With the meta shifting and strategies like eater/keyhole, crescentus/lamprey and vamp/account siphon economic denial becoming quite prominent (and consequently placing, it seems to me, a lot of extra pressure on this ID), I’m wondering how effective PE currently is and what changes (if any) people are considering for this ID’s archetypes.
‘IHD’ has put a lot of pressure on the white tree by limiting the flatline options you thought you had. You can’t just pop a Ronin and Neural anymore and take your win. It can clean out the hand, but often times you’ll need to rinse and repeat, which seems to have hurt PE’s tempo quite badly. It has also given runners much more confidence in how they access remotes.
Never mind Miss ‘It’s not so hard’ Patel, who’s ability really hurts your Mushin’d servers.
There are some reasonable tools for dealing with the meta at the moment. Chronos is very handy against MaxX and Shapers. Swordsman seems a handy include for Eater and AI based strategies, and I think that breaker became the tipping point for including a 1-of (or maybe 2-of) of this ice. Housekeeping is potentially a great current event to add pressure on the runners hand .
I’m not sure these slight changes are enough though, and perhaps something a little more drastic is required to keep up. What adjustments are you chaps making at the moment? Is ‘Cambridge’ style Jinteki still a viable choice in the current landscape or are the higher ice density taxing builds more effective now?
I have done a little testing with a fairly standard (no biotics) PE list against Eater-Keyhole + IHW and it is very tough. Your Ice is very weak to parasite and eater-keyhole protects the runner from ‘when accessed’ damage effects. Playing aggressively is a good way to score points and pressure the runner into checking your remotes.
Another option I’ve considered is Shock, which means the runner can’t score all their points in one hit unless they have some serious protection. Shi-Kyu is another card you can trash from hand to hamper the runner’s Archives strategy.
Smart use of Jackson helps in the matchup if you are worried about the runner using Hades Shard. Install your jackson and use his ability straight away. If the runner installs Hades Shard and uses it immediately, the corp doesn’t actually have an opportunity to use Jackson before the runner accesses.
The reason most PE lists don’t already play taxing ICE is that you can’t pay for it. Traps cost money to activate (especially Snare…), ICE costs money to rez and agendas cost money (to advance). You can generally only pay for 2 of those things. Unfortunately, affordable and taxing ice is usually very low on strength and vulnerable to eater+cutlery or just parasite.
My advice would be to get as much dangerous stuff in archives as you can ASAP and try to score agendas very aggressively with cheap ETR ice like paper wall and quandry. Eater+Keyhole takes a while to set up and PE needs to be aggressive to win.
2xShock and 2xShi Kyu seems logical to me as well. It dilutes your installable traps though and archives ice feels hard to come by at the moment. The shocks will also help slightly with RnD lock tactics which I feel are actually really strong against Cambridge.
Balls to the wall aggressive is the best way to play this game IMO. (Well probably not, but I have the most fun playing that way)
Shi-Kyu isn’t as good as Shock! because you need to pay credits for it to do anything at all. TBCH I haven’t tested Shi-Kyu in any of my decks, so I’m not sure how good it is in PE generally or against the Eater-Keyhole thing.
An idea might actually be to play a Biotic Labor or two and a few Trick of Lights. Squeezing in some more econ (Medical Research Fundraiser is amazing) helps this strategy. Being able to force out your last one or two points with a Biotic, or putting 5 advancement tokens on that unadvanced Fetal that has been sitting there for a few turns with a Biotic and a Trick is a great feeling. The only problem with playing those cards is that they are extremely vulnerable to Keyhole. If you get them early and hold on to them they are great though!
For what it’s worth Minh brought a PE killteki deck at the Outpost Ghent store championship and got absolutely crushed. And we’re talking about arguably one of the best jinteki shell game player in the world.
Yep I haven’t won a game since my play group got MaxX and Valencia obsessed. Ronin’s bouncing off IHD’s left and right. Then they get de-ja-vu’d. Suspicions slowly being confirmed.
I sort of joke about PE glacier but I think it needs to be the new way to play PE. Shell game just isnt going to work. I think some key cards in a glacier-ish PE deck would be Celeb Gifts (you need the money), Shock (wear them down and also more mean things to show with your gifts), Hokusai Grid, and Hostile Infrastructure. One taxing scoring remote and reasonably well defended centrals. I’m going to brew it after I’m done stressing about last shot at a store champs
I don’t know what a deck like this would look like, but I think you’re right that serious PE players are going to need to move away from the very-low-ICE archetypes, at least a little. The shell game becomes much harder for the runner to play if the cards you’re installing are always behind an ICE or two…
re: IH W , obviously it’s a very strong card, but I don’t know if it’s such a death knell to Net Damage attrition - unlike FF, it doesn’t actually reduce the number of cards going into the trash. also, compared to its effect on scorch, PE is far more likely to ferret out the IHW with a random ping and leave the runner open to flatline. In the above example of Ronin+NEMP, using your NEMP first gives you a 2/3 chance of still flatlining regardless of the IHW in hand. TLDR: LARLA and FF both hurt this archetype a lot more - even before OnC the deck had essentially become a coin-flip that you weren’t facing anyone who had prepared to play PE.
If you deal 2 net to a runner, and he has 1 IHW in hand, does it kill him anyway? Misunderstanding maybe on my part leading to lots of angst in my games.
I just won a store tournament event with a standard Cambridge PE deck against a siphon and leela heavy field, sweeping all my matches. My star player was a single scorched earth. I won by keeping my credit pool low, not threatening tag punishment, and then waiting for their hand size to drop to three. Runners get careless when you’re unable to activate your traps. It also helps to play the complete mind game. I sigh, look hopeless, feign hatred at my deck for being useless against them. Say stuff like “sure, whatever, what a surprise” when they foil my traps, siphon, or steal agendas.
This is what I started testing recently too, I wanted to get away from Ronin because (IMO) it’s a card that you lose value on when the Runner runs it. I wanted to slot ToL to help score some of the tougher agendas (Fetal and TFP), so I went with triple Junebug. you get value whether the Runner runs it or not. Checkpoint not great versus Kit, but otherwise it’s generally very solid for shoring up HQ and a bluffing/scoring remote. I tend to stack Eli/Markus on RND. Shell Corp on Psy Field or a Mushin trap can go a long way.
