Older Article: On Running Double or Triples of Reusable Economy Cards

stimhack 2013-12-19 10:25:06 UTC #1

Originally published at: http://stimhack.com/on-running-double-or-triples-of-economy-cards/

After discussing Alexfrog's "Profesional" Anarch deck on the Stimhack forums, several of us had an exchange in which we agreed to disagree. Should you run 2 copies or 3 copies of an economy card if future draws of that card will be dead draws? Examples of this include Kati Jones, Professional Contacts and Magnum Opus.…

This is an old article. We are working on making the forums more closely integrated with StimHack so that new StimHack articles automatically get posted to the forums. Additionally good comments in the forums will be displayed under the articles. Still working out some of the particulars, and for some reason some of the older articles got picked up by the system.

ahhhfresh 2013-12-19 13:18:05 UTC #2

If you want it in your opening hand or soon after it seems 3 would be the logical choice. I'm also not particularly scared of dead draws... just draw harder. I mean Plascrete is a dead draw against HB but that doesn't mean I'm going to run 0 copies.

Arkhon 2013-12-19 16:07:22 UTC #3

That's what HB wants you to think...

Arkhon 2013-12-19 16:14:21 UTC #4

In all seriousness though, it depends on a few factors. Primarily, how important is that card? Can you live without it and can you get to it any other way?

As the card pool grows there will be competition for deck space, plus if it's out of faction there's the influence cost to consider. These arguments favour fewer copies, especially if you have deck search (i.e. Hostage) but justifying Hostage probably needs a specific deck type that's Connection-centric.

On the other hand, it's inevitable that at some point there will be effects that allow you to discard cards to fuel something else, so dead draws won't be quite so dead in the long run. This might tip people back in favour of running three copies.

TL;DR: I'm playing Devil's Advocate and saying "it depends"

Myriad 2013-12-19 17:38:02 UTC #5

Well... really if they are so valuable and you are criminals, you can cover your bases by running hostage (so long as it is a connection). This is what I typically do in my Andromeda deck as it allows me a lot of freedom and Hostage adds consistency to my deck.

Out of Crims, Hostage is a worthy nod if you feel that Katy or Pro contacts are so valuable to your deck that they need to get played ASAP. I would say even cutting one of the x3 for a Hostage adds more to your deck than simply running x3 and in some cases you might actually gain something by running Hostage. For instance, you could cut down to x1 Pro contacts (it has a really high install cost after all) and run John Masanori in the free slot, or one of the numerous other connections.

Basically, I agree with Arkhon. As more connections are printed, I think Hostage might be a more and more worthy addition, which will save you deck space and still maintain consistency in many, many decks that will be using either Pro Contacts or Katy (so MOST competitive decks at the moment).

ahhhfresh 2013-12-20 01:46:13 UTC #6

Certainly for a Criminal it makes a lot mores sense to run Hostage and 1 each of your connections simply because of the 2 influence cost of Pro Contacts. Would you run Hostage outside of Criminal to save the card slots though?

SneakySly 2013-12-20 04:15:32 UTC #7

This is increasingly one of the bigger challenges in Netrunner deck building. There are plenty of decent cards we are seeing that could totally be viable in play... except that there is nothing to cut besides other comparably good cards. Cards like Early Bird that have cute but small effects seem particularly tough to fit in for these reasons.