Five different agendas and Old Hollywood Grid?
e: hang on, counting is hard…
To run 5 agenda weyland I think you have to include two copies of vanity project.
Vanity and government takeover are so bad together in my play experience. Two agendas to score forever is bad news for the runner, but far worse news for the corp!
I was kinda sad, because I really wanted to bring mushin Grid back.
I’ve been experimenting with 3x Vanity Project, 3x Prireq Mushin Grid. Vanity project’s no harder to score off the mushin then a 5/3, and you only need 2 scores to win.
I’ve been playing this a bit too. It loses so badly to any reasonable runner who knows your plan. If they wear themselves out running R&D, then you can win, but if they just stay home and get rich, you usually just lose.
I’ve hit that too lately. It’s really hard to control the pace of the game with this many moving parts.
What about playing batty to make HQ untenable? I have an off the grid build, no mushin, I just take my time and usually win off the low agenda density and repeated attempts at entering r&d,because HQ is so teaching to get through. It’s so hard to enter HQ twice in the same turn, especially with Excalibur
It’s still pretty easy to beat if the runner knows they only have to make 4 runs per game. If they beat themselves by running R&D, then it didn’t matter what you tech hq with.
Well, the runner is more likely to break themselves on r&d if hq is locked up. Having Excalibur on hq really seals it
Against crim, sure. But any blue sun build ruins crim. And HQ won’t be locked up, that’s what I’m trying to convey. Shapers and anarchs have a really easy time sitting back and making money, and they have easy ways to beat Excalibur. No one who knows what they’re doing will be running R&D.
Anarch has a number of ways of frustrating this deck, but money is not one of them. I’ve never really had to worry about ppvp Kate, but other shapers give me fits. If hq costs 20 credits or so to get through, and they have to do so twice, it’s only a problem if I haven’t gone off the grid, and they have an HQ interface, AND I haven’t taken steps to keep my HQ free of agendas. And multi access off r&d isn’t that big a deal if you don’t draw much, unless it’s medium, and then you have a way to turn it off, and can keep making that run taxing.
I’ve been playing OtG CI for about two months now. It dies firmly against Noise due to going late and milling. Recursion is too stressed as it is needed for ice as well. Prepaid never really cares about paying to get in. Atman 3 is trivial vs. excalibur, one run for crisium, one to get rid of OtG, one to steal. Frankly, they can even let the first score go, so long as they get rid of the OtG. To rez all the HQ ice, and OtG (I’ve even played breaker bay variants to make OtG cheaper), you’re often hurting for money. I certainly win > 60% vs non-Noise, but if people know what they’re facing, it won’t do well.
Summary. OtG (at least in CI) has the main problems:
- Money is tough. Rezing enough HQ ice to keep them out, OtG, and crisium, plus pay all the install costs is non-trivial.
- Recursion is taxed. Most builds sport a fair amount of parasite recursion (event prepaid). Constantly peeling the ice off of HQ, and forcing more high install costs hurts. Especially since the Jacksons and reclamation orders aren’t being used to get money back.
- Keeping them out is hard. Even if you can build up, any runners can build up money faster. If they know what they’re facing, Faust/Atman deals trivially with excalibur. A run in to get the Crisium, and another to kill the OtG is not outside of reasonable runners now.
So what’s your secret sauce?
Marcus Batty and Blue Sun, the root and oaktown renovation, and low agenda density. One of these days I’ll share my Blue Sun off the grid deck secrets. It’s a slow deck, but it gets the job done eventually.
Also, Faust doesn’t trivially take care of Excalibur, it’s strength 3, so that’s 2 cards, or 1 and a ds token. Atman 3 kind of sucks, right? And even prepaid Kate doesn’t have the money to get through my servers, and running r&d isn’t very wise with 6-7 agendas in the deck. Speaking of low agenda density, scoring a government takeover or vanity project the old fashioned way, off the grid, is pretty easy to engineer a scoring window for, you just have to brace your self for r&d assault. Fast track helps with lock, and keeping government takeover in my locker tight HQ. If it was able to be faster, it’d be a sensation.
Eh. List or I’m not buying 
Glad you’ve been having some success with it. With slow decks it always seems to come down to if they can harvest enough sucker tokens, tear down your defenses, or get in relatively easily. So yes, of course if it was fast, it would be great. But since these decks often aren’t, we have to deal with the reality of the runner having time to set up their ideal rig. If modern runners know what you’re doing, it is hard to keep them out.
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Why does Atman 3 suck? It hits hive, caduceus, + Excalibur.
…and is only one sucker token away from all of the good 4 str ice.
…except Lotus Field.
which is pretty easy to get by with cyber cypher
Atman 5 is the new Atman 3, which was the new Atman 4.
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Is it time to bring back Katman in full, with NRE?
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I think full on Katman gets kind of confusing with NRE, since it’s an increase in strength for the entire run, rather than with Datasucker, where you can alter what Atman does on a per-ice basis. Obviously you’d want Datasucker in a NRE Katman as well, but I’m not sure NRE does much that you can’t do by just setting the Atmans on different strengths.
Obviously I’ve never tested it. I might just be talking out of my ass.