Rating the Top Tier Corps

Given that katman is running femme and/or parasite AND has program recursion for the worst-case situation… No.

First time posting here, I recently top 8’ed worlds, losing out to Anthony (my kingdom for a breaker…), and my roommate went on to win.
Right now, I feel that the strongest archetype for competitive play is fast advance due to how tournament scoring works. With tie breaks coming down to scored agendas, the ability to fast advance out points can be more important than winning the game.
There is too much ability to play around tag n bag in the current metagame so the Weyland scorched earth plan revolves around your opponent making play mistakes which you can’t rely on at a higher level. With the popularity of 4/2 5/3 agendas in Weyland, they are too slow to be able to reliably apply pressure on the runner to force the play mistakes, so a skilled runner can simply take their time and win. When I saw my roommate get paired against Weyland in top 4, I simply walked away to watch the other match knowing it amounted to a bye for him.
I can tell you without a doubt there was not a single Jinteki deck in the top 16. The board states and mindgames they can set up can be powerful, but they are not reliable which is key in succeeding.
With the current card pool, NBN and HB are the better fast advance decks, placing them ahead of the rest of the corps for high level play. With the way the match scoring currently works, so long as there is an imbalance favoring the runner the fast advance game plans will be favored for post-Swiss tournament play (aka, top 16).

I have similar thoughts to @hollis – Weyland is better against a large field that includes a bunch of random folks, simply because it is better at punishing mistakes. NBN and HBFA are currently better against runners that make few to no mistakes, simply because their gameplan is “get good cards, score agendas, repeat”. Even with these decks though we are still hoping to catch a variance break :). NBN feels a little looser and flapping in the wind against criminals, whereas HBFA is weak against well-piloted Anarch/Shaper builds.

Jinteki is, as ever, Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Film. I prepared for Jinteki/Katman for worlds, but faced no Katman and only one completely hapless Jinteki deck.

That said since worlds I have begun testing a series of what I call “come at me, bro” decks designed around attempting to aggressively punish runners who take their most powerful action–running. We’ll see how they work.

@RepentHarlequin – congratulations on your finish! I completely agree that one wanted an FA-style deck in the elim rounds. I think the general level of play at worlds was high enough that Weyland wasn’t appreciably better than either in the Swiss.

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lol “come at me bro”

sounds amazing already

I’ve recently noticed that Successful Demonstration is very effective at responding to early runs. Ironically, the only problem I’ve found is that it doesn’t do much of anything against bad players!