Official Breaker Bay datapack preview / Hayley Kaplan

New Cards and Spoilers
81

I do agree. I’m just glad that shaper have a console on the horizon that is a power level equivalent to Desperado. And there is a trend to more events in all factions from what I’m seeing, especially some of the MaxX builds I’m seeing.

82

75% never happened. It was 57% at most, and even then at local meta HBFA was rocking the boat hard enough to keep the overall odds very close to 50%.
Noiseshop was far too slow. It was able to compete for a very brief time after Workshop release and before various HB FA/Rush hybrids with Vitruvius and SanSan took flight.
End of Genesis and C&C was about time when the concept of playing around Siphons finally sunk in. I remember constructing a specific NBN deck designed to operate on 1-3 credits to defeat siphon-heavy meta. HB just needed something like Eve Campaign to happen to be able to reliably dodge any Siphon ever.
Katman was allright. As any decent new archetype does, it had its 15 seconds of fame blitzing tournaments when nobody was prepared for it. It quickly became just another strong Runner deck.

And then Jackson came and saved Corp from Flood. And balance ensued.

So, no. I have to disagree. It was never too tough as Corp. Pendulum in this game is quite fast. Fast Track is still relatively fresh, and we already see Clot incoming.

83

After C&C, before OM. That’s the one period you sort of glazed over, and that’s where the situation was nigh-unbearable. Easy access to 4+ Siphons per game meant that suddenly runners had the luxury to siphon you when you were sitting at 2-3 credits, easily.

There’s two parts to “playing around Siphon” - making sure the runner doesn’t get rich off of you, and being able to progress your own game plan after being hit by (repeated) Siphoning. Eve solves the first part. The second, not so much - corp econs were way weaker back then, trashing an emergency-rezzed Eve wasn’t nearly as big a deal for the runner as scraping money back together was for corp.

3 Likes
84

Times between SOT release and Jackson’s advent were a bit rocky due to increased Criminal ability to prolong early game and cause agenda clog in HQ with no hard-response on Corp side, I’ll give you that.

But just a bit. SOT just made preventing flood that much more crucial, something players were already aware of. Biotic Laboring 3/2 on Turn 3 before Andromeda sets up a first Siphon was a thing people were doing to avoid HQ agenda clog. After that it was just a matter of keeping enough stuff unrezzed on board to work compress Siphon Runner while your FA clock was ticking.
He had to break into HQ through Elis and Ichis, Siphon your 1-2 bits and then go out to trash all the drip, Ashes and SanSans you rezzed. Quite often Runner did not have enough resources to do everything in time.
It was a close matchup even with SOT and no Jackson. Not withstanding the fact that it was undoable from Weyland or Jinteki.

85

I don’t mean this in an aggressive way, but your whole point illustrates my point nicely: if the game is in a state where the only semi-playable corp is HB (with one particular build, or very close to it), that most certainly qualifies to describe the corp situation as “nigh-unbearable”.

86

That’s fair point you make. There was just one, maybe two Corp builds who were competing at that time, meta was very ill indeed.

I was addressing huge Corp/Runner side imbalance that arguably was in place during the whole Core Set / Genesis / C&C period, as mentioned in originat shatner’s post, however. I was not arguing diversity of the meta in general.

87

Skilled Katman/Noise/Andy players pushed this a lot closer to 75% than you think for large blocks of time (Andy/Katman for the entire pre-Nationals 2013-Worlds 2013 timeframe, say). Overall the runner winrate never went much higher than 55% or so, sure, but we’re usually talking about high-level play 'round here.

It was really tough, since there were two, maybe two and a half corp builds that could hang tough against good runners.

88

We’re now in the land of subjectivity, I’m afraid.

We could dig up old BGG threads with OCTGN data analysis to check matchups between “skilled players” of the time, but that data sample is polluted by testing people performed between new C&C EtF decks and tournament Andromeda.

I participated in local offline tournament (20-something people) shortly after C&C release. My sample told me that while meta was indeed very scewed on Corp side (I believe I was the only Making News player in top4, others were all HBFA with very similar builds), Shapers and Criminals were both represented on Runner side (albeit with very few Katmans, people did not catch up to it yet) and at the tournament conclusion we had something like 52/48 distribution of winnings between Runners and Corps.

89

If only someone had written a series of articles tracking matchup winrates over time…

6 Likes
90

Ok, sure, let’s couch it: me, the people I tested with, and most of the people we found ourselves facing at the top tables of Nationals and Worlds 2013 were 70% or so (better, in some cases!) with their runners. Ajar was I believe looking at +1 standard deviation runners on OCTGN and seeing 60% or so, which is a nice baseline. I suspect, but don’t care enough to make the time to analyze, that the effects (in either direction) would be magnified by checking higher-and-higher stdev buckets.

I should point out that I have perhaps unusual preferences, e.g. I want a game that is hard for the corps to win (55-45 runners at worst, 60-40 is fine by me). I just want there to be many paths for each side that lead roughly to those win totals :). I may also not-so-secretly rooting for The Jank :).

4 Likes
91

Exactly. Nigh 3 years into the game, it’s time for some more skilled choices outside of simple cost reductions or starting the game with 4 more cards.

Bring on Hard Mode.

(EDIT: Yes, I know things like The Professor exist if I want a real ‘challenge’. Please, don’t let me ‘know’ that.)

7 Likes
92

Personal anecdote time. My records:

Gencon '13 (Andy/Weyland):
Runner - 6-1
Corp - 2-5

Worlds '13 (Katman/HB):
R - 7-1
C - 5-3

GC '14 (Andy/RP):
R - 8-4
C - 10-2

W '14 (Kate/NEH):
R - 6-3
C - 8-0

2 Likes
93

That’s right. I still have that data, too, for my planned loyalty analysis. But matchup analysis is going to get a lot harder as IDs proliferate, even with the growth of OCTGN play.

3 Likes
94

ANECDOTES :wink:

Gencon '13 (Andy/Weyland):
Runner - 8-0
Corp - 3-5

Worlds '13 (Andy/NBNMN):
R - 6-1
C - 4-3

I think that Andy deck conceded a total of around 30 agenda points in those 15 games. It was overpowered like whoa, good times :).

@Ajar yeah, it’s going to get harder for sure. I play a lot of random jank on OCTGN so probably wouldn’t even make the +1 stdev cut despite a strong tournament record historically, so there’s that aspect too :).

2 Likes
95

man if you Code Siphon with an SMC in play with a breaker in hand you can have a full rig up for 1 click

1 Like
96

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Doppelgänger yet, because I am assuming Hayley needs to run it for style points (do everything twice).

97

Can’t Doppel if you’re already playing Comet though ):

98

Oh derp derp

99

It will be really hard to build a deck with Hayley and Comet, even with a couple of Levy you are likely better off with Kate to fit enough events in there.

100

here’s an idea I farted out in 5 minutes. be gentle. Kate is obviously Hayley, and 2 QT are Game Day. Game Day because Box-E because no stress Opus

Tempo Hayley

Kate “Mac” McCaffrey: Digital Tinker (Core Set)

Event (21)

Hardware (7)

Resource (3)

Icebreaker (7)

Program (7)

15 influence spent (max 15)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Source

Deck built on NetrunnerDB.