They can use plop as a paid abilty whilst already breaking the ice, which is too late for the 2nd caprice
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There’s a couple conflicting currents in this thread, with people saying both that more/better hard counters are needed to combat non-interactive decks & that hard counters make the game less fun because certain matchups are unwinnable. I don’t think sideboards can work in Netrunner because of the existence of hard counters—cards like Clot, Plascrete, Employee Strike, etc. would always be in the sideboard & some of the most interesting decks would be unplayable because they’re so easily teched against. That seems like a boring hypothetical meta (hypometical?).
There are a lot of interesting “non-interactive” decks these days. It actually kind of starts with DLR Val, who put together such a strong, linear game plan out of a few key pieces. Now we get combo CI & Bio-ethics IG. I’m not really sure any of these warrant a “non-interactive” label (thus quotes), they’re criticized because they don’t fit @zagzagal’s (sarcastic) notion of real netrunner: corps scoring behind ICE. There are ways to interact, and yes pretty handy tech cards, you just have to play a different style. And so a lot of skill is being pushed into meta-gaming appropriately and choosing the correct tech slots. That’s definitely inevitable with this large a card pool.
Anyways, I just have observations. It’s sad to see people down on the game. I hope we’ll continue to see battles of interesting counters, tricky lines of play that work around strong cards like Pol Op & Councilman. Recall when CVS & Clot came out, almost immediately people were exploring fringes of the timing windows just because of the interaction between the counter & its counter. That was great and made for interesting, skill-testing game play.
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How does that work? Ice has no trash cost do how does PolOp target it?
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I thought it said to pay the rez cost of a card? I’ll check again…
EDIT: Aw, damn, it does say trash cost. Now I’m sad again.
(Councilman says Rez cost, is why I got confused.)
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I keep forgetting there’s a rez window and then specifically a paid ability only window later.
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People get burnt out on the game all of the time. Interests wax and wane. Whenever you’re ready to play at tournaments again you will be welcome.
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@Chill84 how much do you think that your feeling that the game doesn’t depend on good decisions for you anymore, but instead the cards your dealt, is caused because you are a much stronger players and so you’re just making many more good decisions and not giving yourself credit? In some sense, once you’re making all good decisions there’s not much else to do but hope for good cards… Essentially you’re just not valuing good decisions as much because they seem more obvious, and so you end games feeling like nothing mattered when in fact you played great netrunner and if you hadn’t, the cards would have mattered even less. I’m not saying this is all of it, but do you think this may be contributing?
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That’s very flattering, thank you. The people who have played with me can attest that I make constant mistakes; however, the points you make apply to people that I know who are capable of mechanically perfect games.
There are 3 possible experiences you can have after playing a game of netrunner:
- Your opponent was better and you lost because you got outplayed
- You were better than your opponent, and you won by exploiting mistakes they made.
- You and your opponent were equally matched, the game could have gone either way, and was very tense with back and forth action throughout the game. If you lost, you still had a good time because victory was inches away from both of you the entire time.
Now we have to include a 4rth option:
- You and your opponent were equally skilled, but you didn’t draw wyldeside so you never stood a chance.
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I see… so the problem is that games are decided too early essentially. A match up can be close before you start playing, but after the first 5 turns you know who’s winning and there’s no play left…
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I realize this is tough to pinpoint, but can you say about when you feel the fourth option became a thing you saw regularly? Even back in the Good Old Days of Netrunner when PPVP existed, playing against NEH always were vastly easier when you drew an early Astrolabe than when you just didn’t.
If I had to guess, when The Valley got off the boat.
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Isn’t this an artifact of deckbuilding though? Everyone talks about Wyldcakes like it solves the Anarch consistency problems, but that only happens once it’s out. You still chose to play the least consistent faction, and included limited (as low as 3) cards in your deck to mitigate it. Those 3 wydesides are going to be at the bottom of your deck in some percentage of games.
Everyone says Faust decks are consistent, but IMO they are some of the highest variance decks around. Wyldside is a win button that you sometimes can’t find.
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The difference between not seeing an astrolabe, and not seeing wyldside are huge right now. Back then a Prepaid player could still make headway, and lots of games I won despite not finding astrolabe (not that I didn’t whine constantly about it) but when your entire breaker engine runs on clickless card draw then you just lose, imagine prepaid kate where the bottom 6 cards are the various money cards in the deck, you can’t power your breakers even if all your other cards are ready to rock, drawing 3 times and running will burn out a Faust player in no time at all.
The big difference is that when you find it it solves almost all of the faction’s problems. It’s the most efficient engine in the game. An Anarch with Inject and/or IHW can find its pieces easily and proceed to run roughshod on most corp decks.
Exactly. Choosing what is in your deck is part of the game, and choosing to include high variance cards (or just making a high variance deck) is part of the reason you lose or win every time you play as well. You are just as much responsible for including Wyldcakes as you are for you play by play decisions in the game. It’s still player agency and choices, even if it happens outside the match.
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Just play against me more often, it’ll always be in your opening hand.
I’ve heard there are also decks that don’t use don’t use Wyldside… Anyway, I’ll still enjoy reading any stuff you post, I hope you keep enjoying the game casually.
Exactly this. It is the anarch version of the professional contacts lottery. Non-contact resources are only fetchable by artist colony. The chance of seeing a Wyldside in the first 2 turns, with a muligan, and drawing 8 more cards is only 79%. 88% if you draw 12 additional cards. This is the price for such a small, compact engine, it is also the major reason the deck is generally considered mid-range.
As a counter point take Faust out of Shaper, while it does not have the staying power of an anarch list, tend to be much more aggressive. Or the gamble-for-days engine that powers pitchfork, the engine will start gaining efficiency over base even before the Aesops hits the table. Granted at the cost of a much longer setup-period, and higher amount of cards (and inf) invested.
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Non-rhetorical question: how much of that is due to the evil meta imposing its will on you unbidden and how much due to your own choice of interaction with the meta?
Thought experiment: if you were to build a deck that had the same number of answers to any possible opponent, what would it look like? Would it look like any popular deck?
(I suspect that people just prefer playing pro-active decks with a plan rather than reactive decks that can counter many things reasonably well. And powerful cards for certain situations, rather than cards that can do a wide variety of things for moderate effect: think Caprice vs. Midori.)
I built Palana glacier because it felt like it had the most answers, pre-Demo&Dogma. Caprice (and even Crisium!) to stop Apocalypse/Siphon/Keyhole badness, with a side benefit of helping against Blackmail. Glacier style to tax out Faust, with all the moneys so I can afford to rez. Enough ice to withstand Dumbleforking. I already build decks assuming they need to have answers to common/popular archetypes. Unfortunately, it feels like it’s becoming increasingly impossible to counter many things reasonably well. I don’t know what’s a better answer: stick to the list that defends itself well in many matchups but straight-up loses to a less-ubiquitous matchup, or try to find a different list – although the idea that there’s some mythical list out there that doesn’t have an unreasonably bad matchup is one I’m pretty skeptical of.
Sideboards don’t really work in ANR. In Magic you play best of 3, and game 1 you must use your unsideboarded deck. In netrunner you only play each deck once against each opponent, so when would you sideboard? Do you have to scout their deck in advance or decide solely based on their ID?
Also ANR doesn’t need sideboards as much. In Magic you will see about a quarter of your deck in a given game. In ANR, about half your deck (these are very rough estimates). This means in ANR you can spend one deck slot for a one of silver bullet and see it once every second game; about as often as a Magic player with no copies in main and four in the side.
Plus having a dead card doesn’t hurt you as much in ANR as in Magic. You can use it when takin damage as a runner or buffering HQ runs as corp, or just shrug and click to draw again.
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