or you run out of time. Maybe your opponent will make a mistake!
I have heard some variation on: “I have better things to do than play netrunner tonight if this is what the meta is like” from many people, both casual and competitive as they straight-up left game nights or don’t bother to show up. (No, I do not need protips about how to hold special, non-tournament-deck events or beginner nights. The point is those have literally never been necessary before, plus: it’s theoretically tournament prep season.)
Have you been picking up why they don’t find it fun. That seems to be the important bit.
An IG deck that aims to build board state to a net damage inevitability doesn’t seem to me much different to the old NBN decks that spam out assets and fast advance tools hoping to initiate an inevitable scoring ‘train’. In each case you can either keep on top of everything, not letting the snowball start, or race to win on centrals first. The primary difference seems to be whether the win comes through damage or points. I presume people aren’t just funny about getting “killed” rather than outscored?
I personally don’t find it ‘fun’ to play against PE, Cybernetics, or MaxX. (PE and Cybernetics my cards don’t generally matter except as health points, and games often come down to whether I’ve prepared for the traps correctly. MaxX breaks rules of Netrunner to play from her Heap most of the time instead of playing from her deck…)
But I don’t complain, ragequit, or refuse to show up if there’s a chance those decks are being played. They are still legitimate Netrunner decks and if I want to play this game, I have to deal with those decks that I personally dislike. I don’t think it’s my opponent’s obligation to make sure that I’m having fun. I’m pretty sure it’s all on me whether I’m enjoying the game or not.
The deck presents a different sort of puzzle, but it’s still a puzzle to be solved in the context of Netrunner.
Pre Bio-Ethics I had a problem with the deck because the “win condition” was to stall and frustrate the opponent into making a mistake. Nobody in my group played it because it lost all the time, and on Jinteki it was just a matter of playing smart and not getting bored and conceding or making dumb plays because it didn’t matter.
Post Bio-Ethics, its a legit deck with a proper win condition. The stalling games are all over, but now I’m just against MCH and shuffling several times a turn. That and the interaction with Heritage Committee.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a deck with a high winrate.
There’s something wrong with a deck with a low completion rate.
If you want to theorize that players can learn to play with and against it better to improve the completion rate, then I can just theorize that Museum shuffle might randomly shake out to create even less progress in the game state next time around, how about Hedge Fund, Hedge Fund next time? On a theoretical level there is no rate of play that consistently finishes games with worst-case Museums, and on a practical level we’re not seeing players finish their games when they play with the deck, so there’s no angle left to go from to justify that Museum decks can finish games on time consistently.
But that I feel comes back to my previous comment. I don’t think that the IG deck type takes a long time to close out the game. Rather the Runner’s play against the IG deck can cause it to take a long time to close out the game. That is, if the Runner stops trying to play to their best odds to win, and instead simply tries to put off losing for as long as possible.
Which is fine: the Runner can do that if they wish. But then it seems rather strange as the Runner to complain that your own choice is boring you by making the game go long! Assuming that moaning about long closings of games was justified, the Corp seems to me to be the one justified in doing so, since that decision of how long the endgame takes seems to come down to the Runner’s strategic choice. It happens only if the Runner “turtles” and tries to avoid losing.
If they cheat by ignoring the prompt play rules and not playing fast enough to allow their face to get ground off, then yes they could. But then if they cheat by swapping cards into their deck between games they could win too. That’s an issue with monitoring cheating properly.
“Each time a deck is randomized, the opponent must be given an
opportunity to shuffle and/or cut the cards as well.”
A runner is legitimately allowed to shuffle the corp’s deck every time they use museum of history. If they give the corp deck a full 6-7 riffle shuffles, the minium for good randomization, I doubt the game is going to be over in 35 minutes. Seems like a reasonable approach to go for a timed win if you’re up on points.
You’ve brought up this idea before – that not playing at a blazing speed against a stall deck is “cheating,” or that is the runner’s responsibility to accelerate the game when the corp is durdling – but the tournament rules don’t really support this claim. Please stop making this accusation when it is fundamentally inaccurate.
It’s not the Runner’s responsibility, it’s both players’ responsibility to play at a sufficient speed to get the game finished. The number of turns that takes isn’t a factor. (If that sounds illogical or impractical to you, take issue with the rules, not with me! But until and unless they’re changed, that’s what we have.)
If both players try their best to get the game finished but fail, we have rules to cover that and get on with the tournament without apportioning blame. But if one player is aiming to utilise the clock for personal gain in the standings, that’s cheating.
(So if the Runner and Corp are both taking equal thinking times, no-one should be worried. If the Corp is taking short thinking time and the Runner taking a long time, conveniently long enough that it won’t allow the game to get finished to the Corp’s win, but might allow their own win, then questions ought to be asked of the Runner. It is this sort of situation that @popsofctown seemed to be hinting at.)
But runners take longer against IG because of the ways that IG limits their options. They don’t push remotes because the corps not planning to put points in remotes, and because of IG’s ability they can’t even trash assets anyways, oh and traps. They can’t run Archives because IG loads traps into Archives, that’s too often a bad play. After you check the top card of R+D, theres not a on of great plays to make, but you don’t want to take 3$ and pass.
IG still deserves the responsibility for their Plan A being such a narrow combo of cards with a somewhat elaborate setup, taking longer than the average corps.
Oh yeah, there’s definitely cases where the rules, as written, do have that defined as cheating, for sure. But of course there’s obvious issues with enforcement. And FFG has started to take a stance that maybe they should design their cards so that they don’t create rules enforcement issues - see the UFAQ on Clone Suffrage Movement - so it’d be internally consistent if they removed Museum of History from the game because they are making detection of cheating of this form more of an issue.
But then it’s also an additional issue that the number of turns the game might take is infinite with certain Museum of History outcomes, so any pace of play is technically insufficient to guarantee the game finishes.
I’d like to point out that Chess is a game where responsibility for time consumed is easily assigned with 100% accuracy, but Chess still finds it necessary to alter the rules of the game so that an outcome is defined when there is not much progress. In a standard chess game, there is the “50 move” rule, which stipulates that if there are 50 moves without any permanent, irreversible change on the board (which is either a pawn’s movement, since it can’t move backwards, or a piece dying, since it can’t revive), the game is a draw. The rule is very rarely invoked, and some sort of result would be obtained without the rule in existence (in the rare board positions where pieces can duel for better position and footing for that long without a capture, the player with a lead would be pressured into riskier moves as the 50 move rule loomed closer, or the clock pressure would cause one player to lose), the 50 move rule is still a popular aspect of chess.
Again, we’ve talked about this before and I still don’t see any support in the tournament or floor rules that indicates this. The slow play rules all refer to intentional delays over specific decision points, not a need to accelerate play based on durdly strategies. There is no reference, as far as I see, to relative thinking times, but only “unreasonable” delays for particular plays.
[quote=“MightyToenail, post:340, topic:4537”]
They instead rely on getting rid of the runners entire deck in order to then keep them from drawing cards. It takes a lot of time to deal 46 net damage.[/quote]
All good Bio-Ethics lock decks I’ve seen rely on Genetics Pavillion, not on decking the runner. Which makes the kill way faster.
There is a really great IG card that I don’t see people talking about enough in here: Sensie Actors Union
It simultaneously offers card draw (overdraw), and buries a card (agenda) at the bottom of R&D. It powers cards into archives to keep your trash costs up and brings recycled cards back into play very quickly. You are already IG with Hostile Infrastructure, so cards are painful to trash, but this card is painful not to trash.
Genetics Pavillion is ok as 1-2, but 2x Sensie Actors Union does a ton of work.
