A double spiderweb remote can be quite terrifying, especially when you just watch agenda’s getting scored out behind it. My last store champs was a heavy faust meta and Argus went undefeated against them. But, shaper will be set up and have that remote on lockdown by the time the Weyland player gets to 5 points. Which is what happened in the final round. So should I play asset spam to hard counter Shapers? Maybe, but then Whizzard bends me over…
This is what Damon doesn’t seem to be addressing, and is of concern to me, that your deck can’t just focus on dealing with one problem, it has to deal with several. And this is even worse for runners. Rock/Paper/Shotgunning in design as an adjustment to meta is a problematic design approach. Each faction needs answers to each other.
This is why Dan’s douche decks are actually the right way to play, they don’t care about any interaction with the opponent. They just steam roll a game plan that is opponent agnostic. It’s the best way to play this game currently. Shout out’s to 7 point CI bblum, BioEthics IG and all of em. This is what we see in card design and what we see in major tournament winning decks.
Last year we saw it on the runner side, with all the DLR nonsense, and this year we’re seeing it on the corp side.
don’t focus on whether or not they tried out the combo; that’s not the issue. the salient part of that anecdote was that fact that it took months for the player meta to get there for it to be the powerful combo that it was. also, i imagine that in testing, kill decks were probably common as they probably had to try to test everything.
Well that could be explicable by chronotype and faust being in the same testing cycle: they might not have been in the forms they are now during testing for sufficient number of testers to discover its brokenness (it took a few months for people to decide 2 chronotypes was the right number after all).
I’m just saying that by trying to hobble cards that are “inherently” balanced, but are having a party in the particular environment of decks people choose to play, you are trying to fight against the natural forces that result in particular “metas” forming. That seems futile: you will just get a different “meta”, and another card that is also intrinsically balanced will become the bees knees in the new environment. Hobbling cards that are overpowered regardless of the environment seems worthwhile, by contrast.
Sorry, I might not have made myself entirely clear! I wasn’t suggesting that the “row of broken cards” was necessarily an intended outcome, but that the deliberate policy at work would naturally have that effect, desired or not! (An alternative policy to hit over-efficient cards regardless of any metagame wouldn’t have the same ramifications.)
I think BigBoy was also saying that MWL’ing Eli and Architect (two cards that are extremely efficient against Faust) helped give Faust a shot in the arm
“It’s my secret weapon that I only play whenever I feel that the top runners are so strong that I will have a hard time beating them at Netrunner. This is when I refuse to play Netrunner and play this minigame instead.” The Essence Of Bullshit, @Matuszczak
That’s quite true, as Noise already played the Wyld-Chrono-Faust shell in august. (Nats here were full of Noise players), and HB was one of the few decks that could handle the oppressive end-game state of that deck with any amount of consistency. (when it still had 2 Caprice)
See, the issue with Damon is that he looks at a card like Faust and thinks “If you play this archetype and this and this bullet, it’s no problem at all!”
Yeah I didn’t like that. I think Faust falls under the same category as his for D4vid–too efficient for the cost. If it were more expensive to play, had lower strength, and/or cost more cards to use (+1 str instead of +2…) it would have been a fair card that still helped break low strength gear checks while not being as oppressive.
I don’t buy his vision of a Weyland wonderworld where Faust is in the same category as Crypsis.
I think one of the biggest problems with these alternate resource breakers is you could punish them harder if they weren’t required to only do their shtick once and e3 through the rest. A lot of these cards might come off the list once that cycles out.
Sandburg was actually pretty good against the Anarch engine, really. D4vid is not really that efficient on a strength 5 vanilla or strength 5 spiderweb. Sandburg’s weakness is probably going to be effective siphon strategies for the op econ versions.
I feel like between Polop, vamp, and d4 (make no mistake, it will still see plenty of play), to say nothing of regular old run pressure, there are plenty of non-silver bullets out there that can attack Sandburg pretty well. It’s strong, for sure, but far from oppressive imo.