Jinteki Biotech

Maybe the 2 net damage is an actual threat with more of the handsize reduction cards coming out, like Valley Grid. ¯\(ツ)

Reina Roja and Making News both said “hi” :-).

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Exactly, I think you just never flip. :slight_smile: I mean think if you put an agenda and you want to put 4 agenda counters on it? Just put 3 and score. So what does the ID really do? It tells the runner no matter what you better run this! And Obviously the Brewery is the sickest! I mean really? Better have four cards in hand at the end of your turn every turn! God forbid Chairman Hiro gets drunk! Cause I got 1 or 2 Neural Emp!

There’s like a million page MaxX thread and I’m pretty sure you can’t play her without spending 3 on Levy and at least another 2 on Clone Chip.

And let’s not get started on Glacier builds, which are basically just various shells to shove Ash + Tollbooth + Eli/Caduceus into.

Influence is for the using!

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The brewery is “better have 2 cards in hand at the end of every turn”, as it takes 3 clicks to flip the biotech ID and therefore you can’t hit them with follow up EMPs.

haha fair enough. those cards aren’t being used to make the ID viable though, only to make the deck stronger. I would argue that Biotech is essentially a blank ID unless you invest lots of influence, which is why I think it’s debatably as bad as CB, which has the opposite problem: plenty of influence but no way to leverage it. Biotech has 3 abilities and IMO not enough influence or card choices to leverage them.

True but while I was in the shower I was thinking, Biotic into emp flip would cut it tho :wink:

One ability is essentially a sideboard against a particular type of opponent (Noise or suspected Keyholers) and thus requires no influence to leverage, especially since it may not even be worth playing against those opponents.

The other two abilities play extremely well off of eachother: one threatens an easy score of any facedown card, forcing the runner to check installed cards often. It combos well with biotic labor and in-faction traps. The other creates a persistent flatline threat, which grows even more dangerous when combined with biotic labor and in-faction traps.

Not necessarily saying the ID is good - Just that the 2 abilities can work very well together, using many of the same tools. Whether or not it’s worth playing over PE in the “net damage shell game” archetype is a totally different story.

I think the shuffle ability is the most playable. if you construct a deck similar to PE, you can shuffle all your traps back in late game, decreasing agenda density and increasing trap density. you then continue the shell game with your opponent knowing that it is more likely that any new remote is a trap, along with any new central access. does that seem viable?

FA with medical breakthrough and biotic might be feasible. The one with 2 net damage I don’t get at all. 3 clicks for 2 net damage seems wasteful. And how is the archive one supposed to win games?

The ID feels a bit underpowered.

way to come in on the ground floor :smiley:
First off, it’s a mistake to asses each of abilities on their own - the main strength is that until you use the ability, you can represent having all three:

  • the FA ability means it’s very dangerous to not check unadvanced remotes, thus making it more likely they plow headfirst into traps

  • traps can leave the runner very low on cards, making the net damage a threat. it’s not much different from having 2 neural emps in your deck that don’t take up deckspace, are always in hand, can’t be trashed and don’t count towards hand size and can’t be accessed.

for example, if you get a false lead scored, psychic field becomes a game-winner as they will only have one click to draw up, then 2 net damage will kill them. but, because of the FA ability, they can’t just stop running remotes.

  • the re-shuffle ability could be great if the runner is running out of cards (refreshing all your traps by putting them back in the deck against a runner with no stack remaining is pretty much a death sentence) but it’ll be very hard to predict if this one will be useful. I think this ability will mostly just be a sideboard against noise.

The ID is probably a bit underpowered, but not nearly as useless as everyone seems to think.

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Why is it very dangerous to not check unadvanced remotes? I can just hammer HQ and R&D all day long and have Deus X / Feedback Filter / IHW. If you score a Nisei, that’s probably fine, at least it’s not as bad as a scored Nisei vs RP. The “FA ability” only works once, so I fail to see how you make a gameplan out of that.

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meh, it’s easy to get to game point when the runner isn’t checking any unadvanced remotes and you never need to advance agendas to score them. “All Day Long” might not be very long if they’re scoring points every couple of turns, starting before you even get your rig up.

I think your point about current net damage counters is more applicable - damage based jinteki decks are a little weak right now, and this ID is pretty clearly weaker than PE, so it’ll definitely need some meta love to be playable.

I agree that the FA ability doesn’t really threaten anything except a TFP off a single advanced remote, which a Runner can still win through. the ability has no synergy with Ronin since it requires 3 clicks. I still maintain the 2 net damage isn’t very threatening against a competent Runner. then again, that’s kind of the deal with all net damage strategies: no legs against competent opponents.

I think this is the biggest issue for this ID, and it is not an issue unique to biotech. Cambridge PE was doing solidly last year in large part because it exploited runner decks that were stretched paper-thin trying to tech against insane NEH and RP decks. With O&C and lunar fully out, along with upcoming hits to FA strategies, it’s feeling a lot easier to include these one-or-two of net damage answers.

I maintain that this will be a fun ID with a fair amount of play to it - not at all that it will be competitively viable, especially without any card love for net damage/trap decks.

I wonder… would the ID be OP if the cost to flip it was 2 clicks rather than 3?

Much of the talk in this thread has been about leveraging the fact that the Runner doesn’t know which of the possible ID abilities you’re using. It occurs to me that playing Biotech against a new player who hasn’t seen the card before, and therefore doesn’t know any of the possible ID abilities, would be a really weird game. If they don’t know any of the possibilities, is all your bluffing with facedown remotes just wasted? Presumably they’d just ignore the ID until it’s flipped.

This also raises a rules question - if the Runner is not familiar with the ID, are they allowed to request to see all three abilities before the Corp chooses? And even if they are familiar, is the Corp required to show them the three versions before choosing, therefore eliminating any advantage they might have gained from the Runner misremembering the abilities? Rulings will be needed I think.

Yes?

The lack of selection might cause the occasional problem, but that would allow you to do 5 net damage in a turn (Ronin + ID) pretty easily, or advance a TFP from 0 to scoring in a single turn with only 1 credit.

Much easier to build around, and much less fun to play against. Mushin and advance a ronin in one turn, if they have <5 cards in hand at the end of their turn, don’t have Feedback Filter and lots of money, and didn’t run and trash Ronin, you win. Lots of things there, but with cerebral overwriter as a thing, running that Ronin first thing is risky anyway, at least until Drive By comes out.

EDIT: In short, all turn might suck, but 2 clicks would be incredibly strong, and Jinteki is already going to get Chronos Protocol later on, which should be pretty solid.

my experience with shell-game/bluff-heavy type decks is that opponents who aren’t familiar with the card pool generally lose pretty quickly- in fact, If I were to try to design a deck specifically to punish new players, Jinteki flatline shell-game decks would be at the top of my list.

Basically, you lose the advantage of having them worry about all your possible abilities, but you gain the advantage of an opponent who doesn’t know at all what your traps can do to them.

If you’re in a tournament, it’s their loss if they don’t know what the card does (same as if they didn’t know what the trap cards in your deck can do) If you’re not in a tournament, don’t be a dick and just show them the card.

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Only because nobody was prepared to play against that in the US. Here in Europe, after Axul won the German National with a Killteki deck, every criminal deck started to play a single Feedback Filter in response (something Ff0x started to do since last summer) and every shaper deck packed a LARLA and a couple of SoT. You really don’t need much to win against Killteki :slight_smile:

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