SanSan Cycle Spoilers

What I really want to use the Critic for is Iain Sterling - score without turning off your ID ability! Having a Critic out should let you always keep your score tightly behind the corp, with an actual agenda buffered for later if necessary. You can even Hostage for the poor bastard, so you don’t have to run as many copies.

Now all that remains is fitting in click multiplication, so that you can score your points when it’s time to stop fucking around and actually win.

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yeah this is an excuse to play Iain like he’s someone who isn’t awful, meaning faster and more aggressive
his plan no longer needs to be about drip econ and late game, get movin

Ian “I’m getting 2 credits per turn and am still woefully behind” Sterling. Just switch whatever Sterling build you have to Andy and it’ll be better. 2 credits, even per turn, ain’t what it used to be these days.

Fan Site/Data Dealer/Turn Table does make me a bit excited though. I may even try it in Sterling. And the B&E suite suits him somewhat too.

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I think Film Critic will be more impactful than Clot was, though. It doesn’t just target one archetype.

It hurts NAPD pretty heavily as a taxation/protection method; it ignores Future Perfect; it is unaffected by Fetal AI or any other agenda with an on-access trigger; it bypasses Haarpsichord, PE, and Argus; it avoids Midseasons, Casting Call, and Punitive; and it works well with any character that suffered the prominence of the above – so Iain and Nasir players will be particularly pleased to find slots for it.

RP dislikes losing so many kinds of protection that it currently depends upon to keep centrals somewhat safe from random accesses. Sure, you can make R&D more taxing or pop Caprice/Batty there… but that just makes your remotes weaker. The NEH fallback plan of Butchershop becomes much more heavily neutered as Midseasons won’t trigger and NAPD ceases to have an immediate monetary cost anyhow. Non-punitive Weyland decks will be mostly unharmed, and HB won’t lose much beyond NAPD, but it’s not as though Critic is necessarily useless in either scenario and the opportunity cost is pretty low.

It also has a lot more staying power than Clot. While many decks now run tools that can be used to kill Critic, it’s a much more resilient card for many reasons. It requires a particular scenario (most commonly: a tagged runner, a Snatch & Grab, or a Contract Killer) to eliminate rather than a full turn. If you kill a Critic hosting an agenda, it goes right into archives, where you need to collect it or allow it to be scored again, albeit at more cost. Also, there’s no penalty for having multiple copies in play (whereas Clot just means there’s more to wipe), 2 Critics let you dig more deeply more easily.

Funny weakness, as noted earlier, is that the Critic won’t remove a current. The other big one is the number of clicks taken – equivalent to clicking an Opus twice before running when using Critic to get an NAPD, but with the advantage of it being on your time, not the Corp’s.

[quote=“kenobob, post:2528, topic:2197”]
Turn Table
[/quote]…doesn’t trigger from Fan Site or Film Critic.

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Taking someone’s High-Risk Investment portfolio and trading it with a link to a fan site of kawaii Miranda Rhapsody is of utmost hilarity. Doesn’t work, reading is hard.

@GreedyGuts I mean, you’ll still have a runner deck that will be accessing cards. First corp score brings out the Fan Site, it sits until you score again. Trading 0 point runner-made agendas is a massive unprecedented swing. Assuming the Runner deck is good-stuff enough to get a couple medium digs or maker’s eyes off, you can easily and reliably “siphon” 2 or 4 points each game.

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Fan Site doesn’t trigger Turn Table, but once a Fan Site is moved to the score area, you can use it to swap with Turn Table. Seems Legit.

Doesn’t work. Turntable triggers when you steal an agenda, and only with the agenda you steal. Fan Sites are never stolen.

However, Frame Jobing the corp using your fan site? That’s where the real juice is.

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Ah you are correct! Man, I’ve fucked in two different threads today.

I need to get my ass back in school.

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You really can’t switch whatever build to a great first turn vs a big credit advantage for a chunk of the game
Card that makes Iain get his kicks when he’s ahead and/or tied, and this is no longer a “just play Andy” scenario

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Yeah, the only uses for Fan Site at the moment are Data Dealer and Frame Job. Or, I guess, weirdness with Philotic or The Board.

And I must say, Fan Site + Frame Job sounds like a lot of fun, though I’d doubt the deck being super-competitive. Who wants 5+ BP against HB or NBN? I do!

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Nope. Turntable allow the Runner to swap the agenda he just stole with any agenda in the corp’s score area.
It does not allow the runner to swap any agenda in his score area.

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Phrasing!

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If the “few archetypes” it impacts are the two most popular and it absolutely crushes them, it’s extremely playable. A lot of players are splashing Vamp in Shaper to counter Psi games and massive traces from Butcher Shop - they can now run Film Critic instead and free up two influence for something else.

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Film Critic doesn’t counter the Caprice Psi Game which is why you play Vamp. It crushes RP because it means that, as long as you have more credits than them and they have no Crisium Grid/Caprice on HQ, you can score any Nisei they put down. It does wonders against Butcher Shop, though.

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It does counter Fetal AI and TFP, however.

It doesn’t counter the Caprice on the remote, but the runner now doesn’t need to run the remote as they can now liberally assault R&D to (effectively) steal TFPs without their Psi game firing and NAPDs without paying the tax. Film Critic allows Shaper to go back to their old trick of just locking R&D. The Corp is then on a clock to push some pretty expensive agendas through their remote before the lock kicks in. That’s easier said than done - they generally need to spend at least 13 clicks and credits to do that (taking at least 6 turns), before factoring in ICE, economy and setting up Caprice/Ash to secure the server. That is quite a tall order.

Also worth adding: Caprice on R&D can slow down the R&D lock, but then she can’t also be on the remote…

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That’s why everyone should just do brain damage bioroids and defective brainchips in HB

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But this is exactly my point. 6 months ago, NEH was dominating the corp space. Clot was printed, which “absolutely crushed” the NEH archetypes that were popular, and the meta shifted. You still see NEH Astrobiotics decks winning tournaments, but they don’t dominate the top table.

Now RP is the flavor of month. A card is coming that pulls some of its teeth; oh noes, a good card! I predict that in 6 months you’ll still see some RP decks winning tournaments, but the top tables won’t be dominated by them.

If silver bullet tech were as ubiquitous as you think, every single tournament runner deck would #slottheclot. That didn’t happen, and neither will they all slot Film Critic. Enough people will use them to make RP a non-automatic choice, and its existence will push the meta to something new.

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Eh, I feel like Film Critic hurts RP more than Clot hurts Fastrobiotics. There’s not too many ways to play around it as it’s effect is more nuanced than Clot’s and it can’t be gotten rid of by purging. I agree though, RP will still be a thing, but taken down a few notches. I think that’s good for the meta tbh. Nothing should be locked out but it does get stale having the same deck dominate for so long.

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Yea Film Critic does pretty well against RP. But man, fuck TFP. I’m glad.

RP can run Snatch and Grab or even a Contract Killer with all of the saved influence on Batty/Ash.

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