SanSan Cycle Spoilers

Does it? We’ve already got that trope covered in, uh, “Trope.” But I expect that, by the time the distant cyperpunk future rolls around, The Wizard of Oz is going to be less of a childhood nostalgia thing than an old-timey 2-D classic. Still cynically recycled, to be sure, but mainly as an attempt to capitalize on Miranda Rhapsody’s star appeal by plastering her all over it. That (along with the translation) is why I was thinking “Vanity Project.”

But more than anything else, I think the designers are just trolling those of us who are going to insist on making a Salvage deck because of this damn card :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

How does the Criminal Resource work with no credits at trigger? Do you draw anyway, or do you ignore the whole sentence and nothing happens? City Surveillance is the only similar effect and it has a clear if then statement.

How does it work when you have money but no deck left?

You draw if you can. You lose money if you can. That’s all.

Yep. Interesting. So if you have 0 credits you still draw the card.

Hear that? That was the sound of a dozen Nasir players all scrambling around looking for influence.

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Paparazzi + DLR looks like it could be really fun. Stock up on Hyperdrivers and All-nighters (as Hayley?), then dump way too many cards into archives on a megaturn. Or be Anarch and do the same thing with Amped Up.

Oh, and a 6/4 agenda is in 3xSfSS range. That has fun implications for PS/AD combo decks }:->.

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Worlds Plaza could be really good or really bad depending on rez cost. I like Public Support, but what’s the trash cost? Nice Gagarin/Paywall cards.

And I can’t read the text on Surfer but it sounds fun!

These 5 influence assets - wow! I was going to say that Franchise City seemed insanely powerful, but then I noticed (unlike the others, which all have a trash cost of 5) it had a trash cost of 2 - understandably much lower than the others. Still, seems really mean.

Also, do my eyes deceive me? Playable Weyland cards? Public Support seems really, really nice. Finally an in-faction Weyland asset that, no questions asked, forces the Runner to brave a hefty scoring server and trash. Really weird to be getting all of the Gagarin support in one pack. What strength is Tour Guide, btw?

Actually knew of DDoS before, but boy, does that card seem extremely good. Damn, too many good orange cards right now - how ever shall we manage?

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I can’t quite make out what Surfer says, but it looks a bit like a runner Bullfrog?

I like Public Support, but what’s the trash cost?

According to the spoilers from Team Covenant’s Facebook, the trash cost is 4

I can’t quite make out what Surfer says, but it looks a bit like a runner Bullfrog?

Again from Team Covenant:

2 install/1 MU/3 inf

2c: Swap a piece of barrier ice currently being encountered with a piece of ice directly before or after it. The run continues from this new position. You are still encountering that ice.

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I thought an event Copy Cat at first, but runner Bullfrog would be way more fun!

Double Wraparound trying to keep Quetzal out? Just surf through and break it!

Am I reading “The Future is Now” correctly? 3/1 search R&D for a card, add to HQ, don’t have to reveal it? No influence?

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World’s Plaza is 5 trash cost. Weyland super asset server! We might see Singularity get played…

0 influence. Yeah, seems like one of those glorious ‘actually justifiable’ 3/1 agendas.

Tour Guide is strength 0, which I would be sad about if it didn’t have art I’m not that fond of.

Public Support is a whopping 4 trash cost, and World’s Plaza 5. So now you can have The Root, Pad Campaign, Expo Grid and accrue agenda points all from the same server.

Rambly first thoughts inbound.

Cybernetics Court actually looks pretty playable. Helps HB hold onto a bunch of things, which is… honestly pretty useful for many of their builds. Being 0/5 isn’t shabby, either. Certainly makes the Team Sponsorship/Research Grant combo more plausible, along with Grail Ice and other things.

Chronos Protocol remains my most anticipated ID of the cycle. I dunno what all I’ll do with it, I just know it’ll be hideous. Meanwhile, Ancestral Imager and Genetics Pavillion remain tempting, and kinda preposterous.

Franchise City seems… very difficult to time, really. It’s 3/2, so you don’t want to rez it unless they’re about to access an agenda, and if you do you lost any shot at Midseasons, probably. But so long as they don’t Film Critic the agenda, this’ll trigger, and bonus AP might be worth it in this case, especially with all the asset spam stuff. This and Preview with Beales to toss into the mix? Seems decent. Still more excited for the beautiful Upgrade Trap that is Product Placement, especially with the D&D spoilers out.

Worlds Plaza still feels a bit fragile, given how if they spend 5/an Imp token to trash it they don’t have to deal with anything else, making Snare or Junebug or whatever going on top rather pointless as defense. Still, the cost reduction might be enough to make some things worthwhile, and it consolidates fragile pieces into one server to ice up.

Public Support is one such piece! Looks like it has 5 as a trash cost, which isn’t shabby. Takes a few turns to get the payoff, during which it’s pretty trashable, but getting in and trashing it almost certainly will open up a scoring window without them getting the points needed. Useful to have in the Takeover Oz decks, too, for closing out the last point or two every so often. And, of course, there’s the potential hilarity of rezzing two or three of them at once and crushing the runner’s morale. EDIT: Is apparently 4 to trash, but that’s still a PAD Campaign’s vanilla crushing and with a much higher potential payout. Seems decent.

Tour Guide will almost certainly see play so long as it isn’t 0 strength. Maybe even then. If it’s 2 or higher, it’ll actually be pretty good, but I could see running it at just 1. Multi-sub sentries tend to suck for the runner. ETR sentries tend to suck for the runner. Tour Guide is a regular Dustbuster of an ice, and cheap enough that running three of them (say, to protect some of those precious assets) makes sense. EDIT: It’s 0 strength after all. I can still almost see it, for cheap ETR and tax, but 2 is getting a bit much for Parasite-bait. Still, I guess Weyland has so much Parasite Bait now that I’d feel less bad about it, so long as I was running enough subroutines. Sucks against Switchblade, and was always going to suck against Faerie, but laughs all the way to the bank against Mimic and all the other more common killers. Maybe for a sentry-heavy deck that just wants to tax Switchblade out entirely? I dunno.

Expo Grid, though, remains kinda awful. Even if on the Worlds Plaza server, the runner doesn’t have to trash it. 0/3 sounds great, but it’s way too conditional. I’d rather either run a region or ice or something that helps keep an important asset safe, or just run more econ assets.

The Future is Now is a pretty excellent tutor, but a 3/1. It’s one of the better on-score abilities, though, as it’s basically an Agressive Negotiation that doesn’t require more than the scoring, making it the second tutor that doesn’t require a reveal (even Atlas does, though it can also find anything). But, again, 3/1. Ah, well.

Was expecting Surfer to require trashing, that it’s only 2c is kinda insane since you can just chain it all the way up or down the server, as you like. Only hits one ice type, but it’s not an uncommon one. Though pushing further out needs to happen every so often, I guess. Hello, Quetzal. DDoS remains nuts, and Power to the People remains decidedly not worth the slot due to how often it can fail to produce the result, as a priority.

Bookmark is a way to protect important cards for later against Chronos Protocol and get around handsize issues, I guess? Seems a bit underwhelming but it’s free to install, at least, and can be cracked at instant speed for Plascrete-esque protection (s’long as you do it in advance).

DaVinci is… interesting. Power counters, so virus wipes do nothing. Nice combo with all the stuff that benefits you running repeatedly/each turn. It can also install any card, which is what makes it most useful. Want to run a big, expensive console? Now it’s more doable. Want to install at instant speed for Hayley but don’t have enough cash to drop another thing? Here you go! Hey, runner, how do you like the idea of being able to pop a Shard in your hand on the Corp’s turn? Have a blast! Of course, it’s a program itself, and takes up an MU… but still. It doesn’t need to get all that many counters to become worthwhile, and it solves some of the “I drew into the Clot I wanted to SMC and don’t have a Clone Chip yet for some dumb reason” issues. Also, lets you instant-speed The Source.

Wireless Net Pavillion looks useful for DLR decks in particular, or anyone that runs a bunch of resources they’re worried about having trashed. Clever wording makes it useful against Sync, too. But Tag-Me with Resources might not be quite as impossible as it was before. Hell, a couple of those and some Fall Guys and the Corp’s probably not even going to bother trying. Though Freelancer, Character Assassination, Contract Killer, Snatch and Grab (if you’re afraid of being Scorched)… all those still work. Also makes Paparazzi more playable as a form of Scorch Protection, because it’ll actually be hard to trash them even if you’ve got other tags already, and that buys you more time.

So DLR decks are kinda looking like they might be a thing again? Or is that just me? Because the ability to turn it on without having to find a way to be tagged (though if you’re Anarch, why not Joshua B anyway?), the ability to ignore that meat damage threat, the ability to make trashing your shit really obnoxious, and (if you’re also running enough, as you probably should be) the ability to pop out a Shard with no warning… Well, that might be too many pieces to work reliably. But still!

Pre-EDIT: Noted there were details I’d guessed wrongly about that got corrected in-thread, so I added the notes about 'em, but left my original thoughts.

1 Like

To expand on some of the thoughts I had when looking at Tour Guide (and quietly weeping)… at what point do we have enough “dies to parasite” cards to make it stop mattering so much, most of the time? Noise (and Anarch in general) can still recur it more times than anyone deserves (24 max parasites in some Noise decks, or: more parasites than some NEXT decks run Ice), but will they want to use them all, necessarily? And a bunch of that bait is actually pretty frustrating if they don’t go trashing it like that, even the Cutlery is less happy than against higher-value targets. I think Weyland might be the best-positioned to do it, not entirely sure. They’ve got the most “decent, but dies to Parasite, so nevermind” ice, at least, but HB has more recursion.

Tour Guide is the obvious one. It’s an ETR early on, so long as you have at least one asset, and I’m okay paying a bit more for a sentry that does something atypical for sentries. It’s good for protecting those same assets, especially important ones, at least early on. A killer is usually one of the first breakers to hit the table, but whatever, gear check is always going to be a thing.

But then, in Weyland, we have… Ice Wall and Meru Mati. Both can have enough strength to be safe, but much of the time are 1-strength ETR barriers for one or two credits. Not super taxing against Corroder, but make Lady sad, at least. Then there’s Spiderweb – Bastion in terms of Corroder-breaking, makes Lady a bit depressed, doesn’t get hurt like Bastion in that fight with strength changing, but dies to Parasite more easily all the same.

Errand Boy costs quite a bit for its strength, but if you’re overwhelming their Parasites anyway, it might still be useful. Doesn’t stop the run any, but lets you either fill your hand or refill your bank accounts, and I’ve heard people swear that it’s playable, though I found it rather “meh” when last I tried to make use of it. Shadow’s cheaper to rez and to break, but still gives you some money to help make up for it – though the tag trace is minuscule.

Enigma and Quandary have the frustration of also being zeroed by Yog, but lots of decklists still go without Yog, even in Anarch. The threat of Lotus Field is all too prevalent, I guess, even with NRE and the like. They’re both pretty basic gear check, but Enigma’s got a small tax, of a sort, and actually works well against Zu, which is a pretty popular breaker.

Quicksand probably won’t get run against enough times to become huge, but something like that on a frequently-run central can grow to be a real nuisance if the runner doesn’t deal with it early, and it draws a disproportionate amount of parasite-hate because if they don’t blow it up early it could easily survive until it’s too much of a pain to handle.

There are some decent splash options, too, I’d say. For the more taxing side of things, there’s Pup and Pop-Up Window. Rototurret used to be a staple before the high cost and parasitability drove it out, but I think it’s still a pretty decent card, especially if it’s not highly expected. Himitsu-Bako is weird in that it kills parasites without dying, but isn’t really all that worth the influence in the end, probably.

Now, the one problem with all those is that they’re still relatively trivial to break, anyway. Negotiator might be useful but it can be paid through and is broken by mimic along with all the other sentries mentioned. But combining the cheap para-bait ice with a few higher cost, high-impact things seems like it could be a viable plan. Spend more of the influence on higher-strength, better ice to sharply contrast with the cheaper stuff. Grims and Archers, Ichis, Tollbooth, all those kinds of things. Maybe that’ll be enough to be worth it? I dunno.

HB is the other faction I could see pursuing this kind of a plan. The NEXT ice all draw Parasites like mad, and they have a number of ways to recur stuff if push comes to shove. They also have a lot of destroyers, which are pretty useful. NEXT Gold + Batty is already pretty nifty, after all. Dunno if Tour Guide or Spiderweb (the two particular Weyland-influence standouts) are worth the splashing, but HB’s well suited to making use of them. Tour Guide, especially, as HB has more than enough assets to run and wish to protect. Also, NEXT and EtF both have different ways of benefitting from the spammy ice plans more directly than pretty much any Weyland ID except for maybe Gagarin (what with Tour Guide). Blue Sun is probably better, but then you probably shouldn’t be worrying so much about draining all their parasites.

2 Likes

/tg/ was talking about hosting Executives on the Worlds Plaza. All their costs is in line with the discount, and if they trash the World Plaza instead of paying for the Exec first they go directly and safely to the archives do not pass go.

It’s a troll deck for sure but just imagine how easily Weyland can tutor assets and how quickly Blue Sun can set up a big remote with Director Haas + Victoria Jenkins. Oh the glorious jank. 4 click Corp, 3 Click Runner.

:grinning: 2x Enhanced Login Protocol, 3x Jackson, Titan Transnational :grinning:

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