If you plan to clear siphon tags (getting more important with security testing), I think crash space is going to be the way to go. they’re cheaper and they’ll pay for themselves fairly quickly. 2 crash space is great as far as defense goes, and it clears two siphon tags a turn
3 Likes
Yeah, that’s fair.
Still, I don’t think Midseasons is prevalent or reliable enough to be a sole justification for running Papertripping - and certainly not spending influence on it out of faction. I’m pretty much not even thinking about Midseasons when I build a deck; in fact I don’t think I’ve ever had it used against me in competitive play (once or twice on OCTGN).
There could be some clever Custom Biotics builds that change my thinking on that in the future, but for the last year or so a lot of the better decks have been tag-me. Maybe that changes in the new cycle if there is a push away from hardware and towards resources. Maybe that change is already happening with all the connections in H&P. It’s pretty interesting right now I think. Rachel Beckman will possibly be meta-defining a little further into the cycle. Once she’s released I think the resource-heavy decks become a lot more viable and mass tag avoidance becomes a big deal.
Rachel’s too fragile for the cost, I don’t really see her getting all that much play unless there’s a way to cheat out expensive resources (which could very well be, seeing some of the upcoming cards that have been spoiled). And her fragility has no solution currently, except for NACH (which is fragile in and of itself, and the Fall Guys you need to keep that around have no synergy with Rachel).
Midseason is actually pretty reliable, and very strong outside of NBN. Back when it first came out, its biggest issue was the inability to burst up fast enough to actually leverage it properly (whether by making it connect in a spectacular enough fashion, or by having money for the follow-up play fast enough). This is no longer the case, because Celebrity Gift, Restructure, Blue-Level and any number of other things.
Competitive scene: The biggest thing is GRNDL only having 10 inf, I feel. BABW decks are usually much more deadly when they run Midseasons (or a 1/1 split between it and SEA), and I feel like a fair share of Midseason/Psycho decks (or decks that run two of each as a backup plan) have won tournaments - I’d need to browse through the TWD archive to say for certain, though.
Totally this. Actually the reason my latest siphon recursion criminal builds tend to run three of the thing - seeing two early is just a huge econ boost.
You can just use Fall Guy and Decoy to protect Rachel, rather than NACH. If you’re not tagging yourself then a couple of them will be sufficient in most cases to deal with anything the Corp is doing (except Midseasons). FG, Decoy and Beckman are all connections so they synergise with Hostage and a resource-based Calling in Favors economy.
We’ve seen from The Collective that a 5 click runner is absolutely busted, so I think she’s worth experimenting with, especially if there are ways to cheat her into play.
How, exactly?
- Fall Guy doesn’t protect Rachel, because her trash isn’t a one-time trigger “when you receive a tag”, but an ongoing condition “if you are tagged”
- Decoy stops a tag, true, but it doesn’t stop two or more, and gets trashed when doing it
- Fall Guy can’t keep Decoy on the table, because he trashes as a cost, not as a result (see: SacCon and Faerie vs. Sharpshooter)
tl;dr: Dunno, seems pretty antisynergistic to me
Calling in Favors is a really bad idea for an economic engine with Connections that trash to do stuff 
2 Likes
Ooh yeah, missed that. Was doing it from memory. That’ll teach me to read the cards. Hmm yeah, trickier then - it’s NACH and Fall Guy or nothing I suppose. It could still be worth it because that fifth click is still very powerful, but as you say it starts looking like a significant chunk of your deck that’s not pulling its weight.
I’m partial to public sympathy. Not as strong as plascrete vs. lots of scorched but more all around useful.
I’ve been using wyldside so that may be a caveat.
There are ways to cheat her into play already.
The real killer for Rachel is breaking news, against which decoy does nothing, and NACH taxes you for 4 credits, as well as being hard to keep in play. In a meta in which NBN is dominant, I can’t see paying for Rachel working out that well. If you take away breaking news I’d think it had a chance, but as it is, probably not. The only hope for Rachel is if a Eureka! deck ends up being playable- if you’re getting her for free, it might be worth the risk.
1 Like
For an 8-cost card, I don’t really consider 3 credits, 2 actions and a card slot “cheating into play”, especially once you also factor in the 10 turns of using Motivation that you’ll have to undertake before you can actually pull it off
1 Like
Huh. Must say that this discussion is making me appreciate Origami one hell of a lot more.
Yeah, these and Psychographics are the two reasons why I greatly prefer Midseasons. It’s a bit trickier since you have to lose an Agenda, but that’s a big part of why I like have 1-pointers.
I’d be interested in why. Origami has the same disadvantages as Public Symapthy (first one doesn’t offer protection against 2x Scorched; have to maintain cards in hand to keep the protection), it costs MU and Weyland have Archer, Power Shutdown and Grim to get rid of it.
There are a few benefits to origami over public sympathy. Origami are tutorable, anarch’s have some good memory options (djinn and grimoire), and with wildside and duggar’s they can use the handsize well, even in non-scorch matchups. Plus, you can’t trash origami when I’m tagged, making it more suitable for tag me anarch builds (although you will need to watch out for badtimes). I think origami is worth testing, at least.
2 Likes
Basically what @benjaminwald05 said. It’s easy to Power Shutdown, but doesn’t go away when you’re tagged, necessarily. Sure, Bad Times might kill it, but that’s what Djinn stacking is for. The fact that it can go well with Anarch’s otherwise all-but-unusable draw engines is just a bonus. If you’re using Duggar’s and Origami anyway, they can’t really Scorch you out. They can kill your Duggar’s to slow your drawing, but if you’ve used it already (Joshua B. on install turn, perhaps? Seems needlessly complicated.) then you’ve got, what, a 14 card hand? Triple Scorching won’t kill you, and only HB can dream of a quadruple Scorch (usually a turn after tagging, and eating up a probable minimum of 16 credits).
Not saying it’ll be amazing or perfect or actually end up as better than Plascrete, but it’s a plausible alternative and that makes Origami more interesting to me, where I’d previously been panning it. We’ll see how it turns out.
With regards to Bad Times, assuming you’re using Djinn to host your Origami, and have Grimoire out, it takes triple-BTs to kill your Origami-Djinn… and that has to be in one turn. Power Shutdown is more dangerous, for sure, but there are things that can help against that somewhat (other 0-cost hardware/programs, sacrificial construct splashes, deja vu/recovery run, etc.), and either way the loss of it won’t take effect for a full turn. And hell, even two Origami + max handsize means you need to be Triple Scorched to get killed, because you’ve got a max handsize of 9.
(Thinking of Bad Times, Deep Red means that Triple Bad Times (which costs 12) won’t kill everything. I dunno if I’d do it, since, well, you lose your breakers, so unless you’ve got nested Djinns it might be necessary to let things go to keep up accessing… but again, you’d have a full turn in which you’ve got all those cards, and the corp is down 12 credits. Seems not unsalvageable to me.)
I’m interested to re-open this conversation as it seems more and more plascretes are getting cut from decks. (Possible meta occurrence)
Yet where once plascrete was an auto include x3, that seems to be falling out of public opinion. Is scorched earth still to be feared? Do we need to build our decks around it? Options I have seen…
Plascrete (pc)
Magnum Opus/money machine (mo)
Decoy/NACH (d)
Public sympathy (ps)
Imp (i)
Less card specific and more play style oriented (in my own words)…
Aggression
Super caution
Calculated
And lastly self imposed ignorance.
I guess the question I ask is what is everyone doing now days? I personally like playing a calculated aggressive early game with a slower later game having a good amount of money vs possible SE decks. I find it frustrating finding deck space for specific counters and would rather just add more money.
Tell me your thoughts! What do you PERSONALLY do?
if NBN midseason w/ scorched wasn’t around id cut plascretes but NBN Midseason + the handful of players in a big tournament who will still bring supermodernism type decks is enough i still put 2 in most decks.
2 Likes
You could look at it a couple ways:
Let’s say you tech your decks against what is likely going to top 8 a tournament rather than the gamut of other deck types (in my example, that will probably be Astrobiotics, with maybe some RP and EtF to flavor), you will do better ONCE YOU’RE there, if you anticipate that you can win and/or take a calculated loss against the couple scorched earth/punitive counterstrike decks that might not make the top 8 cut (or will have to work harder to get there and stay there) then you can basically ignore plascrete entirely. So when you see these top decks running 0-1 plascrete carapace, the lesson isn’t “the meta is changing” its people relying on skill and that they won’t have to face these decks as much in the top 8 to justify giving up 3 slots.
The other way to look at plascrete carapace as a card, in a microcosm and not dependent on how flush of missing scorched earth is in the meta. What does this card do for you? It prevents meat damage? How does meat damage work? Generally you combo it out (tag+SE, steal+PS) to take somebody from full to dead in one turn. If you lack strong draw, if you lack the funds to compete with midseason/SEA Source, you should be looking at plascrete as your tag protection.
I think of it this way: right now you CANNOT prevent tags reliably. Not entirely, that means that decoy/nach are unreliable. you CANNOT prevent closed accounts. Tournament decks are all about low variance, and you can account for how Plascrete protects you. and when a retaliation on corp turn is not an option, running on click 4 becomes much less risky. Having more options means you’re deck is more agile, so being able to run on your 4th click is surprisingly valuable. Being able to walk through ICE that hurts knowing that they can’t KILL you for it is valuable.
when i was still running crim i used crash space a lot. saves from three meat damage and can remove tags with recurcreds, so it’s still useful against some decks that don’t run SE. i had a lot of success with it. in anything other than crim though it’s hard to spend the influence.
Why oh why wasn’t Plascrete printed as an Anarch 2-inf? It would make the deckbuilding decisions so much more interesting, and actually somewhat legitimize Muresh Body Suit*
*well, not really, but, you know.
1 Like
Muresh + Box-E!!! Is this 20 characters yet?
1 Like