It does feel a bit overcosted, but after the political/alliance cards from mumbad, I am 100% behind being conservative with the power level of new game mechanics.
But man, Defense Construct would be a lot more interesting if you could use it during an HQ run to grab a fistful of snares, or at least dilute your hand before a legwork lands.
I have already built a deck with Indexing, “Freedom Through Equality” and Mad Dash.
Step 1 Indexing (hopefully seeing an agenda)
Step 2 "Freedom Through Equality"
Step 3 Mad Dash
Step 3.5 Corp rezzes and uses Jackson
Step 4 Profit!
You put Temu on RnD last turn, right?
Network Exchange would be very good in Leela. Not sure that it’s worth 2 influence though, given that you want to see it early, and it won’t be relevant in a lot of matchups at the moment.
I think just because there’s not that many large sources of net damage, and they’re coming out in the same cycle.
compared to Notoriety and Freedom Through Equality, it’s so much more value in terms of click compression since it’s a 0-cost run event. sure, there’s a downside if you don’t make it in, but there are lots of common ways to make sure it works
tons of really useless expose effects (very likely not worth using them just for this though)
but every faction except Apex (rip) has a way to leverage a run on R&D specifically:
Adam: Find the Truth
Anarch: Medium (more risky, and very anarch)
Criminal: Spy Camera
Shaper: Indexing
Sunny: Globalsec Security Clearance
with Freedom Through Equality, you’d use any of the above tools, then pay 3c and a click to play it, then make your run.
with Mad Dash, your next click is just the run itself.
i think it’s best for Shaper and Adam, two factions that could use the support right now. that’s probably why i’m most excited for it. it doesn’t really help the top tier decks as much as it helps ones not in the meta right now.
@Lttlefoot’s point is valid. it doesn’t really need to exist if you’re just camping remotes, but The Source works well to help secure that the corp tries to score in a remote, which again helps Adam a lot.
overall, i think it’s great against Food, since one Mad Dash/Notoriety/Freedom is often the last point you need
I’m so glad we are getting Network Exchange as a counter for all those OP glacier decks.
I think there’s a interesting use case for Mad Dash over Freedom in that it lets you keep your current up. So you could, say, keep a Interdiction/Rumor Mill going so the corp doesn’t shuffle your peep’d agenda away at the last second before you can get to it it. Then again, with Freedom it lets you use a Run event that might actually get you in the server. (Blackmail, Inside Jeorb, etc.)
It also sticks around if something goes wrong. The downside with Mad Dash isn’t really the meat damage, it’s that the use case is narrow: you should only play it precisely when you know you’re going to score (and can do so without another run event). I don’t even think Freedom is that great of a card, but at least you can drop it before a Medium dig or a Sneakdoor burst – even if you whiff on turn one, you’re likely to have another shot at it.
If you whiff on Freedom you lose 3c though (most corps slot 2/1s and/or 0 cost currents to clear e strike), which is worse than a damage in most games. I think Mad Dash is going in a lot of decks, and there will probably be new deck types built around using both Mad Dash and Freedom to win with 2 agendas.
I am looking forward to put mad dash in my smoke deck. Makes indexing significantly better, and with fte4 any agenda is worth 3 point at a minimum.
I’m not really sure this is true, as the opportunity cost is pretty low. I think there will be many situations where you’re happy to play this card even though the score isn’t guaranteed, simply because the potential upside is much bigger than the potential downside. Throwing this onto a random Medium dig seems fine, for example, or even onto a single HQ access if you’re a decent way into the game and think agendas must be accumulating there. As long as I thought there was, say, a 40%+ chance of an agenda, I think I’d be pretty happy to play it.
I think whats more disappointing to me that the text of these cards is how anemic the flavour is.
Cards that wouldn’t have fit in pretty much any cycle to date:
Oberth Protocol
Archivist
Jemison
maaaaaaybe Pushing the Envelope and Maw if we get a consistent ‘Clans reduce both players hands’ mechanical theming.
And that’s it. For our big introduction to the Mars of Android we’ll have a card called Net Analytics and flavour text quotes from someone from Genesis cycle.
And whats more there’s no less than four cards with a big ol’ empty space for flavour text to flesh out the setting where they just didn’t bother.
I don’t think think that’s the use case for freedom through equality though. The most common use of freedom is indexing->freedom->run. To be able to just indexing and then run has a value in terms of clicks.
Also, I don’t actually know how valuable this is, but you could use both at the same time. Turning a 2 pointer into four points seems good.
It’s a bit of a fine line, though. I’m all for J-Mercs and such, but when you start to get into cards like Breached Dome, it’s like “well, the Runner was just beach partying in SanSan, but now I guess they’re also on Mars this turn”
Gonna be real with y’all – I feel like much of the Mad Dash talk is evaluating the card on best-case-scenario-thinking, which is generally a bad approach to Netrunner cards (see also: Brainstorm is going to change everything!). I think @Kesterer probably has a more realistic outlook, but at that point I start to question the value of the slot it’s occupying. More power to you, though, and good luck with the experimentation – I’d be glad to be proven wrong. =)
If you weren’t slotting Power to the People for Mad Dash style scenarios with say, Medium, you won’t slot Mad Dash.
I love Power to the People! I used it a lot in my apocalypse MaxX decks for a while, it paid out surprisingly often.
That said, I don’t know that I’d slot Mad Dash over FTE. FTE may be more expensive, but it has the added bonus of clearing a troublesome current when I need it to. I could see doing 2x FTE + 1x Mad Dash just to see if I could ever pull of the agenda +2 dream, sometimes cards do surprise me.
I think people might be missing the fact that Defense Construct is an Advanceable Upgrade.
That’s huge.
Its effect is minor for a reason. The trash cost is 0 for a reason.
They had never printed advanceable upgrades before. If any others get printed besides this one, the world will change. IAA will no longer be ‘Overwriter or Agenda?’, and you can get really weird by putting two cards with advancements on them into the same server.