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Is Fester ever an actual deterrent?

Netrunner General
#1

I’m quite enjoying the re-resurgence of Noise. And as I built my new Noise decks, I’m putting in Fester, because it seems extremely synergistic.

And then every time I draw it, I groan a little bit. I mean, it’s only 1 credit, sure. But it’s not a virus. It’s not advancing my state. And I’m not even sure if it’s protecting my virus counters.

Does anyone ever start to purge and then say “Oh, wait, Fester!” Maybe if you have 2-3 out, and it’s a 6 cost, it might be a penalty, but I feel like a corp is just going to spend the credits on rezzing something (say an Adonis) and then purge.

OR does that shift, now that Clot is a thing? Is Fester enough to make Clot actually cause fear in the corp? I’m looking at my Noise decks for space to put Hacktivists, and Fester is looking really high on the list…

#2

It should be played as a greater plan of denial, or not in the deck at all. For example, your noise deck should run 3 lamprey, and possibly siphon, maybe vamp. You need to overload the corp economically, and play smart to where they can actually lose money if they purge. It’s the kind of catch22 card that anarch love to have in their toolkit.

It is definitely pretty weak right now.

3 Likes
#3

If cyberdex virus suite catches on, it punishes that pretty hard. Double lamprey hit each time you run archives

1 Like
#4

Had to double check, this is optional on the purge so its not as awesome as when i first read this haha.

#5

No.

10 char

2 Likes
#6

I think with Fester, the issue is that money is rarely the limiting factor in purging viruses–mostly you’re racing the corp to a board state they can safely spend a turn clearing viruses–fester really doesn’t punish that very hard. I also think that by the time you get 3 festers, and often 2 on the board (out of 3), how many purges do you think are left in the game?

I think if you wanted Fester to work–you would need a single card that you could regularly rush into threatening range, but not SO quickly or repeatedly that purging becomes pointless. As you can see, this is a pretty narrow window where Fester is actually quite strong.

2 Likes
#7

That really seemed to be it. I’m not trying to keep the corp broke with this deck, so the 2 (or even 4 or 6) credits never really made a difference.

And @false_idol - also a good point. This deck also lacks that, unless it’s the point where Hivemind has some, but not all, the counters. But that point gets passed pretty quickly.

1 Like
#8

I think maybe part of the issue is that you would have to actively hinder your own deck in order to really enterprise on repeated forced-purges. Most of the time, you want to win the same turn as your big hivemind play, I think there COULD be a deck that uses hivemind this way, but the problem is that it shares too much overlap with decks that plan to win very quickly once Hivemind is out, not dawdle and force the corp to purge a bunch.