Influence Inflation

so giving her 5 more influence would make her competitively viable? that’s exactly my point. we need more tier 1 IDs

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i see what u did there. misplay on my part.

anyway few points:

  • she is competitively viable now (Your Netrunner Deck - Acoo)
  • being broken is not same as being on par with some other ids in terms of tournament strength, so no: adding influence wont help

did you really just post hinkes kit vamp list… lol… that regionals was 8 months ago… let’s see how many regionals are won by kit this season then maybe ill eat my words

It’s tough to make more tier 1 IDs without superseding previous IDs. It’s natural (I think) that there is 1 dominant ID for each faction in tournament play. It’s great that there are competitive decks from so many IDs. If most IDs you make are considered tier 1, that’s the power creep that nobody really wants to see. Different but neither better or worse is really really hard.

Kit is pretty good as she is, if she had more influence she’d be better than Kate (her ability is worth more than 1 credit per turn) I don’t think it’s necessary myself. I think Chris Hinkes was just outside the cut at Worlds too - I think it’s largely a moot point, Chris is a good player, which is why he does well in tournaments.

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yes but he himself has said that kit vamp is not well positioned right now and kit has taken a big hit in viability since that regional

guess I’m alone in this boat, but I will forever reject this idea =)

I will honorably fail attempting to make this happen! :slight_smile:

You could at least post his 19th place Worlds list, that’s a little more recent:

http://www.acoo.net/deck/5045/worlds-championship-2014-19th-chris-hinkes-kit-vamp/

Unlike the broad success people had with his PE, I haven’t seen a single other person find any success with his Vamp Kit idea.

Vamp is a nice surprise but when people are ready for it, it doesn’t do much - it’s just miserable trying to match asset drip economy with Opus clicks.

Personally I think he’s just a great player playing a gimpy list and would have done even better at Worlds with a regular Kate or Chaos Stimshop.

Either way, you can’t look at that list without seeing how hamstrung it is by the 10 influence cap.

  • Playing Personal Workshop with 0 Stimhacks
  • Playing 0 Corroder
  • Playing 0 Parasites and 0 Datasuckers
  • Playing 0 Lucky Find
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I’m not trying to single you out specifically, I only quoted this to make a point. If you or anyone else seeing this are able to, this video is well worth 7 minutes of your time. While it is especially relevant for people who have experience in the games that they use as examples in the video (chess, league of legends, starcraft), it should be understandable to anyone.

This “perfect imbalance” is why League of Legends is one of the largest, most played games on the planet. It’s also what Netrunner is aiming to be.

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I was very unhappy with that monstrocity I took to Worlds. Kit has a bad matchup versus NEH FA, and that was my attempt to compensate.

Yes, I could probably do better with a “better” deck, but I have to play what I enjoy. My economy must be based on Magnum Opus. I can’t stand event econ as a runner. Just my preference. Currently I feel that Kit is the only runner that can be successful (fast enough) with a MO only econ. I do plan on trying out Haley, though.

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Kit is probably the Shaper best positioned to use MO. She can carry it around much safer (as destroyers are easily decoded) and the MU isn’t an issue as quickly.

I love Kit, and spent a long time trying to make her function. But ultimately I couldn’t get her to succeed. She was always poor, and her ability lends itself to fast, sustained running - which the Shaper cardpool largely doesn’t.

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how about ice destruction kit? like this one:

Rielle “Kit” Peddler: Transhuman (Creation and Control)

Event (16)
1x Stimhack (Core Set) •
3x Diesel (Core Set)
1x Tinkering (Core Set)
1x Infiltration (Core Set)
3x Sure Gamble (Core Set)
2x Kraken (Humanity’s Shadow)
2x Escher (Creation and Control)
3x Dirty Laundry (Creation and Control)

Hardware (11)
2x The Personal Touch (Core Set)
2x Plascrete Carapace (What Lies Ahead)
2x R&D Interface (Future Proof)
3x Clone Chip (Creation and Control)
2x Astrolabe (Up and Over)

Resource (6)
3x Kati Jones (Humanity’s Shadow)
3x Daily Casts (Creation and Control)

Icebreaker (4)
2x Yog.0 (Core Set) ••
1x Sharpshooter (True Colors)
1x Cerberus “Lady” H1 (All That Remains)

Program (8)
3x Datasucker (Core Set) •••
2x Parasite (Core Set) ••••
3x Self-modifying Code (Creation and Control)

10 influence spent (maximum 10)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to All That Remains

if you’re not sold on kraken, u may put whatever u think is good there (makers eye, more tinkerings etc)
its good vs RP, fiftyfifty vs neh, i got few wins vs BS but on paper it looks like it cant be good here (big barriers dont like yog in theory). overall good deck that missed me top4 slighlty on SC (3:2 had with runner and 3:2 with corp)

to the point:
if i was allowed to put legwork (vs neh) or spooned here (vs all, biggest help vs BS walls), it would be defo broken.

This goes for JPE and Kit decks, imo :). They eat newer and/or unprepared players for breakfast, but lunching against the wily, prepared veterans is much harder. I’d give Kit and Iain two or three more influence in a heartbeat.

If GRNDL had 12 influence, I wonder if 3x Biotic would be any good :).

I agree that Perfect Imbalance is ideal, but I have some serious theoretical nitpicks with this video :). Chess especially is not perfectly balanced, and metagame staleness has more to do with the outcome of a function describing the complexity of the game’s inputs and the pool of games available for and amount of time competitive players spend analyzing said pool. If League only had, say, four characters you could play, and then we played and analyzed games like crazy without tweaking the rules for a couple hundred years, I think we’d arrive at metagame staleness comparable to chess :slight_smile: .

The real lesson is that you need to create a broad spectrum of viable lines of play and then continually inject changes into the system to keep the stochastic processes frothing. FROTH, YOU PROCESSES!

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I always thought GRNDL should have been Weyland’s 40-card minimum ID. As of now, a 12-influence GRNDL even with a smaller deck size wouldn’t be broken, but influence gets more powerful as the card pool expands.

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I would argue the exact opposite is true - in Core Set, NBN and Jinteki used to spend a ton of influence on stuff like Beanstalk Royalties and Ice Wall, just to cover the fundamentals of early ETR and economy.

In Core Set, a blank ID with 20 influence would certainly be stronger than either Making News or PE.

Today NBN has Sweeps Week and Wraparound, and Jinteki has Celebrity Gift and Himitsu-Bako. And every faction has access to the strongest neutral cards printed like NAPD.

IMO, influence becomes LESS powerful as the card pool expands - factions become more likely to have their bases covered without being required to splash out for essentials.

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Well, you’re right that preventing metagame staleness is more complicated than the summary in the video, but the point I would like to emphasize is that I think Netrunner has done a pretty good job so far. There is certainly room for improvement, but as a consumer I at least have the feeling that they are making strides towards this type of perfect imbalance system. Clot is coming out soon (and I think The Source and Chakana are generally undervalued), it’s rumored that Criminals will be getting a fresh injection of Identities in the next cycle, Anarch just got a huge boost to its card pool…all of these things point towards a “shift in the balance”, if you will.

The thing to keep in mind, as you pointed out, is the length of time variable. League (at least when I played) worked on a two week cycle. Netrunner is using a (theoretical) 4 week cycle, with a pack every month, right (barring any issues at port)? It seems like it should be sufficient given the proper planning. My hope would be that Lukas et al. would start to see that this system needs to be planned out on that scale.

Yeah, I broadly agree with everything you’re saying; it’s just that the video rubbed me the wrong way and I had to get that off my chest ;).

I’ve got a yeahbut. Yeah, but now that all corps and runners pretty much have the staples like card draw, econ, cheap ice, in faction, we’ll see more possibility for power splashes and strong synergy.

They have a lot more cards to print, and even a forgotten ID like Custom Biotics may gain some advantage as the amount of strong cards grows.

+1 on this. I’m coming to think that, for example, custom biotics is only marginally less powerful than a 45/infinity HB ID with no other ability. Sure there are a lot of powerful splashes - scorches, biotics, midseasons, giraffes - but in the end a deck can only do so many different things and you’re limited more by the 49 number. I honestly had trouble filling out all 15 influence in my SHL2 playoff deck. “Uh, got 4 spare… tsurugi? Why not! Wormhole? Sounds sweet, sure!” With infinite influence I mighta played some sweeps weeks and ice walls but it wouldn’t have made it any more than marginally better.

Of course HB is the most self-sufficient and the other factions are still shoring up major holes with their influence (splashing for biotics, midseason/sea/ash, eli). And I don’t hope that NBN gets more biotic effects in-faction or anything. It’s just that it’s very situational how relevant influence is.

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awww. @bluebird503 @PeekaySK, Iwas asleep and you guys defended my honor. Thanks homies.

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Once clot hits nobody’s gonna be able to play the Sicilian defense anymore. It’s gonna be all French and Caro-Kann. I’m gonna have to start putting a 1-of Femme in my deck every time I sit down to play with the white pieces.

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