Yeah, one of the problems with the MWL is that it tends to hurt shapers least, for programs anyways. Paying 1 extra influence for D4v1D in shaper is not a huge problem, because you only need one with your tutors and recursion. But paying 2-3 for them in anarch is a bigger problem. Same with the Lady include–you only need 1, so I still have no real incentive to switch to corroder.
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Is it really that big of a deal to pay 2 influence for 2 d4v1d? I don’t think paying 5 for d4v1d out of faction sounds reasonable at all.
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I mailed the Organised Play guys and they’ve past it on to the rule lawyers. This may or may not result in an update or clarification!
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A new Anarch decoder could go a long way to mitigate the hit on D4v1d. In the past 6 months, I have used more D4 counters on Code Gates than anything else: Tollbooth and Turing being the two biggest offenders. Both have fallen out of popularity lately, largely due to D4. If the new decoder is any good and D4 becomes less common, Gutenberg and Wraparound are only going to get better, since they’re the other biggest offenders. This may be mitigated by NBN’s loss of Astro.
Still, I see rough times for Anarchs. The L4J shell was largely abandoned for Dumble because the latter has a stronger late game. Against Glacier, L4J runs out of steam in the late game. Anarchs don’t have the guaranteed multi-access of Shaper and Criminal. We can’t afford to pay arm and leg in the late-game to build Medium tokens. This is why we trash ICE.
Furthermore, there is no feasible economy engine for Anarchs that isn’t Resource-centric. Criminals can function between Desperado and event economy; Shapers are largely Resource right now but this is mitigated by their tricks, Panch+Deus/SS possibly a staple moving forward. I’ll say it a million times: I see no functional difference between a Shaper running RND for a few bucks to access 3+ cards, and an Anarch investing clicks, credits, and counters to minimize the amount of rezzed ICE.
ICE seems to be getting better, while tools to deal with ICE are getting nerfed. The gap between Rez cost and STR is shrinking, in the Corp’s favor. NBN is already brimming with powerful ICE that is close to free to Rez. If these trends continue, playing Runner will become frustrating very quickly.
Moving forward, I think Anarchs are particularly ill-suited to deal with NBN. a single tag can result in the loss of your entire economic engine. Traditionally we have no link to help with Tracers. NBN’s servers are becoming as taxing on Datasucker as HB’s are—but for half the Rez cost on the Corp’s side.
This was basically a stream of consciousness of thoughts that occurred to me. I may have gotten a bit carried away. The times are certainly a’changin’, I just hope we aren’t in for Bad Times.
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I hope to play bad times.
@CJFM You’re so right, shaper tends to rush out a D4v1d, and occasionally has to power draw to try to find another clone chip or smc, and in that time, I occasionally find cobras, data ravens, or some other way of dealing with it. Unless you’re playing against prepaid Kate, which you aren’t, it’s easier to deal with the looming smc threat shaper presents in almost every deck. Hayley might have the clicks to bring a bigger running presence from time to time, but if you’re playing against a rushy deck, D4v1d might not be all you need, and it’s hard to use scavenge on both Lady and D4v1d if you only have one of each. It’s getting to the point where there is counter play in the form of these things taking more clicks to pull off, leaving the Corp time to play cards like Salem’s Hospitality if they are still in hand, or installing a disruptive upgrade like Navi Mumbai City Grid or being able to play a Voter Intimidation on a personal workshop. The game is getting tighter and tighter, but they are REALLY trying to pull off some slick stuff in this next cycle, clearly.
I feel strongly like the Flashpoint cycle is going to have a lot of synergy with Mumbad and Breaker Bay and Lunar cycle, as evidenced by cards like sealed vault FINALLY having a purpose. There is joy, joy in my heart.
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It is a lot of influence, but its worth it in the right shaper deck. The thing is, shaper has an awesome pair of breakers in Lady and cyber-cypher. Both are relatively cheap to install, high strength, and extremely efficient. They both have downsides, but the downside of each can be mitigated by using recursion, to reset the chosen server on cyber-cypher and to reset the counters on Lady. This allows shapers to set up early but continue to threaten accesses all the way into the late game.
D4v1d is perfect for complementing this rig. It allows us to deal with high strength sentries like assassin and archer, take care of surprise tollbooths and turing for cheap without commiting cyber-cyphers to remotes, and so on. And it benefits from the same recursion we’re already running for Lady and cy-cy. It’s just so perfect for the kind of strategy that remote-sniping shapers want to play, I’m willing to commit 5 influence to it.
Yeah for a while it seemed like it was all,
"Fck the system! Fck playing it safe! Go hard or go home! Anarchs rule!! Punk Rock…(Annnd I’ll just take that thing I trashed back, and this–, and this–…Oh, how silly of me, wouldn’t want to forget that.) All a bunch of phonies, I tell you.
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It seems like Anarchs have lots of options for reinventing themselves in a way that adjusts to these changes.
What about running non-AI breakers and using Making an Entrance to locate the right ones at the right times, now?
Maybe that particular thing doesn’t work, but there’s always possibilities. The PPVP-Clone Chip-Lady nerfs definitely proved that the automatic result of a heavy MWL addition is not “now you have to stick with that same strategy except with a lot of the really key stuff gutted out”, instead a shift to overshadowed cards that were almost as good all along may create new archetypes.
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This have been updated in v1.1.2
Game win = 3pts
TL Win = 2pts
Draw = 1pts for both players
Loose = 0pts.
Match = 2 games.
Intentional draw = 3-3
Bye = 6-0.
If they had let Bye at 4-0 or 5-0, it fixed the Bye / Win / ID / ID situation to access the tops.
4-0 is better than 0-6 or 3-3 but less than 6-0. By using it you avoided two shit situations / 3.
I think it was good like this, because to me you want to applaude firstly the guy who won his game, then maybe the last champion, then the guy who makes a draw.
This typo was fortunate in my opinion.
This could have been 4-2 or 5-1 instead of the aggressive unilateral 0pts middlefinger to the unfortunate player. Best is 5-3. Byes should give a neutral score to that guy.
Well.
I don’t think reducing the value of a bye is how you improve the ID situation. Remember byes are handed out for odd numbers of players and typically in a tournament, but least successful player with receive these points!
I’d have liked to see an Intentional Draw not get as much as a genuine game where players won one side each, but the most likely solution that people are looking for is to have more rounds and smaller cuts, so IDs don’t happen as early in competitions and are more risky when they do.
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I am thoroughly convinced of this. A tournament structure is (mostly Swiss) is aimed at collecting information on wins/losses to sort players, hopefully beyond pure chance. Allowing IDs effectively allows players, at their whims, to prevent the tournament gathering more information. Players will typically do this only after a string of early victories - allowing them to ‘lock-in’ favourable variance (often aided by a bye!), and prevent the tournament gathering any more data to smooth it out.
A larger number of rounds/smaller cut would prevent this, and it should be obvious now that this needed to happen once IDs were introduced. It was not - the number of rounds and size of the cut remained roughly the same, and now we’re seeing the consequences.
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The errata has just annoyed me:
I’m building decks on NRDB and at this point I’m playing with cards up to O&C (I keep up with the rules and cards and FAQs, but the guys I play with want to slow down and explore all the cards more), and I can only add 1 AstroScript, even though of course back then it wasn’t limited to 1 per deck.
Ah well, just get on with it I suppose.
this brings up something I have to admit I’m curious about: is this errata being printed on new editions of Astroscript?
FAQ says the most recent printings of cards have the corrected text, so I guess they will. Thing is what happens if they get errata’d again? (i.e. limit of 1 per deck was overkill) then there’ll be 3 versions floating around. Seems more significant if you’re actually altering the way a card works rather than fixing an omission or wording things more clearly for the future. Lesser of two evils overall though probably?
I have a feeling the Astro nerf isn’t going anywhere. Considering Damon has said that if they could go back, they would never have printing Astro the way that it was, I feel like this change is here to stay. Previous MWL was probably just testing the waters to see if they wouldn’t have to be as drastic as straight up banning it.
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I think the power level of individual cards under Damon is going to decrease, while the power of synergies may increase. His design seems very Johnny with little to no regard for Spikes. This isn’t necessary bad, but I don’t particularly care for this style of design.
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Agreed. I’d rather have a mix of the two. Finding synergies is fun, but pure combo games add an element of RNG that I just really despise. Plus, slinging power cards sometimes just feels good, man.
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I just can’t believe they’re going to publish a broken game. You can argue that it’s fine because they’re one data pack away from NBN having a legal deck but core does not play properly. That just seems untenable.
Thing is for the person who only has a Core Set, none of these rulings really matter and you shouldn’t be compelled to abide by them. You’ve only got two in the box, your options are limited in other areas; essentially the reason for this being made a 1-of doesn’t exist in a single Core Set box so in my opinion there’s no issue at all with them doing this.
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What do you mean? If the card says “one per deck” on new editions what is the person going to say? “Oh well, I should probably ignore that rule even though it’s printed on a card?”
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