[Jinteki RP] Perfecting Perfection: The Best Deck Ever

I don’t get this 8 agenda thing. NAPD is my least favorite part of facing RP and if they are only running 1 that makes me happy. GFI means there are 33% more agendas that I can actually steal early! Is 1 deck slot really worth it? What am I missing?

One less agenda means that RP is running that card slot as un-stealable. Protecting RnD is more than just agendas defending themselves; if you can run fewer agendas the scarcity is self defending, too.

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GFI only being worth 2 points for the Runner means they’re still generally going to have to access 4-6 agendas in order to actually win the game, which is not easy when you only have 8 agendas and 4 of them protect themselves. Unless they get a lucky first psi game TFP, they aren’t winning on 3 agenda accesses.

IIRC, someone did some simulation work upthread (or maybe it was a different thread?) showing that 9 agendas with 20 points (3x TFP, 3x Nisei, 2x NAPD, 1 Chronos) is more resilient than 9 agendas with 21 points (the third NAPD over the Chronos) and slightly better than 8 agendas with 20 points (Hades Fragment and one NAPD).

If I’m right about that, then 8 agendas with 20 points for the Corp and 19 for the Runner seems like the best of both worlds, to me, even if that means 4/8 self-protecting agendas rather than 5/9 (Chronos) or 6/9 (3x NAPD).

Edit: In addition, scoring the Chronos generally doesn’t help RP win the game (that is, if you score it, you’re almost certainly winning by scoring 4 agendas instead of 3), so although it’s probably the best option in the 1-pointer slot, it doesn’t add a ton of value. Cutting it, gaining a slot that could be ice or Interns, and also bringing the point value in the deck down to 19 for the Runner seems quite strong.

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ah thanks. i might have known that had i seen anyone play the Board ever lol. still waiting to see that card in action.

I played a very long game against a deck that ran almost nothing but 1-pointers and The Board. I think I had 10 agendas stolen at the end of the game, with 3 points to show for it. I forget why now, but for some reason I either wasn’t comfortable or couldn’t trash The Board (which was in a big server anyway - maybe a breaker got wrecked and I couldn’t recur it). He eventually decked digging for his last Hostile Takeover (he had 6 points), and when he drew his last card and didn’t see it, he realized I had stolen 2 and he had scored 1, and there was no way to safely score any other agenda.

Original calculations pre Global Food. Script.

3xTFP 4x2 1xGF → 25.3 accesses mean
1xTFP 4x2 3xGF → 23.2 accesses mean

I’d like to do some calculation with Film Critic too, since I feel that if Film Critic is everywhere you prefer Global Food to TFP but I’m not sure how prevalent it has to be. For the following I assumed that TFP has 90% chance to get stolen, because the runner can hold multiaccess events until they have Film Critic out. It’s easy to change the percent though.

In Film Critic world:
3xTFP 4x2 1xGF → 19.1 accesses mean
1xTFP 4x2 3xGF → 20.8 accesses mean

f = Film Critic play percentage.
g = percentage running 3xGF

RP payoffs:
3GF → 20.8f + 23.2(1-f) = 23.2 - 2.4f
3TFP → 19.1f + 25.3(1-f) = 25.3 - 6.2f
Equating: 25.3 - 6.2f = 23.2 - 2.4f
2.1 = 3.8f
f=55%

So if you expect more than half of people to have Film Critic, 3x GFI might be better (note I ignored the influence cost).

I was going to do a similar analysis for when you should play Film Critic but noticed that FC dominates no FC. So I guess we are all playing FC and 3xGF now.

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That’s about in line with my expectations, and there’s no way 50%+ of the field is going to be running enough copies of Film Critic to have access to it every game. It’ll make the Shaper matchup a bit worse, though, which is definitely a problem.

That said, one thing that should probably be factored in here is that the Runner won’t be able to steal NAPD 100% of the time. They’ll be able to steal it the vast majority of the time – probably 80%+, since people make a point of keeping 4c available vs RP – but not 100%. That will dampen the effect of swapping it for GFI, although my suspicion is that it’s still in GFI’s favour.

I grabbed your code from Pastebin; Python isn’t my lingua franca, but it’s pretty straightforward, so I’ll mess around with it and see what I come up with.

Okay, if I give NAPD a 90% chance to be stolen, I get:

3x TFP 3x Nisei 2x NAPD 1x Chronos: 24.2 accesses (8.9 sd)
3x TFP 3x Nisei 1x NAPD 1x GFI: 25.9 accesses (9.9 sd)

So slotting one GFI is still more resilient to accesses than NAPD + Chronos, although you take on additional variance risk (not surprising; I’d expect that to be true of lower agenda count builds in general). The margin is smaller – 1.7 additional accesses vs > 2 additional accesses if NAPD gets stolen every time – but it’s still there.

Thanks for this code, BTW, it’s very easy to adapt and it’s super useful.

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Question: can the deck find space for anti-FC tech? Snatch and Grab is at least situationally useful in other matchups as well… To me the situation seems analogous to the evolution of NEHFA in response to Clot.

Glad you found it useful! :smile:

Good point about NAPD. 90% seems reasonable.

I thought about trying to figure out a percentage that they would have Film Critic but it seemed too hard so I just tried it with 100%, 90%, and 80%, it changed about how you would expect. I haven’t played with the card yet so I don’t know if it’s good to hold your multiaccess until you have FC etc. (And whether it’s right for Anarchs to play it at all).

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I don’t think FC is as bad for RP as Clot was for NEH – @jrp’s math shows that a ton of people need to be running FC for a hypothetical 0-influence GFI to be better than TFP. In other words, the meta would have to be very distorted for TFP to become more than slightly worse, and even a slightly worse TFP is still a powerhouse.

That means I don’t really want to tech for FC. I’d rather keep the extra economy and copies of Batty in Dan’s list. The real trick, I think, would be shoring up the Noise matchup somehow. People are talking about Cerebral Static, but I don’t think that does it – that just alleviates Noise’s pressure from one server. He still pressures the other two centrals and every remote, and the viruses are still good even without the mill effects.

More to Noise’s ability than just pressure on archives… The disruption is worse than the threat to win on one big chives raid. If cerebral static ain’t the answer to virus spam, there is no answer, and Whizz or Val can just as easily play it as Noise…

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@pacer took RP to 2nd place in a Noise-heavy meta. Ask him. I know he had Snares and CVS. Not sure where he made room.

Wasn’t he running Static? I thought I saw it in a video from that regional he won.

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He also had PAD Campaign and a bunch of other nonstandard stuff. I’ll be curious to see if he publishes the list.

dbs (49 cards)
Jinteki: Replicating Perfection
– Agenda (8 cards)
1 Fetal AI
1 Hades Fragment
3 Nisei MK II
3 The Future Perfect
– Asset (13 cards)
2 Daily Business Show
3 Jackson Howard
3 PAD Campaign
2 Snare!
3 Sundew
– ICE (17 cards)
1 Architect
1 Cortex Lock
2 Crick
3 Eli 1.0
1 Excalibur
1 Lotus Field
3 Pup
1 Susanoo-No-Mikoto
1 Swordsman
2 Tollbooth
1 Tsurugi
– Operation (7 cards)
3 Celebrity Gift
3 Hedge Fund
1 Interns
– Upgrade (4 cards)
2 Caprice Nisei
1 Corporate Troubleshooter
1 Cyberdex Virus Suite

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Noise is a tough matchup, but it’s also hard to play unless they have a decent amount of practice. If you can rush out a nisei and keep DBS firing you should be fine, just need to count where your agendas are that you put on the bottom. I ran 2 snares for the off chance that I had to let them run with medium and hopefully let them kill themselves. It worked in a couple of games. If you run it and score a Hades it makes the match up so much better. I cut static after Tulsa to make room for other stuff. It isn’t too impactful late game and the 2 credit cost hurts a bit. Snares are usually always impactful. Low number of agendas help as well. It’s one of RP’s worst matchups in my opinion. ELP might be worth returning too just for the noise matchup.

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How did the swordsman do? I was thinking about adding that to stop some of the faust action…but with mimic/parasite being around seems like it would be a dead card most of the time.

Swordsman is just too weak against Kate and other Anarchs not running Faust. A good Faust player knows to protect their Faust (unless they already have recursion prepped) from unrezzed surprises. After all, it’s eternity in hell if you don’t. #mephistopheles

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Im interested in this too actually. Speaking as someone who has only ever really played noise, swordsman just never seemed that scary, even when crypsis was the breaker at stake. Parasite deals with it cleanly enough. If the worst happens and you do lose faust, its not the end of the world. Your gameplan shouldnt hinge on a single card cough aesops cough

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