Completely agree. I don’t think many people are upset about this being the current situation, they’re simply pointing out that this is, in fact, the situation.
This seems over-simplistic though… the paragraph you typed right after this being the perfect argument against it. Anarch used to “need” to spend its influence on Siphon. Then they got an in-house fix. Shapers used to “need” to spend their influence on Corroder. Then they got an in-house fix. Criminals are still spending their influence on the same things they’ve always spent influence on, while they’re waiting for their in-house fixes. Meanwhile the Anarchs and Shapers have moved on to spending their influence on making things better. It’s not a terrible thing, it’s just a thing.
Another thought… as the Corp meta moves away from the FA/RP strengths, even older Criminal setups get better. A lot of the perceived weakness right now in Criminal can be attributed to them just being “best” at the things that Corps are currently defending best right now. As the Corp meta moves to defend against Anarch/Shaper, the equilibrium comes back naturally…
(Note: I know this Mr. Miyagi crap isn’t really news to anybody here, I’m just pointing out the obvious.)
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Big props to the meta over there publishing nice Weyland decks. While I won’t go so far to say they are all golden (Gov Takeover Weyland was complete ass for me and the GRNDL Supermodernism works so much better in Titan), you guys have forged great ways to make ICE scary in green.
I’ve been having pretty damn good success with the GRNDL Supermodernism ICE suite (3x Archer 2x Grim 2x Blacklist) as well as the Rangus Security suite (3x Changeling 2x Lotus Field 3x Archer 3x Patch) to often complete rig kill Shapers and Anarchs.
Also been cutting all the dead-to-me Snares and trading them for the superior Casting Call to great effect. Scoring behind an Ice Wall becomes a thing again against SMC. Recursion seems to be going out the window for all of these rushy Corps (Is it time to start asking if Jackson is really necessary in stuff like Supermodernism, HB FA, and Biotech rush? I think so.)
Runner recursion is getting more and more important and Criminals need to either start splashing 2x of each breaker again or running Sac Construct. Keegan and Batty are proving devastating to Runners without answers to program destruction. This new heap meta we’ve seen this cycle has been really awesome. Corps are throwing out Chronos Projects Blacklists, and Runners are running Levy in almost any ID now and doing insane tricks with Clone Chips. Love it.
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Too easy. Jinteki, right?
Points please.
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I’ve always thought recursion was a crutch, and it basically lets the player do the same old crap over and over, and I’m a guy that likes variety. There just needs to be more reason not to lean on it for me to really like it, but I appreciate how important it is
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I personally would also like a bit more variety, but I think, for most competitive players it comes down to something like:
- These X cards are the most powerful I can use.
- Using these recursion cards lets me use them even more; it’s more effective to do this than use other cards with different effects.
- Recursion is therefore among the best abilities available to me in the game, as it maximizes the number of times I can use my most powerful effects.
This is primarily for the runner, but we can see the same with the Corp as well, since cards like Interns, Archived Memories, and others see play, as well as the occasionally over-advanced Vitruvius.
So, I think it’s less of a crutch and more of “If the aim is to win, use the best cards as many times as possible.” Recursion allows that.
…I just realized I’m probably talking about stuff people figured out back when C&C came out. 
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Clone Chip is best Runner card. Discuss. 
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And it isn’t really very close.
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I think you’re hitting on a concept I like to think of as “churn” rather than strictly recursion. If you plan your deck around being able to use the heap properly you can afford to aggressively draw cards. A deck with lots of churn has great tempo from the card draw, can afford to tech for specific matchups since they have an easier time drawing the tech and care less about discarding it, plus the consistency benefit of playing the best stuff more than 3 times a game. This is why Faust is such a good card, it lets you ignore one of the resource limiters (credits) and instead use a resource you wanted anyway (cards) in it’s place and with recursion you can churn out the discarded stuff with little to no penalty.
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