It’s all good. I totally think some people have forgotten how to play against the style of deck, and that was probably part of the success. But hey, what can you do?
As I said earlier, the decks I played against were:
NEH Fastrobiotics
Foundry + Twins fun stuff
NEH Fastro with Grail
RP Grail
Blue Sun Gov’t Takeover (The 2nd Place London deck)
another NEH Fastrobiotics (I only mentioned 6 decks in the other post, but there was a seventh)
Butcher Shop
So besides the two outliers in Butcher Shop and Foundry, they were pretty standard. And their pilots were all more than capable. We have a “creative” meta, I guess. I’d call it a healthy meta. There are lots of people who experiment, but we also have a strong core of “top tier decks” as well.
Hostile Infrastructure/Hokusai Grid/HoK RP is terrifying to play against with this Reina deck. i think I suffered roughly 25 net damage in my game against before time was called, and all I had was a stolen HoK for my trouble. Having to go pay and trash all the HI and all the drip before even TRYING to go Keyhole them was just awful.
playing against these reina decks feels like i’'m playing against PE after honor and profit. think of reina as PE for your credit pool. she takes a credit here and a credit there like house of knives pings cards, your options as the corp get narrower and narrower and you may think you are going stabilize but you were already dead fist of the north star style back on turn 4 when your lotus field got crescentus’d…it just took 10 more turns before you finally keeled over.
i dont think the deck is unbeatable but i think its a reasonable choice that can trade blows with the good corp decks and eats up all the pretenders that have been getting fat off NEH scraps.
The Siphons are tempting in compressing deckslots. Is it worth running one instead of two Lucky Find and/or one of the Vamps? Going all-in on them seems risky if people remember how to play against it.
You can take them all the way down to 0 no matter what.
Clearing 1 tag is easier than clearing 2.
Vamp isn’t an economy card and the deck doesn’t need an additional one. It’s in faction and plays well with the deck’s ability to just dump cash onto Kati.
The economy is fine, because there’s also an incredible amount of denial. Like Noise decklists, it’s very counter intuitive how it all unfolds. A second Vamp might be good, but the economy probably can’t support two of them.
If you keep Kati, casts, and Lucky Find, yes, it probably is fueled just find. My twitch stream has a game from Saturday where I dropped the lucky finds and suffered for it. That deck didn’t have enough econ to get the vamp going. I’d let others with more experience with the deck talk about it, I’m going somewhere else with this deck than focusing on the HQ lock and I’m keeping this one closer to the vest. I just want to say this deck is good, but not the end-all-be-all of Reina decks. There’s plenty of room to make personalized choices like people do with their Andy decks.
I think its solid, but it’s a bit too easy to tech against, imo, by just getting that crisium on HQ. That said, clone chip in Reina + Crescentus is working awesomely. And I think its opening up another deck that can support clot when that drops.
I think we’re all tinkering around the edges at some level. 3 Eater, 3 Crescentus, 3 Lamprey, 3 Vigil, 2 Keyhole/Medium, [some economy], [some Siphon/Vamp], [some fun support cards].
I tried out Sam’s latest iteration (or close to it: 2 Scrubber, 2 Liberated, 3 Daily Casts, 2 Kati, 2 D4v1d, 1 Corroder as I forgot my Knight, 2 Gorman Drips for fun) and it won every game. I don’t know if SIphon would have been better, but Daily Casts, Kati and Liberated provided the raw credits and Gorman Drips were 6+ credits each. I think they might be better than Daily Casts.
I liked having my Corrodor and D4v1d, and I can see why people include real breakers - every so often you really do need to just get in. Half tempted to put QG/Singularity in, but surely that’s too wild to ever work.
I’ve got 2 gorman and 2 deja in my version and it is kicking shit. Being able to deja for econ+lamprey is pretty amazing. Deja offers some additional flex on some of the other cards, namely 1 slot for vamp. I consistently get 5+ off gorman when timed correctly, sometimes more.
I’m also testing some more edge case cards, as I’ve shifted the entry to most of my econ cards down a lot, since running low on credits seems to happen a lot, until you pull off kati. I’d like to get lots more testing in before saying its ‘better’ or as good as others though.
I agree that siphon is flat out wrong here, and is a different build honestly.
Personally I think the solution is to find ways to be good without siphon rather than not playing siphon spam. Click 1 you go broke is great! If you can punish with medium/Keyhole dig on R&D right after and use cards like imp to trash their assets then them going broke was the plan all along! Plus if the corp is broke they can’t astrotrain/advance their gameplan.
If you do, be prepared to get into even more fights as you try to explain that purging the virus counters doesn’t purge the credits off it. No one ever understands that.
