I’ve never considered RP to be that taxing or that troubling personally. RP can tax sure, but BS’s taxing is a tier above, and it’s less weak to early pressure thanks to the ability.
RP has very taxing ICE and click compression. I would probably say it’s more taxing than BS. Blue Sun can eventually glacier up their servers, but it’s not quite the same. Also, it’s much easier to face-check Weyland than Jinteki. Typically, you’re not going to get punished by Weyland while face-checking as long as you have nothing installed. The same cannot be said face-checking Jinteki. I confidently face-check Weyland first turn; I rarely if ever face-check PE or RP turn 1.
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RP is much more taxing, but I think Blue Sun is more dangerous. It can score much more easily, and with Atlas that’s a real issue. Atlas-chaining is harder than Astro Chaining without Biotics, but an overadvanced Atlas means that the corp can take advantage of every scoring window that crops up. It’s pretty scary, especially if it can also run a good flatline backup plan.
Face-checking Blue Sun is a terrible idea, because they can run Engimas and Tollbooths to make you regret it, and shuffle them around so you can’t be sure of running into the same thing twice.
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Blue sun doesn’t do facecheck punishment as heavily as other factions do nowadays. Even NBN can make you regret it more if they’re splashing for architect.
On the other hand, face-checking is generally just a waste of your own resources, as there’s no opportunity cost to the corp to rez a hive just to keep you off accessing the top of R&D early game. You’re better off quickly building your own economy, trying to threaten to be able to kill an oversight with emergency shutdown or d4v1d.
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True, I was thinking of other Weyland. Face-checking against Blue Sun definitely isn’t as good. That said, I don’t consider Enigma or Tollbooth scary things to hit when face-checking, to address @GreedyGuts.
's fair, certainly not the worst. It’s not so much that they’re scary as that there’s no benefit. You don’t get to know where the Tollbooth is or even keep those credits from them, next turn they can pull it off Archives, say, and put it somewhere more useful without you being any the wiser. Tollbooth is much worse when you can facecheck the same one repeatedly, unless your econ’s pretty rock solid, I think.
Splashing architect seems like a much better plan th’ more I think about it.
Step 1: splash 2x Komainu into Blue Sun
Step 2: strip insolent fools of their handsize
Step 3: laugh evilly
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Having actually played against Blue Sun now, I have a few thoughts on the ID and how it plays. These are more thoughts in general, rather than on this specific deck. First thing is, it’s obviously really really good and an intimidating presence that few other IDs can match. But I think it has some limitations.
Firstly, I think that running Blue Sun has to involving running some form of flatline threat. Not to is to waste the ID’s biggest single advantage - the ability to rez powerful ICE and pull them back to get the money to kill with. The thing is that, unlike GRNDL or BAWB, Blue Sun has “actual money” and “temporary money”. The actual money is what your real economy generates. The temporary money is the money you’re getting from pulling back ICE - it’s only temporary because at some point you are going to have to re-rez that ICE. And if the runner is smart and you don’t have a way to force the issue, at some point your actual money is going to run low and you will start having problems. Because heavy use of Blue Sun’s ability isn’t free. It’s a click to re-install plus the install cost if there is one. You can’t spend a straight glacier game game playing two click turns, you’ll fall behind. And a good runner is going to be playing to force you pull back ICE every single turn if they can. So you need a way to leverage that temporary cash into a win condition and tag and bag (or punitive) is the obvious way to do it.
Secondly, I can see why the OP includes the Biotic. Weyland’s inability to fast advance is still a big issue. You can have all the money in the world, but it’s not going to help when the runner is on match point and Noiseshop or String Theory or PVP Kate is also sitting on a tonne of cash, daring you to install cards (and threatening legwork or to deck you if you don’t). ASH might do the same job and might do it better, but it’s a weakness that hasn’t gone away.
Thirdly, I think that rushing out of Blue Sun is quite unstable. It is heavily reliant on Oversight AI and very vulnerable to D4V1D. It also suffers, as others are saying, from the lack of face-check punishment in Weyland’s ICE. The Runner can quite happily bounce off Curtain Walls all day long and 14 credits to rez is still a lot of money to not have for the rest of the runner’s turn.
Finally, there are two cards that really ruin Blue Sun’s day. D4V1D and Emergency Shutdown. When we get the Anarch Bad Pub ID, Blackmail is going to hate it as well. But I think that if the runner isn’t running one of those cards, then they are in deep trouble. Enormous barriers plus flatline threat is really hard to deal with right now.
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This is how metagames work. It’s the same in Legacy MTG. You just can’t build a deck that does well against everything, you have to hedge your bets and make compromises so you can fare well against the field you expect.
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I’m not entirely sure I agree with the necessity of flatline inclusion. You’re right that you need a way to leverage the cash into a win condition, but I think that you may be able to substitute rig-destruction in place of tag-n-bag. Archer/Grim/Roto/Lycan/Information Overload/Ichis combined with Power Shutdown, AggSec, and Will o’ the Wisp may well be able to open those scoring windows. An Oversighted Archer also makes for a pretty good remote defense early on.
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Wow, I never thought of this before. I was even fiddling with a Caissa deck yesterday and totally failed to understand the implications of Blue Sun and Caissas.
Caissas can’t even ‘return home’. Which is even more grinding.
Wow, that is like, really rough and forces you to both run an alternative breaker, and Pawn.
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Pawn won’t help you - you’d need to be able to make 2-3 successful runs in a single turn. Much better off playing more Deja Vu, possibly even Retrieval Run. At least that way, you only need to get through once, and it’s less click-intensive.
Agree with this. My favourite blue sun build so far has been no-scorch glacier with Ash as the money dump. In uncorrodable, I would include corporate troubleshooter.
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If this was meant to be a trolling attempt, well played.
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My initial build was program destruction/dismissal (see: Wisp) with nigh all Barriers. Was quite fun, and is still my fave build. Any one can kill someone, but how about creating a wall that they truly cannot climb?
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So, would that make Gorbachev a D4V1D-packing Anarch? 
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I’m not sure I agree. The main problem with it is that the easiest ways to deal with Archer by far are one-shot breakers like Faerie, Destroyer and (ish) D4vid. Given that all of these cards (excepting maybe D4vid, I don’t know yet) see regular play, I think an OAI Archer on the remote is deceptively porous. Granted, it’s not a huge investment either.
We all know who’s the true commie here. Why, yes—I did spend an unreasonable amount of effort on this.
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That’s just porting Uncorrodable to Blue Sun. Uncorrodable has its problems, and I think Blue Sun Glacier will prove to be a more consistent and reliable deck than (any version of) Uncorrodable.
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Oh. I’m unaware of the build.