A lot of those things you listed replace the access step. If there’s no access step they won’t work.
In honesty brain damage is not so bad…you can largely manage. if you’re gaining even 2 clicks per turn…you can get ahead of it quick using clicks to get cash and find the other hand size increasers…once those are in place, the extra clicks are gravy.
In our ekomind deck it’s not uncommon for her to end the game with 5-6 brain damage just from recurring stimhack. I do hope for 1 more hand size card or brain damage abatement/healing.
Not being able to access cards isn’t the same thing as not having an access step.
If it denies you an access step from replacement effects, the ONLY use is safety in checking or getting them to rez things for parasite or to break with Forked. Which is to say, it would be terrible and I’d hope they’d do better than that. I don’t want to spend deck space and money on something that vaguely lets me shamble forward, I want to spend it on making sure my Wanton Destruction lands first click and dumps the Corp’s combo away.
[quote=“x3r0h0ur, post:165, topic:1907, full:true”]
In honesty brain damage is not so bad…you can largely manage. if you’re gaining even 2 clicks per turn…you can get ahead of it quick using clicks to get cash and find the other hand size increasers…once those are in place, the extra clicks are gravy.
In our ekomind deck it’s not uncommon for her to end the game with 5-6 brain damage just from recurring stimhack. I do hope for 1 more hand size card or brain damage abatement/healing.
[/quote]Oh, it’s manageable and all, but the deck I want to run with Brain Damage would kill me waaay faster than that. Drawing up and handsize increases are good, I just want more, more, more!
Not saying I need to void it completely, but either a program that can install off of being damaged away or an additional means of abating (or healing) brain damage would go a long way toward making that more of a thing.
Mostly because, well, I like Stimhack a lot. I like Stim Dealer a lot. I like Amped Up a lot. But if I run all of them and don’t get triple Origami and Duggar’s I’m going to murder myself. Might be that I’m more concerned with flatline decks than I need to be, but if Weyland’s coming back into ascendancy I definitely feel like there’s a need to be concerned with cards-in hand.
That said, I suppose with sufficient clicks Wanton Destruction followed by an Archives Interface powered run could remove the meat damage flatline worry from the game entirely. Hmmm…
I’m really looking forward to the ekomind/overmind/origami/e3 decks. I think the other idea is to run Sage, although I feel as though eko+sage+origami+public sympathy is a lot of moving parts. And drawing and setting all that up will make it harder to set up a good money situation. That’s the problem I was having with making the deck: how to quickly set this situation up, while at the same time not being completely poor.
I’ll have to look into this… never considered Wrym, but I’ve always liked it.
Seems a little reliant on Parasite thouh.
Now you’re thinking with destruction 
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If you run opus in the "multimilllion clicks deck, wyrm isn’t so bad afterall, if you can keep up with recurring enough parasites…
This is / should be The Anarch Way 
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Yeah. My kneejerk reaction was a bit harsh.
I’d still like some more non-AI breakers for Anarch, but if that’s what we get there’re certainly ways to make use of 'em now, at least.
I don’t think we’re going to see any further breakers that aren’t situational / one-shot / heavily specialized, fwiw. For any faction.
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AI breaker that gets you in for super cheap but doesn’t let you access cards?
Notoriety, Quest Completed, Emergency Shutdown, Data Leak Reversal, and viruses that load on successful runs all synergize with that.
Not to mention account syphon, vamp, fork, lamprey, credit denial, ice destruction, installing shards…
I’m assuming that “instead of accessing cards” effects won’t proc, making vamp and siphon into a no go.
If that’s the case, it’s useless. Having to mostly import stuff to make it work, with nothing great in-faction? DLR’s easy to lay out already, QC’s a mediocre card at best, and loading up your viruses mostly won’t matter if it won’t get you in on anything good. “Slow tool to load up datasucker and medium” is not enough of a selling point for it to ever see inclusion.
If their goal is to help Anarch, it won’t prevent the card access step, it’ll just prevent you from accessing cards. Given that Anarch is in real need of said help, seems likely they’ll get it.
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Isn’t the other problem that Ekomind is completely terrible unless you have absolustely every piece already in place? I ran an Ekomind deck for a bit, but quickly switched to Deep Red, even though I wasn’t running any Cassia.
Eh, the way we’re building it, if you start with 5 cards or so, with all nighter (later stim dealer or amped up), then duggers, use your last click to install overmind, you get a massive overmind. This weekend the pieces did fall into place fairly early and she got a 27 counter overmind into play, and even had the pleasure of holding onto about 11 of the cards in hand which included 2-3 stimhacks 2-3 deja vus and at least 1 scavenge. Seriously, try to keep someone out after that bullshit.
And no, the game wasn’t practically over by then, 10 cards from dugger’s is a hellova game advancer.
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As I said, completely terrible until you have every last piece in place. Which in this case is the cards in hand, the Duggar’s in play, the All-nighter in play, the Ekomind in play and the Overmind in the top ten cards (ok that bit is easy) with the money to both play it and use it.
Up to that point, Ekomind has at best been giving giving you +1 MU at the cost of crippling your ability to play out a bunch of cards at once (if you have programmes in play) whilst also turning damage into programme destruction.
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In fairness, if you’re looking for a combo Duggar’s isn’t a bad starting point. I’m not sure this particular combo is good enough, even when it does go off. But it might be a starting point. Even if Ekomind is rubbish (which is probably is), it’s really good fun. And there are a bunch of cards that sort of support it in a way that might mean it’s worth exploring.
Ekomind is also a brain in a jar. Cards that represent a brain in a jar should definitely be played.
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But that’s exactly the problem. Duggar’s doesn’t work well as a “dig for a combo” card. At the moment, Duggar’s is the thing you use to pull the combo off once you’ve got the pieces in place. If you use Duggar’s to dig for the combo you end up discarding tonnes of cards and open up scoring windows left, right and centre.
I love the concept and spent a lot of time working on it. At the moment I think that the whole thing just works backwards in a really painful way and that you’re better of using less funky stuff that is more consistent (e.g. Deep Red). Now it is quite possible, likely even, that Amped Up and Steelskin might change all that.
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Anarchs are about to be taking a lot of brain damage. I think that’s pretty cool. I have no idea if we’ll be able to mitigate it, or win, fast enough for it to be a good idea. Amped seems really really good though. Stimhack has always been good. Stimdealer looks like a good plan. Interesting times.