It’s an issue with the game, as camping on a remote is one of the leading causes of Corp stalling. If the Corp can’t win, why should they play worse? Many of those games are only winnable for the Corp after an extended period of time, due to the nature of the game the runner can easily swing the game by stealing an agenda, forcing the Corp to play slower. Once the runner is on 6 points, games can feel like they last an eternity.
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Isn’t this precisely why the corp’s secondary lose condition (running out of cards) exists? The issue is that MoH decks start at 54 and (between Jacksons and MoH) are unlikely to have less than 65-70 potential draws (with an upper ceiling of “infinite,” of course). Stalling is, in that scenario, much more viable for a longer period of time.
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I enjoy playing IG decks, but I very purposely do not play these types of decks online unless it’s with a friend who knows I want to test with it. I’ve got mixed feelings about decks that win more passively than actively. On one end, I don’t feel like it should matter; the runner should be able to win with their deck as quickly as I should be able to win with my deck. But on the other end, I can’t justify taking 50 minutes to play a game, even if I get a bad draw.
I usually end up apologizing left and right for “the game” in general taking a long time.
The Corp is in an interesting position to be blamed for game length. Do you guys complain about your opponent’s Iain deck taking too long? I guess it’s just the structure of the game since the Corp technically “controls” the win condition.
Net damage kill seems to play very differently in a tournament setting to online (in my very limited experience, at least). If you are playing against randoms, they have minimal investment in the game and so are much, much more likely to make a “screw it yolo” run on your quad-advanced overwriter than in a tournament.
This goes doubly so for a MoH kill deck where the games are going to take a long time if the runner is careful - the runner has a much bigger incentive in a low-stakes game to flip the coin and either way get to a “more fun” game.
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Agreed on every point.
There’s an interesting thing with the opposite as well: tournies put people on tilt. Nerves can lead to bad decisions. I’ve won plenty of tournament games purely because people made a blatantly suboptimal choice (usually involving Legworking an HQ they knew nothing about) but it made sense to them in the moment.
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Playing corpside is Wizard time 
Personally, after sleeving up an IG build, I found these to be pretty much the most boring, shuffle intensive decks in the game. Hated every moment of playing it. If people are getting good results with it and can stand it, so be it, but it really isn’t my cup of tea.
It seems to be both the IG and Gagarin trend. Take whatever new thing comes out and see if you can make it work in those ID’s. So it should only last a few more boxes. Hopefully.
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I think what makes people upset about Museum games taking a long time is that MoH drastically changes the game’s dynamic: if you’re a runner who can’t secure the win, you have an advantage running out the clock. It turns the passive late game runner plays into a liability instead of a strength. It’s not just that the Corp is prolonging the game but it’s prolonging it in a way that shifts the burden of closing out the game onto the runner.
IG kill has basically replaced Cambridge for me as my go to tournament kill deck because it forces the runner to play into my strategy more. Museum cuts down on my odds of seeing Mushin+Ronin but gives the deck a lot more lasting power, which can sometimes be a problem with PE nowadays. And like Cambridge, I find most games ending quickly and games I need to grind out not taking overly long.
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Shrug. I played against more PE when I was testing for the SC last weekend on Jinteki than anything else.
And I play a Gagarin Museum deck. (@CJFM’s with tweaks.) I only went to time twice on the day, against Criminal Desperado/Security Testing that forced me to change my normally aggressive playstyle. (Trying to rush out agendas, or spam assets, against that sort of Criminal is equivalent to suicide. So I had to play a slower, more defensive game and wait for my ICE to show up.) I won one, lost one in those matchups, it was the Runner side that ended up going to time with only 20-25 minutes left to play the game.
Might be different environments, but I don’t expect to go to time even once, so twice seems like a lot.
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How often do you play against SecTest/Desperado Criminal? Do you change your playstyle against them?
I hadn’t played against them very often, indeed I pegged the local meta as not really on those kinds of decks (I played the only two in the tournament) so it’s one of the reasons I brought Gagarin, since that style of Criminal is, in my limited experience, very difficult for Gagarin. By no means did I play slowly, but the pace of the game changes because Criminal WANTS you to go fast and to try, and be punished for it, so trying to do that against their superior posture for that sort of game felt like it would just lose you the game. (Both Crims were Leela as well, so NA’ing an Atlas isn’t always a good thing to do like it is against other runners.)
I believe the first game took 40 or 45 minutes, while the second took between 30 and 35 minutes. There was another difference between the two Runners: The first one had Masanori. For the first one, I turtled hard, only installing remotes behind ICE. I finally got all centrals locked down with Museum and DBS behind ICE and a scoring server with ICE too, so that it finally killed his econ engine. I think he won off an R&D single access, but it’s hazy now. The second runner I went more reckless, because I’d managed to Contract Killer his Kati, and Corp Town his SecTest, so I started just playing out naked remotes again, and he couldn’t find a replacement for SecTest before I won.
(Basically I just had a really good draw against the second Crim)
I think you’ve made a strong case for Killer. I’m going to give that a try!
It also lets you see your mushin and ronin combo far more times than the number of those cards you put on your deck allows. Can’t tell you how many times I reshuffled in a hedge fund only to see another one on my next draw.
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Are Ronin-based strategies viable anymore with Councilman and Political Operative out there? I guess we will see how often those Ronin defusers/killers are played.
My IG has Contract Killer, which can work to take care of it to some extent.
That’s a serious concern of mine for IG going forward. A month or two from now it won’t be as big of a deal, but since they’re brand new they’ll be stuffed into a lot of decks right now. I’ll likely shift back over to PE or Biotech and focus on Ronin/Hiro/other rezzables less until things die down.
The problem then is that you can’t get down on Bioethics to as good effect. I think we just have to cope. Maybe run snatch and grab? I don’t tend to be rich compared to my opponent though 
Snatch and Grab is a solid one of in Jinteki murder, but yeah, money is too much of an issue to use it reliably. Most of the IG kill combos I use (aside from ones involving runner blunders) involve every rezzed card working and Pol Op/Councilman mess that up. You could go the Profiteering route and sit on a pile of creds. That was already good.
I haven’t done a ton of testing yet but I’m a little underwhelmed with Bio-Ethics thus far. You really need to rez at least two of them at the same time to maximize their potential (by that I mean setting up a kill combo) and finding multiples can be a pain in 54 cards. I almost feel like they’d fit better in a 1000 cuts deck than IG right now, but that’s likely because I haven’t played with them enough yet.
I think I dig enough to find enough of them, but if you want to find them as needed, you can EBC/Tech startup, but it shows your hand. It does encourage running facedown cards more and more as the game progresses, because you can’t pressure the runner to run anything facedown until you have at least 6 advancements out among the cards (4 and 2 usually). With bioethics, you can usually do it sooner. Also, you can rez 2-3 to try to ping out IHW while you build up to the kill turn… I think its just another good tool in the belt.
Definitely agreed, they’re nice to have and can get a lot of work done if they happen to zap IHW. I love them with Hiro, myself.