Latest Spoiler:
A bunch of new spoilers to discuss:
3 Likes
holy fucking shit…
they killed dinosaurus.
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CI will be grabbing the hell out of Ashigaru, I assume.
NEXT Silver looks to be about as good as anticipated. Shame it’s so easily Parasited, but even so… NEXT looks all the more viable now.
Morning Star (and even Breach!) look like they’re about the get a serious playability boost. Corroder might be on the way out.
Those three fragments… wow. Each of them is potentially very useful in the right deck, even being neutral. I’d definitely take a couple of them over PriReq in most decks.
Anarchs get a pumpable Killer! It’s like a more expensive to use, but reusable, Faerie. Neat!
Honestly, BlacKat looks like the least interesting card spoiled here, and it’s not that bad (or so I hope, can’t tell if it’s 0 or 3 strength)… just going to have a hard time competing with some of the others. Kind of a pumpable midrange between Morning Star and Corroder.
Grail Ice is seeming more and more interesting as a thing, once again something that CI is likely to prefer over others.
Shattered Remains is everything I’ve been hoping for in an advance ambush asset, a way of dealing with Desperado. Of course, it’s an ambush asset, but…
EDIT: Going into the Fragments more…
Eden lets you build massive servers of Ice much more easily and inexpensively. Definitely something a glacier deck would want for rather massive potential econ gains.
Hades hates on Noise/trashing and provides a non-Jackson way of (slowly) removing agendas. Helps with some kinds of tutoring, less good in HB with their preference for Archives-grabbery. Also removes decking as an issue – not that it really was, before.
Utopia fragment is the best, by far. Turn every 5/3 into an NAPD contract, effectively! Make Mandatory Upgrades usable (after scoring a 5/3, meaning it’ll only come in handy to play that Vitruvius out of hand and win you the game…).
They all have to be scored, and once you do you’re probably about halfway to winning, but if you don’t have good 5/3 options and want to be using 5/3s, they’re all definitely worth looking at, at least, I think.
EDIT AGAIN: Encrypted Portals seems kind of neat, but really strange. I figure Jinteki’ll probably get another decent code gate to make it work, but as things stand it makes Chum/Inazuma/Shiro more useful. Score a couple of them, and Enigma’s no longer Yoggable! You’ll have made money! They could have been House of Knives… Still, neat.
1 Like
I don’t much care for Encrypted Portals, except it makes Rainbow a 3 rez 5 strength ice, which seems pretty damn awesome no matter what you use to break it.
I don’t think the importance of Shattered Remains can be overemphasized. Weyland wants it the most, and it’s the only faction that has no in-house advanceable ambushes. I don’t see how this could be a coincidence; well done FFG.
3 Likes
So if you fast track and score a hades fragment then powershutdown your deck, you get to draw whatever you want every turn forever. You also cant lose to being decked, since you recur and then draw, clonechip noise is the only thing that stops you, and jackson can bail you out if you know its coming.
CI is Insanely good now
3 Likes
And netrunner online communities go nuts. 
I love Next Silver. Only costs 3 credits, makes next bronze more viable turning them on against yog late game. Easily gains 2+ subs if you run 3 of each. 3 silver, 3 eli, 3 bronze is the start of a very taxing, yet cheap ice base in HB.
Having lots of subs is great.
The stealth fracter is good against them though.
Just going to consciously ignore this. I am really not a fan of CI/combo decks.
This is one of those things that seems doable, but risky. And also only doable in a very loose sense of the word. Unless you can guarantee they can’t get into your archives, they can just hit that, steal however many agendas exist in your deck still, and then it’s gg.
EDIT: I also don’t see what CI gains from it, as they want to draw as many cards as possible, not one/turn – even if it’s the PERFECT card each turn. They seem less benefited by it, not more.
2 Likes
Then the runner just have to make a run in the archive and grab all the nice agendas you nicely put down there. Yeah, great idea.
2 Likes
I really want to make a Replicating Perfection deck with the following agenda suite:
2x The Future Perfect
3x NAPD Contract
1x Utopia Fragment
2x False Lead
Requiring 8c to steal a NAPD after Utopia seems outright cruel, especially if the runner has to bounce off a Tollbooth or fight through a Caprice/Ash.
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Just add Red Herrings.
Second thoughts, Morning Star keeps getting better as more cards are released. 2 of the barriers spoiled are significantly weak to it.
1 Like
I don’t know how good that deck would be, but it would be astoundingly fun.
Now all we need is deluxe Anarch set. 
Morning Star already handles the vast majority of barriers more efficiently than anything else – it’s the outliers that hurt it most (Curtain/Hadrian’s Wall, the Heimdalls and Wotan, etc.) and most of those don’t see a tremendous amount of play, usually, at least where I’m from. I think it’s already decent, but this is definitely a massive boost, yeah. HB Rush will be all over NEXT Silver, CI and of course Jinteki itself will likely want Ashigaru (I can keep 4-5 cards in hand at all times as RP easily enough, and that gives me something almost entirely better than Wall of Thorns).
EDIT: Equally important is that with Midway Station Grid (depending on the influence, an obvious splash, and even just in NBN, useful at taxing) breaking everything at once is becoming all the more important.
1 Like
This; this, right here, is a problem. All pieces of ice before have established that:
-Sentries wreck you
-Code Gates tax you
-Barriers stop you
And there’s not much deviation from that. The important upshot of this is that, strategically, it’s generally safe to run as long as you have a scalable killer, you can run safely; the worst thing that can happen to you is losing 3 credits (tollbooth) or taking 2 damage (wall of thorns). Nastier code gates and barriers exist (viktors, heimdalls) but they usually end up costing you clicks, enigma-style. Hence, the popular wisdom: “never run on your last click”.
If you run, turn 1 click 1, the worst thing that can happen to you is losing your hand to komainu and then jacking out. If you install faerie and run, the worst thing that can happen to you is losing clicks (bioroids, enigma, hourglass) or credits (datapike, popup, various tracers) or taking a minor amount of net damage (yagura, wall of thorns).
Shiro kind of breaks this rule by making you access snares, but if you’re running you’re ready to access snares anyways. Inazuma also breaks this by turning archer into a str 5 code gate, but Inazuma’s positional restriction make it much easier to predict. If you see two pieces of unrezzed ice, or a nasty ice behind an unrezzed ice, you should get a decoder, just in case.
Merlin however?
Merlin has a non-negligible chance of flat out KILLING YOU if you run turn 1 click 1. A corporation with 3 Merlins in their opening hand simply has to install ice, click up 1 credit and wait for the runner to make their fatal run. Face-checking just became a lot more dangerous. Running turn 1 click 1 against anyone is no longer a correct play; drawing up to six is required until they can’t rez a Merlin or you’re confident they don’t have multiple Merlins in hand.
Now, you might say the odds of this happening are small. And you’re right. The odds of getting all 3 Merlins in your 6-card opener, in a 49-card deck is ~0.1%. One game in one thousand. A freak occurrence. (try it here if you don’t believe me: http://stattrek.com/online-calculator/hypergeometric.aspx)
That’s not what makes Merlin dangerous.
What makes it dangerous is that it’s not a sentry.
Imagine if Neural Katana had two cousins, Neural Broadsword (a barrier) and Neural Trident (a code gate). Suddenly, you can’t facecheck ice without fear of taking punishingly large amounts of net damage. Suddenly you need a Faerie, Corroder and Gordian Blade to run anywhere.
Merlin is a Super-Neural-Trident; If the corp has unknown cards in hand (which they usually do) and 6 credits (which they sometimes do) then every face-down piece of ice is a non-yoggable lethal code gate.
But it’s just net damage, right? It punishes face-checking, but just like Komainu you can pick yourself back up afterwards if you had enough cards in hand to survive it, right?
Well, no. It gets worse.
http://www.netrunnerspoiler.com/set/first-contact/lancelot/
Merlin is a program-trashing code gate. It’s not a destroyer, either, so sharpshooter doesn’t help.
God help us if they print a barrier grail, which they probably will because this looks like a cycle:
-The typeless, “mythic” grail)
-The Sentry grail
-The Code Gate grail
-The Barrier grail???
This thing, and the likely-to-be-printed barrier grail are going to be major sticking points in the future; they’re going to be the things you need to plan for and you need to constantly be aware of, like account siphon is for the corp. Back-breaking if it hits you unprepared. They’re neutral, so they’ll be in every deck; at least they cost some influence.
I don’t want to be the alarmist “broken-the-sky-is-falling-second-coming-of-caprice” guy, but Merlin breaks a lot of unwritten rules. It’s going to cause some upsets.
2 Likes
What does excalibur even say? As long as it’s not trashing programs or killing runners, I’m okay with it.
Is decent, but not a huge worry. He and Lancelot (and presumably the other nasty grail ICE) cost influence, so the Corp is putting all their eggs in one basket and would need a hell of a lucky draw.
Hmm actually, this is pretty strong in CI. Power Shutdown your deck, then recurse reclamation order to draw three copies of whatever card each turn. As you say though, you have to keep archives safe. It could be workable.