Originally published at: Quorum – Stimhack Community Reviews and Meta Predictions - StimHack
Discuss the latest article here.
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Crazy how much miek and terrificy agree on sifr.
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I tend to side with Miek at the end. Aaron is a game changer.
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I think Aaron is a big change to the game, and Sifr has also influenced the meta immediately after release. Stinson and Violet Level may not bring a lot to the corp side, but both cards are certainly playable.
Chiyashi would be more exciting if it weren’t in the same pack as Sifr. Macrophage is a pretty neat card that counters a common threat, as well as providing a strong counter to a virus deck that doesn’t exist.
The pack is pretty cool, and has some notable impacts.
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I like the review format - hope this continues!
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I think this pack contains some of the worst design I’ve seen in Netrunner. I liked a lot about Flashpoint up to now.
Sifr is ridiculous, Aaron is is off-the-charts good to the extent that I think he’s over-the-top as a hate card with applications against a handful of different corp win conditions, and is still very good in matchups where tags aren’t a factor. Peace in Our Time gives a big boost to toxic, non-interactive decks like dyper Kate. Violet level clearance is a huge boost for CI7, which is one of the least interactive decks decks in Netrunner. I’m really not sure what they were thinking on a lot of these and hope they don’t push the meta in the direction I’m picturing.
Our panelists here are clearly top players and know what they’re talking about. I agree with most of their commentary, although I think they may be underestimating tapwrm a little.
There are several cool or interesting cards in this pack that I think are good contributions to the game, but I think the bad cards are really going to overshadow them in the end.
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Yeah, Tapwrm is better than a lot of people thought when the pack first came out. Most of the time it forces a purge, it’s like a reverse-Encore that only requires you to run one central. It’d be understandable to underrate it if the reviews were written on release day, but one of the advantages of doing the reviews a couple weeks after the pack should be seeing how the cards play in real life.
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It is worth noting that this article was actually written about 3 weeks ago before any testing. I think there are some clear things we missed, such as tapwrm being better than we thought, and tracker being good for batty psi games.
Also FWIW I think it was my comment that got put into Terrificy’s, if you’re wondering which of us to attribute that to. He did have his own thing to say so hopefully that can be recovered at some point.
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Also we have fixed the Sifr problem. Thanks for pointing it out guys.
I thought guys were pretty spot-on, it definitely wasn’t intended as a criticism.
Wrt Aaron:
One problem I have with this card is that it shows the sequencing of packs needs work. It has been said that playtesting is done over a full cycle, so cards like Controlling the Message and Hard-Hitting News probably don’t seem so problematic when you already have Citadel Sanctuary, On the Lam, and Aaron Marrón. However because packs come out sporadically and we can’t guarantee a full cycle is complete for tournaments, you get situations like Worlds 2016 where we have 16 NBN tagging decks in the cut and mostly Anarch, the only runners who can deal with that.
This is true, but if Aaron was released at the time of HHN or CtM, then the new NBN stuff just never gets played. Instant garbage tier. It’s good to have the NBN dominance a bit reigned in, but Aaron is just way too efficient for this purpose, imo.
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Yeah, I would much rather have the Worlds meta of NBN dominance than the current meta of no corps being good. Both are a problem, of course.
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yeah but people found out that Power Tap is actually pretty good against CtM too if you also have Citadel Sanctuary. Admittedly that’s the kind of interesting interaction that is maybe missed during playtesting, but you don’t necessarily have to have Aaron first to provide some of the counters that were needed against CtM and HHN.
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Citadel wasn’t out yet at Worlds, that’s why Power Tap Andy wasn’t there.
Ah… sorry if I wasn’t clear but that was my point. The release order of cards was out of whack, so CtM got to exist in a vacuum where Citadel Sanctuary hadn’t been released. You wouldn’t necessarily have to go full on Aaron to make this right, just so long as cards like OTL and Citadel were released first.
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I was surprised that SacCon was not mentioned in the discussion of Tapwrm. This combo makes the effect way stronger.
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also, Damon said he wanted to release many of the cards more when it made sense storywise. that’s why the very first card in the set is System Outage (the representation of the 23s incident) even though it comes in a pack with an ID of the same faction
So… after the several weeks that Quorum has been out, is there consensus on how bad Sifr is for the game? Like, on a scale from basic MWL targets to the great Museum Massacre?
My experience with Sifr has been that, much like Rumor Mill, it actually warps the game more at the deck construction phase than it does in actual gameplay. Yes, it’s extremely good against high strength ice, but the meta has already shifted away from big ice and to low strength/high-sub ice and various Sifr hate like Lotus Field and Architect.
In most of the games I’ve used Sifr I’ve honestly found it a bit underwhelming. The install cost is quite a speed bump and most reasonable opponents built their decks to not get destroyed by it anyways so it ends up being less valuable than I had anticipated.
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Sifr is a 5-cost combo hardware. It does nothing without breakers and/or Parasite. Unlike Temujin Contract, which can wind up carrying any 'ole pile of crap, the rest of your deck has to be pretty on-point to make it work.
I think it’s not as good as Desperado.
It’s still ridiculous as a Grimoire replacement in both Temujin Whizz and Dumblefork, though. Try playing Blue Sun against those decks now … just ain’t happening.
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