Since people started playing Apocalypse and decks splashing Siphon (again), pretty much everyone in my local meta has started putting Crisium Grid in their decks if they can afford it. This makes the Apocalypse Maxx deck I like to play a lot weaker/coinflippy, but it also makes PPVP Kate (my go-to tournament deck) a lot more annoying to play properly, because it suddenly takes a lot of money to fire TME/Legwork, and I hate using RDI just to counter Crisium.
So is this the time for me to finally learn how to play Anarch and not splash Siphon? How do you deal with Crisium and which decks do you think are best equipped to handle a Crisium-heavy meta?
Either imp crisium or change strategy.
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If you can get in to siphon, you should be able to get in to trash Crisium. If you’re relying on siphon all the way to the point where you can’t run HQ to trash Crisium first, you need to reassess your overall build because you’ve made something that’s too specialized and it’s going to get hosed by Crisium. Eater MaxX is hard countered by Crisium, and until they put out hate cards like Councilman it’s going to be a serious weakness.
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It’s not that big of a deal as Kate, IMO. You should be running 1xRDI at the moment, IMO, which I think most Kate decks did at world. If you’re still on stimhack, use it to get rid of it. Otherwise, yeah it’s annoying - but maybe your fear is playing on you too much. You can fire TME even when there’s an upgrade - worst case, they rez crisium. Best, it’s a bluff or a CVS and you can kill it.
3 Likes
This is the main point. We’ve moved past the age where you can just sit on the power of a single card and win games. The meta can tech against any strategy that tries to do this. Siphon is a really really high influence card, and when the meta is right people put Crisium in their decks and its time to move off of siphon/apocalypse until the respect dissipates.
If your plan is: I play siphon and win. You will lose at upper tiers of competition. Instead, figure out how to use siphon in addition to your plan without having your whole game focused on it.
10 Likes
Well, most of his breaker suite is Eater, so that’s not necessarily true. He has the rest of the breakers as well, but just single copies.
I remember Noiseshop not having much of a problem against Crisium. It only does anything against Medium and Datasucker, which isn’t really too much of a pain, especially when you have 3x Imp to trash it.
Also, playing any Whizzard deck means that you don’t care about Crisium.
In fact, I can’t think of a single Anarch deck that doesn’t run Siphon and/or Eater that cares terribly about Crisium. Even when I play with PPVP Kate, Crisium doesn’t really break any matchup. It’s just a bit of a tax.
Or, if you really want to dodge Crisium, you could just play Nasir. 
Kate shouldny care about Crisium.
As for MaxX just Retrieval Run for your Femme and deal with your trouble Ice protecting the Crisium server. I have had to do that on several occasions.
Corp players, take note of how the feeble runners plan on attacking the crisium grid. Plan accordingly