Yeah, Taurus in Making News is going to be a big thing, I imagine. I’m glad Hardware’s ceasing to be untouchable, but it certainly hurts anyone relying on it. Of course, program and resource trashing are already things, so it’s not like anything is perfectly safe, so it’s not like they’re in all that much worse of a position. It’ll probably stick around, though, because it adds a rather nice tool to an already excellent deck.
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I wasn’t happy with the consistency of my PVPP Kate in the last regionals. Ultimately there are only 9 economy cards in the deck, and if you don’t draw enough of them early, you are up shit creek without a paddle. NBN is too fast, and HB-SanSan simply becomes unstoppable. The number is 9 because the PADs themselves don’t really count: they only make you money if you draw the other 9.
Been trying to move away from PVPP since, trying to find another economy for Parasite recursion, but MO causes terrible MU problems and it stops you drawing cards. I’m going back to the Katman roots with Desperado for a while, see how that goes.
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This is why Pads seem to make a lot of sense in Anarch - that number goes up to 12 easily (Deja Vu), and can get up to 17 in a Retrieval Run-based build.
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Well that’s not strictly true - they’re still saving you money on your run events.
Also, I was playing the CT big-breaker variant so I had Test-run and Scavenge too. But that made it even less consistent I found because it became even more draw-dependent. If I drew my breakers I then had to either pay them at full price or over-draw to discard them. If my Scavenges came out early they were useless.
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Well, Anarch can use Econ help. Between these and Feeders, they could have a lot of recurring money.
Man, Taurus… time to make that link deck, methinks.
Link won’t do you any good - the Corp can just pay to get the trace to 5 and still kill your hardware. You need a good sentry or tracer breaker 
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Link won’t help, but SacCon will 
that card was already massively useful for face-checking with a partial rig, and it just got better.
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Truth. Forgot about that secondary ability!
SacCon will def. see an increase in play.
I was actually going to post exactly that. Though only true for Kate, whom I believe is the only person who really likes VoicePad. In other decks… it’s okay.
PPVP is a short term card with long term benefits. Daily Casts is a long term card with short term benefits. They are really quite different cards. The problem with Daily Casts is that losing money that could be used to make a run now in order to make a stronger run in the future is generally worse than just running now due to how much stronger servers are likely going to be in the future. So really, it’s more angled towards not applying pressure in the short term so the loss is mitigated, meaning that it’s all long term upside. PPVP on the other hand doesn’t have that problem, or at least its inherently smaller for Kate (a click and a card). So you can make that short term run and that long term run (which situationally can be better or worse).
A better comparison would be Infiltration to PPVP since at least those are both short term cards. For the record, if Easy Mark was neutral, I probably would seriously consider it over PPVP (I mean, I would play the neutral Easy Mark regardless, but it might end up causing PPVP to be cut).
I don’t think PPVP is the be-all, end-all, but replacing it with Daily Casts is a bad idea that indicates a misunderstanding of the card. Someone earlier critiqued that it’s really more “all the good event cards,” and yes, that is very true. That is the strength of the deck. But while Anarch Siphon Recursion’s strength is Account Siphon, it works because of Same Old Thing and Deja Vu, because those address issues (sustaining economic pressure) that Account Siphon has. PPVP does the same thing for “good event cards” addressing the lack of a sustained advantage and tempo loss from having to click for credits to pay to play them.
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I won yesterday with an Atman/parasite/ voicepad deck (coupled with a fastrobiotic on the corp side) the Paris Regional against a field of 62 players. The deck only lost one game on the fifth round against a midseason/scorch deck. And It was mostly dues to a couple of mistakes I’ve made and not so much on my opponent plays. Played too fast and it costed me the game.
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Great job!
2 more wins in 60+ people tourneys for PPVP Kate (shouts to @Chill84 for his Louisville win) , or, as @Arkhon would say, “Yeah but a lot of tournaments have been won by sub-par decks…”.
Lol, I’m not saying it’s not a decent deck because it clearly is. My point was that you can’t use a tournament win as evidence of the quality of a deck - there are a lot of factors that contribute. PPVP is good, but just not as consistent as I would like.
So if frequent high finishes and multiple large tournament wins isn’t consistent, what is ;)?
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My siphon noise deck has frequent high tournament finishes and regional wins as well, but if I you asked me to hand you a tier 1 deck for a tournament, I’d give you 4-5 decks before even mentioning it. Apparently siphon anarch cleaned up in atlanta as well.
There’s something to be said for personal testing
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OCTGN data, I guess.
Oh, I agree that player comfort, skill, and practice matters quite a bit. I don’t think that in any way reduces the argument that a deck that wins a high number of games in a competitive setting is “consistent”, for values of the word “consistent” as I understand them :).
Edit: for instance, I am not temperamentally well-suited to PPvP Kate builds, so my success with it is lower than that of many other people. I do not think less of the deck concept as a result though, because I have seen people for whom it is a great fit do incredibly well quite consistently with it.
I’ve played a couple of games against high taxing HB/Jinteki deck and honestly, the burst econ swing from the PPvP Econ forced the corp to play way more conservatively than it would have against other archetypes which opened a lot of scoring windows for me with Legwork/Indexing run. There’s not a lot of runner deck who can control the corp tempo as consistently as the PPvP kate in my opinion. A lot of runners deck tend to fall flat during the mid-game when the corp is sitting on a ton of creds and the usual cred-denial schticks doesn’t work anymore because they don’t have the right breaker or the right amount of creds themselves to play agressively, which tend to open a scoring windows for the corp. The PPvP doesn’t care about that because they can recover from a low amount of creds to a moderately high amount in 2 or 3 clicks, something other decks just can’t
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You have to play a lot of games, way more than is humanly possible with a single deck, to get an accurate picture of its consistency. I could toss 5 heads in a row, but it wouldn’t be reasonable to say that I can do it consistently.
Like I said, I played a PPVP deck at two regionals on consecutive days. The first day it totally bombed - I even lost to a beginner who didn’t even own all the cards. But the next day I made the cut and placed. Not a single card different and I wouldn’t even have said I played particularly poorly on day one - the deck just came out upside down.
When you play a deck that relies on combos you have to accept that variance is going to hinder you on occasion. You get two or three hinderances on the same day and you don’t make the cut. You have a clear day and everything goes to plan and you come home with a trophy. That sounds a lot like inconsistency to me.
Consistency is the very reason why Andromeda is so dominant - those 4 extra cards make a huge difference. PPVP clearly has potential, and when it works has a very robust economy base, but occasionally it will let you down. And, as I said above, it hurts to play against damage decks - I don’t think Jinteki is a good matchup for it.
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It’s all about knowing how to evaluate your risk and reward on each plays you decide to make. I know there’s a lot of players who tends to play really conservatively and for these kind of players, PPvP deck aren’t the best archetype for them. But there’s a reason why we got a couple of players playing this kind of decks are rocking high attendance tournaments. You force the corp to play YOUR game, the same way Gabe does by hammering the HQ early on then force you to score behind a 3 deep remote because of Inside Job/Knight.
Any LARLA or Escher uses?