fastro is a name more than a descriptor at this point.
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Fastro’s not a name – it’s a way of life.
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The other day I sat at 7 points, minus 3 News Teams. I then installed Data Dealer and sold 3 News Team to make $27 and win. Who says you can’t have your News Team and eat it, too?
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BYOTYC is noticeably slower than NEH fastro, for what it’s worth.
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It used to be that if you made a deck with money and breakers, you’d have a good shot at winning games just randomly. A lot of janky decks used to fall at one or both of these hurdles.
But now whenever anyone plays a janky deck, there’s a copy of Faust in there, somewhere. And after that, all you need are cards to have a shot at winning, which it’s hard to build any sort of legal deck without.
And I think the thing that frustrates me most about Faust - beyond that it’s impossible to lock out, ever - is that the baseline for making a functional deck has gone way, way down.
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[quote=“Dragar, post:171, topic:5589, full:true”]the baseline for making a functional deck has gone way, way down.
[/quote]
Why is this bad?
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It’s not bad in some ways. More viable runner decks is always a good thing.
But, for example, it’s bad for players who are beginning to deck build, as they can play Quetzal with e3 and Spoilers and Kraken and still win games because they can pitch all that nonsense to Faust. And I don’t think that many beginner players can easily identify what’s going on here. Their deck is functional, they win plenty, but their ‘deck’ is really just Faust and its fuel.
I think it’s also bad for the game to have ‘any old bunch of cards, plus Faust’ as a viable baseline for a functional deck. A lot of the interesting parts of Netrunner comes from ice and money (and even the exception of pre-Faust Noise decks used to interact a ton with the ice being encountered - half the fun of those decks was that ice subroutines actually fired past turn two!). Making the baseline level of a functional deck ignore those aspects (to a large degree) is pretty disheartening.
I definitely agree with this sentiment, but I will say that I think the card has had a bit of the opposite effect for corp decks. It used to be that if the runner had a bad draw, you might be able to win games on the back of “by the time they finally drew their code gate breaker I was on 5 points and an Astro token.” Now every Corp deck needs a good answer to “what do you do when the runner can break everything.”
Again though, overall I agree that Faust has been a net negative influence on the meta.
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Maybe that’s just the corollary. The baseline for functional runner decks has gone way down, but the bar for corp decks has gone way up. To beat even the wackiest deck, which inevitably has Faust in it now, you need Ash/Caprice/FA. Weyland rush utterly died, by way of example.
And now that Gabe deck is 6 influence over the limit…
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-1 CC -1 Parasite +1 Shutdown +1 something
Deck is way worse, but so is everything else.
-CC, -1 Parasite, -1 Easy Mark, +1 Shutdown, +2 Sure Gamble?
Mommy’s gotta click draw for 30 turns, install her whole rig, then kick some ass
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So… You bashed it enough, but what were the play test results?
God dammit Chill you almost made me shoot coffee out of my nose.
Seriously though, the only way to make Sunny even remotely fast enough is to use Off-Campus, Drug Dealers, SOMETHING that’s clickless and gets you cards. You definitely don’t need cards that eat your clicks (friggin’ Globalsec) when you have to burrow through a mountain of cards.
Nexus Kate is actually scary though. Toss the Congress econ suite out, put in some Mopus action, and you’ve got a rabbit hole stew going.
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In my Sunny testing, I’ve disliked Career Fair and Modded, and I think you hit it right here: If you include those cards, you need more card draw to justify them, and Sunny already needs a ton of card draw to get through the 50-card deck to get set up, so it’s hard to use them.
I’d hit a point in my testing where I was contemplating removing Earthrise from Sunny, and it’s because I put Proco into the deck. Yes, Proco, the biggest -Tempo card since Magnum Opus. I was also using Supplier, but I think that could’ve potentially been Personal Workshop if I had less resources and more Hardware/programs.
The problem, however, as always, was that it set up too. damn. slowly. DLR Val on paper looks like it has the same problem, but Val has Blackmail to keep the corp stuck in the early game while she sets up. Sunny has no tricks to get into servers early on while she’s setting up, save Security Nexus. That’s why Nexus is so crucial to Sunny builds, and is probably why it’s seeing success in Kate, doing the same thing for her, and Kate sets up faster than Sunny.
(And of course, you compare Blackmail to Security Nexus and they look similar, except Nexus costs 7 more credits, and requires you to get a bunch more Link strung together, while still beating the Corp on economy… Ok so they’re comparable in that they achieve the same end result… Except that Blackmail needs next to no setup, and probably is singlehandedly responsible for Valencia being playable.)
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I actually think Street Peddler is pretty solid in Sunny. At one influence, and with a deck low on events and (presumably, at 50 cards) redundancy, it feels like an auto-include. I don’t know if that mitigates the rest of the setup time problems though.
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I’ll publish it tomorrow after I do a write-up, but here’s the un-published link:
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