Voter Intimidation, yes. Cerebral Casts, only if you want to pretend to be a naive scorch deck. That’s the real strength of the card I feel, to present your opponent a decoy.
Well, it’s also a way to land a tag with less money - that’s pretty rare.
I suppose if the runner decides you’re not playing scorch, but then would they let you trash them with a loaded Kati out? Only if they have less than 1 card in hand I think. People take brain damage for fun, Just saw a video where a criminal took 1 BD for sec testing money, with John Masanori out. 1 BD is worth not taking a tag it seems.
Taking the brain is less appealing if your opponent knocked almost all of the cards out of your hand.
If your goal is to flatline, either through meat or net, brain helps with that plan a lot.
Also against faust, the brain is pretty good.
I think Cerebral casts is fine. Its not as great as SEA Source, but it also is more of a Neural EMP card I think. You are supposed to only really use it when the runner is on 0/1 cards.
Between Chetana, Batty, Komainu, Brainstorm (maybe), Mamba, Casts, Upayoga and Psychic Field, I think that is the beginning of a psi ice build that can utilize cerebral casts, so that either result is actually really good.
Especially the Mamba play. Mamba is a pretty beefy sentry, costing around three cards against faust and 1 that they simply cannot ignore.
1 Like
Upayoga is great.It’s a 3 credit, 4-strenght Datapike that can cause an even bigger credit swing at the cost of its End the Run.
With Chetana it becomes a piece of ice that can potentially wipe the runner’s grip.
and Mamba it gains a token that you can use to flatline the runner whenever you like.
Both of those are powerful enough to warrant space.
Add to that, the fact that it costs faust three cards to break, and I think its quite good.
But maybe I am just drinking the Chetana kool-aid.
4 Likes
I certainly may build a Nisei deck when these next few PSI ICE come out, if only to sleeve up some cool cards that I’ve never played with, like Mamba.
Keep in mind that you’re always going to have to pay 1c to make the runner lose 2c with Upayoga, because the runner will always bid 0c in that psi game. The credit swing isn’t as big as datapike (unless you have a nasty psi ice subroutine that the second subroutine can fire, in which case the runner needs to break).
Unless the runner needs to only lose one credit and knows that you will always bid one, but you know that he knows so you bid zero?
5 Likes
9 Likes
I was pretty fascinated by this Psi-game from a game theory point of view. I looked at a bunch of game theory Nash equilibrium solutions to psi games in a BGG article/post I wrote but this one doesn’t fit those examples well.
This is a weird game! It’s weird because it’s not zero-sum–in some sense it’s not a 2-player game, because you both are paying money to a phantom 3rd player–the bank. This makes it weird because our selfish incentives don’t interpret this 3rd person well. This means if we look at the game naively as just credit losses as payoffs, the Nash equilibrium solution is both players bidding 0. Why? Well the definition of a Nash equilibrium is a strategy for which your opponent cannot gain by unilaterally deviating. This is true for bidding 0 for both players–if corp bids zero, runner can’t do better than bidding 0 and if runner bids 0 corp can’t do better than 0 either (if he bids more, he loses credits and therefore does “worse”). So it’s a Nash equilibrium and it turns out it’s unique.
However, we can immediately see the limitation of this solution. When runner always bids 0, corp can bid 1 and force runner to lose two–so he’s paying 1 to force runner to lose 2 and we can think of this as a “better” result than us both bidding 0. Our naive approach didn’t see this because it saw things from the point of view of “us losing more = worse” and doesn’t care about how much runner loses.
So now we can try to adjust things a bit to try to get “better” strategies. One approach I thought of is viewing corp losses as runner wins, and runner wins as corp losses. This tries to reflect the fact that what matters is a credit swing, since this represents a change in tempo/board state. So the result of both players bidding 0 is still 0 for both players, but the result of corp bid 1 runner bid 0 is now: for corp = (-1+2) = 1, for runner = (-2+1) = -1 which gives us the idea that corp won a credit on the exchange and runner effectively lost a credit in the exchange in terms of board position.
Once we perform this transformation, it makes the game zero-sum which makes nash equilibrium approaches work better. Whenever corp wins, runner loses, and vica versa. This actually makes the game have a new unique nash equilibrium solution:
Corp bids 0 25% of time bids 1 75%, runner bids 0 75% of time and bids 1 25% of the time. Bidding 2 is never used by either player.
I think this solution makes a lot of sense and fits our view of “winning” a bit better than just always bidding 0 (which makes the sub useless unless you’re nisei division :D)
Oh and the final value of the game, is the corp on avg earns 3/4 of a credit and runner loses -3/4–so the value of this game is 75% of a full credit swing. This seems pretty undwerwhelming since using this reference point any sub that costs 1 to break creates a 1 credit swing (runner pays 1, so corp “wins” a credit runner “loses” a credit in this view point). Good thing it’s not the only sub and often people will make the mistake (or be forced into it through low credit pools) of paying to break it.
Just for full reference I’m not sure if this transformation is the “correct” way of getting better game theory results… need to think about it a bit more 
4 Likes
Nisei Division probably makes that math tricky. Upayoga is such a nice drain of money, tollbooth needs to look out
Got this from the Facebook group.
5 Likes
The game theory way of looking at it might make less sense in a real world situation depending on the credit pools of the players. For example, if the corp is rich (and thus losing credits doesn’t matter much) vs poor runner, bidding 2 as corp is a valid way to go. You’re essentially forcing the runner to lose 2c (at a cost of 2c for the corp, or 1c if you’re Nisei Division). Doing that just before some Caprice psi games and you need a ton of money as the runner if you’re not breaking Upayoga.
(I guess you can adjust the values for credits and get a valid game theory solution anyway…but thought I’d point out that there’re times where the credits are not valued equally on both sides)
So the baseline for making this work is a deck with 3 Liberated Chela + 3 Fan Site + at least 3 of All-Nighter/Hyperdriver/Temple of the Liberated Mind? So you’re looking at 9-15 card slots so that you can turn 1 pointers, Fan Sites, or News Team/Shi Kyu’s into 2 pointers… If the corporation doesn’t forfeit an agenda.
To me that screams two massive restrictions: your deck has to be built such that you can apply pressure while building towards the Chela scores, and you need a strong late game in case your opponent just forfeits agendas. It will certainly be a deck building challenge to get this thing all up and running. I love cards like this because they’re what help keep games fun for a portion of the community. Winning a game by scoring a Chela should never happen, but when it does it will make for really memorable games.
3 Likes
Liberated Chela looks disgusting. It probably won’t win you a game outright very often, because the Corp will happily sacrifice an agenda over, say, losing the game. But that’s an insane amount of tempo loss to keep the game going. And a Hyperdriver can still leave you with 2 clicks left over! It will probably be high influence, but all the best tools to make it work are in faction.
Not to mention you can sacrifice News Teams and Shi.Kyus. These cards used to be cool but now they may be the biggest liabilities can possibly put in your deck.
This card is bananas.
Edit: @PaxCecilia But the thing is, you don’t strictly NEED those fan sites. Even just sacrificing a 1 pointer for a point can be game changing. To me, what this card does best is force the Corp to lose massive tempo by forfeiting agendas to stop you. Normally I would say this is a win more card, because you have to be on or close to game point for it to be really threatening, but with all the tools to make it work in faction…
Yeah it will require building around, but I don’t think 3x each card is completely necessary. This card will absolutely do work against Weyland and most NBN decks regardless of whether you have Fan Sites. Just sack those Hostile Takeovers and Breaking News (or 15 Minutes!)
1 Like
3 notorieties and 3 Chelas is still only 6 points. Still have to score an agenda to win the game. (If you’re using chela on a fan site then it implies the corp has scored an agenda which means they can counter your chela)
what is Chela? cant see that image up there…
Shaper resource, connection, 0 creds.
spend 5 clicks, sack an agenda: Add to your score area as an agenda worth 2 points. the corp may sacrifice an agenda to prevent this. If they do, remove Liberated Chela from the game.