Only against criminal really, and it can be argued that criminals being able to only have 1 of each breaker is a luxury rather than necessity (for Shapers and Anarchs batty is just a tempo hit). That batty can be countered with just more copies of cards you were playing anyway rather than specific hate makes it seem much more fair.
Itâs a necessity for Criminals, because the colour pie has rather unfairly dictated that theyâre not allowed to have good breakers, which means that they have to pay influence for them. Result; you can only have one of each breaker.
(This leads in to another rant on why the colour pie shouldnât restrict core game components like economy, draw or breakers from certain factions and instead should just focus on them being flavoured appropriately).
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I dunno, winning without at least one of your breakers is kind of the fun of playing criminal? Iâve actually always thought the âcrappy breakers, great econ, decent ways of avoiding iceâ aspect of criminal was extremely clever, we just needed 1 or 2 more influence on Temujin.
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Caprice was present in 100% of the glacier decks. Sheâs 4 influenceâŚand she was present OUT OF FACTION. They had copies of archived memories to get her back, for goodness sake. She was in 50% of the top 4 corps, and I remind you that they spent 4 influence on her. Like, you canât seriously be arguing that Caprice/Batty werenât all over that tourney, can you? I made it to day 2 of the swiss, and every red deck I came across (I want to say I met 4? And I think one purple that had sprung for her too, but I also think he went on to be one of the decks in that list.) that wasnât IG had Caprice/Batty.
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I agree with that a good criminal deck has to be built like that, but it means that Batty isnât an insurmountable hurdle.
Iâd jokingly disagree that its a colour pie issue meaning criminals have bad breakers and counter that breaker development in general is schizophrenic (Sunya and Fawkes anyone? The Birbs?). Really good breakers were made by accident for the other factions (paperclip being accompanied by morningstar and nfr belays the idea that they purposefully make good fracters for anarch) and criminal have failed to luck out ;).
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If you play Caprice in the remote while playing Criminal, youâre doing it wrong (imo).
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If Caprice is in HQ, she wonât defend remote (barring Off the Grid tricks). And if you really want to get rid of her when sheâs on HQ, Sneakdoor Beta is perfect solution.
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Old trick : people do learn. Unlike those who rush an agenda behind one ice.
Without Mill, this was doable and crim allready complained.
Glacier was already heavily on the decline at GenCon because dumblefork generally wrecked it. If you faced a ton of glacier at GenCon, your situation was unusual.
Also, people constantly complain about the demise of glacier. Youâre the only person rejoicing in it. Saying that people are âentitledâ for wanting back one of the core archetypes of the game is super weird.
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I played at Gencon too. Played both days. I guess I probably saw Caprice? but she wasnât a problem for me because I had a PolOp, for basically that exact purpose. I know that Caprice exists and I win despite her. I did not lose any games at Gencon because of Caprice. I did lose to tagging yellow decks and very quick rush decks, but glacier was the least of my worries.
Caprice is important to glacier because it is very difficult to keep the runner out of the remote indefinitely. She also works great in HBâs never-advance style using 6x 3/2 agendas, where as Jinteki glaciers tend to use more 4/2 and 5/3 agendas.
Summing up AM as âonly to get Caprice backâ is selling an excellent card very short. AM lets you tutor any card in your heap. It is very powerful and versatile card. Recurring Caprice is a great use because Caprice is a good card, but it is far from the only use for AM in these or any other deck.
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Huh. I can see the logic in the arguments for banning ParasiteâŚ
Just because something has been around forever doesnât mean we canât look at changing it.
Another side-effect that would be helpful to the game is Clone Chip could probably come off MWL if Parasite is gone, since thatâs the abuse case for Clone Chip. Without Parasite, Clone Chip becomes an insurance plan for breakers, and an alternate way to get the correct breaker when you need it, a la Personal Workshop. (And, I suppose, also enables False Echo shenanigans, but câmon, let the binder fodder card have its day in the sun. Like seriously, False Echo is a really bad card that only sees play because of a weird combination. 
)
Iâm still not sure banning cards is the right answer, but these are good arguments.
Oh, but you are 100% wrong about PPVP off MWL. That card is just a mistake and as long as it exists, Design has a hard time making economy events. This is why Temujin Contract exists, and why High-Stakes Job isnât very exciting.
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Iâm not sure what your point is here? BN was present in 100% of tagging decks? Boom was present in 100% of meat damage decks? Ronin was present in 100% of net damage decks? The fact a card is core to a strategy is not an argument for it being banned, unless you have an argument on why scoring all your points out if remotes is bad (good luck). If Caprice was clearly the dominant deck archetype then you can make the argument that you can remove Caprice from the game and still have that strategy in play. When Caprice is around, is in a deck as a 1x (meaning theyâre expecting not to draw it a decent amount of the time) and not the dominant deck, the idea that Caprice needed a new counter clearly falls flat.
There were a multitude of strategies that beat Caprice, and you can see that by the lack of dominance at that juncture. Caprice did not need rumor mill to be contained, and not only did rumor mill remove Caprice from play, it removed all strategies involving scoring from remotes from play.
Personally, Iâm not crazy about psi games, Iâd prefer a card that was 90% the power level of Caprice without the psi games. However, Iâd much rather have Caprice than not have strategies that can score out of remotes for all their points. This idea the game needed a Caprice counter when rumor mill came out is clearly wrong, and I think if you look at the previous metas itâs also clear it was true when plop came out.
This is basically the point of my articles. Powerful cards enable corp archetypes to exist, and if you try to ban / hard counter every one of them corp ceases to be able to win because their default plan loses to the runners default plan.
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I agree with basically 99% of Simonmoonâs article. I donât think Faust needs to be banned personally, but wouldnât be sad if it were. Analysis of things like Marron and rumor mill are spot-on.
I go back and forth about what to do about SAU but I increasingly think it needs some kind of intervention. Its value and efficiency is absolutely off-the-charts bananas and in my opinion itâs by far the best of the political assets. I have no idea why itâs 0 to rez when the others all cost 1 and arenât close to matching its power level.
People generally agree 1 card is worth more than 1 credit. Commercial bankers is pretty darn good, but itâs 1 to rez and provides 3 credits per turn. SAU provides 3 cards AND buries one card from HQ at the bottom of R&D â not just one of the cards drawn like daily business show â which is extremely helpful to the corp by allowing the player to distribute agendas where he wants them. Firing it is even optional. People say all the time its value is immense even if it just fires once, which you never hear people say about bankers. Itâs probably the most common card people playing non-yellow horizontal decks import for influence outside of Jackson, and when coupled with strategies to protect low-trash-cost assets, it can easily take over games â quickly.
I still canât believe anyone would defend sifr. It breaks the curve in so many ways. It enables ridiculously easy destruction of ice of any size with parasite or cutlery. Itâs effectively a flexible femme fatale that can effectively be retargeted each turn for 5 instead of 9. Compare to security nexus, which costs 3 more to install and requires support cards to be truly effective. FFG thought D4v1d and its limited charges was too efficient and placed it on the MWL. This thing basically does what D4v1d does once and lets you do it once per turn. The designers donât like yog because it intrudes on the design space by making people not want to use low-strength code gates ⌠this thing makes people not want to use big ice of any type. AND it provides 2 memory, without even the restriction of grimoire, which in my opinion was already a very good console.
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I agree with everything except the last paragraph. 
With Parasite, yes, Cutlery, not so much. There was already lots in the game to enable Cutlery ICE destruction, SIFR doesnât really add much there. Parasite-SIFR still isnât the abuse case, because youâve still had to hit the ICE and deal with it at least once, which IMO is all you can expect your ICE to do. Parasite-SIFR-Clone Chip is the abuse case, because you completely negated their ICE for a very low cost, albeit a limited number of times and for a high cost in Influence.
Except you canât just bypass an ICE with only SIFR, with Femme you literally only need Femme, and Programs are much easier to find than Hardware. False Equivalency.
SIFR actually requires support cards to be effective at all, while Security Nexus, theoretically, can be used with no other Link (or Power Tap) cards. (Nexus Kate does it on virtue of just slamming the Magnum Opus button a bunch.) Additionally, Nexus also completely negates one ICE/turn on its own, either making it do nothing (bypass) or by turning it into a Data Ward. (tag+etr) Side-by-Side, Nexus is stronger.
This is fair. You have to stack big ice, now, to get it to do anything, and thatâs only if they arenât destroying your ICE, which, letâs face it, no one puts SIFR in a deck right now without also putting Parasite in there.
Restriction of Grimoire? Grimoire doesnât have a MU use restriction. Thatâs Deep Red and Memstrips⌠Honestly the +2 MU is the least-used part of this, it does allow Runners to not play MU-juggling games with Parasites, but thatâs about all.
I had a brain fart talking about grimoire but stand by the rest.
Normally, players are installing icebreakers anyway, so I donât consider paperclip or mimic or yog or Faust to be a support card the same way rabbit hole or access to globalsec is a support card for security nexus. The support cards for nexus arenât things youâd normally be chewing up deck slots and clicks and spending money to install. Itâs a fair point though that you need to the right breaker in play before it becomes a skeleton key to get in any server cheaply and easily.
As far as the cutlery point goes, when someone destroys my DNA tracker with spooned, normally a minor point of consolation is he had to pay a steep cost to do it (or at least empty a D4v1d). It warps the cost of using cutlery to destroy ice if you can break any strength ice for whatever it costs to break the number of subroutines it has.
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PS. Also compare Sifr to the toolbox.
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I just wanted to chime in and say I really appreciated both of @SimonMoonâs articles on this topic. They were well-reasoned and illuminating. I donât agree with every ban or MWL decision stated, but who would? We all enjoy the game for different reasons and have our own biases.
The core case that there needs to be varied corp win conditions and that the present strengths of the runner card pool eliminate them is true. Whether you think Caprice is a problem or notâand a lot of people have argued this for a very long timeâI like to have a variety of corps and Iâm not sure we have that anymore. The counters to kill (On the Lam, Aaron), glacier (Rumor Mill, stealth, ICE destruction), and tags (Aaron mostly) all got very good, very quickly in this cycle. Corps received awesome pieces of ICE in return but itâs not clear how to use them as a win condition with ParaSifr around.
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If the default plan of the runner is too be half rock / half scissors, then expect to loose unless youâre a half rock deck.
Itâs not a problem, again.
Paying a slot to put Mill doesnât make you auto-win vs non-caprice or non-whatever deck. You paid that slot for nothing there.
So people would hesitate to pay the slot instead of puting more money (which solves most things) for exemple. So Caprice exist again.
Except thatâs not the way that tournament players think, certainly at high levels.
The issue here is that Rumour Mill is an exceptionally strong counter to defensive upgrades, to the extent that your matchup against a deck using it is almost unwinnable. Most tournament players wonât consider taking a deck to a major event if it has a matchup that thatâs poor; it doesnât allow you to leverage your skill, and if your pairings are bad you have little to no chance to making the cut.
The natural result is that people donât take glacier decks to tournaments; for proof of this see any major tournament since Rumour Mill was released.
Now compare that impact to Political Operative, which occupied the same space as a counter to defensive upgrades. Because itâs not so overwhelmingly strong it merely helps your matchup, rather than rendering it a certainty. That means that the glacier player still has room to out manoeuver their opponent and can still win if theyâre good enough.
The result of that difference? Glacier decks were still popular after the release of Political Operative, and stayed as a playable option right up to the point that Rumour Mill came out.
That, in a nutshell, is why Rumour Mill is so constraining on meta diversity and should therefore be banned.
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I think thereâs also a lot to be said for Blackmail and Rumour Mill together driving out any corp gameplan that involves anything other than 3/2s. And if you are running nothing but 3/2s, it may as well be a FA deck. That both are powerful cards that see incidental inclusion further drives out any random remote-based or upgrade based decks, that might try and sneak through when the meta relaxes away from this a bit.
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