I just never have had any problems vs caprice. But if she were a problem for me I would play this card.
Real counter to caprice is pressure on all 3 centrals and remote plus economical pressure. It is pretty expensive for corp to play caprice as well. And even if he managed to protect this single server well, your deck should be able to win getting agendas from other places.
Drive By is maybe the best this far. Not a counter but forces a rez of Caprice/Ash and you can shoot it easier with S&W. Although I don’t think unregistered S&W will be ever playable. It’s horrible against RP where Caprice matters the most
If Clot and Traffic Jam are your Great Hope against NBN, I think you’re going to be sorely disappointed. We’ve already had anti-FA cards printed - Chakana and The Source were allegedly going to put a stop to the Astrotrain, and, well… When’s the last time you saw someone playing The Source?
It’s true that NBN players are going to have to deal with it, probably by making deck adjustments. I’ll be honest though… due to the fact that NEH has good click-less card draw and economy, the decks I’ve played against occasionally have a turn to spare to clear virus counters, and a Corp Current will invalidate the Runner Current. If worse comes to worst, they’ll just throw in Cyberdex Trial and Targeted Marketing (naming Clot or Traffic Jam for extra hilarity) and call it a day.
There are those who say, “Good, then I’ve manipulated the Corp’s deck design process. Mission accomplished.” Well, they manipulated yours first. They made you, the Runner, use up valuable card slots on cards that are, for all intents and purposes, anti-NEH Silver Bullets that are practically useless against any other Corporation.
Didn’t the community have a debate recently about the relative merits of Plascrete Carapace? I seem to remember people expressing the opinion that they didn’t like including such a highly-situational card in their decks that was a relatively-useless dead draw in most matches. (Mind you, this was before Blue Sun!). Sure, Noise might get a little more usage out of Clot, but not much. That’s what these two cards are going to end up being: okay against NEH, and virtually useless against all other Corps.
I’m not denying that they’ll have something of an effect on Corp play. I just think it’s going to be, at best, a minor nuisance to NBN, and at worst, a non-issue to all other Corps.
Except Caprice was going to be rezzed at the beginning of the next run on her server anyway so why not just Rez her during the Corp turn if you suspect they have a Drive-by? Or just leave her facedown as bait or a distraction from another important Asset? Technically the Corp actually manipulated you into spending half your turn or more confirming it was Caprice without you actually making a run, which is making the Runner waste valuable time. Clicks are the REAL currency of this game.
Yes, ofc, you’re right. Silly of me 
Thanks for clearing it up!
That’s a bit of a false equivalence at least for Clot. The strongest aspect of Clot is not trying to keep it in play, but to action-install (SMC or Clone Chip) it on the corp’s turn as they’re attempting to score that first Astroscript. None of the anti-FA cards so far let you disrupt a FA in progress. This is not a problem that Cyberdex or Targeted Marketing can easily solve. NEH will have to play smarter.
Though I agree with you that these cards will be fairly useful only in the FA match-up and that might limit or discourage their inclusion. On the other hand there are other ways to extract utility from such cards. Clot is still a virus for Noise, like you mentioned, and can still be pawned or scavenged. Traffic Jam can be used to wipe an RP’s ELP from the board. On the whole I don’t mind having narrow meta cards in my decks but that’s personal feelings.
I think that calling Clot a ‘Silver Bullet vs NBN’ is a bit of a stretch. Hostile Takeover? Trick of Light? Straight up Biotic->IAAA? The inconvenience cost of a $1, 1 inf, 1 MU Virus install (so tutorable! So recurrable!) seems negligible relative to aggravating the hell out of the Corp as long as you have SMC/Clone Chip etc. anywhere handy and they don’t load up on Cyberdex Trial. Which is a REAL silver bullet. Even my beloved (slightly self-indulgent) Clone Retirement in PE is messed with.
Even if it doesn’t always hit, a $1 card that says “If Corp has no clicks left, steal an agenda.” would obviously be unbelievable. This is like that except it’s more exciting because it fails sometimes if you misread the opponent, which to me at least is by far the best part of this game. And if we REALLY hated variance, we’d be playing Agricola.
This kind of card prompts fun bluff-y interactions, makes Mushin better (it’s gonna sit out a turn anyway!) and prompts running and interaction over “Mandatory Draw, Biotic Labour, Triple Advance and Score.” And as always with Virus powers, if the corp wants to relieve me of it for a while by giving me two turns in a row, I’m down. (Except with Darwin. You’ll be good one day, boy. .)
The main problem with Chakana was click/time investment, with The Source a taxing downside and difficulty of recursion. Clot seems to suffer neither.
Traffic Jam…well, I remain unsure of currents at best, even the swankier ones like Manhunt or Enhanced Login Protocols.
No-one’s saying these cards are Great Hopes that will cast NBN-FA into a pit of despair for 1000 years, they just might be enough of a hassle that more people go “Y’know what? Let’s pull out those tagstorm cards and see if there aren’t two ways to win outta this big yellow chassis. Or hey, we could try…<etc.>” Which would be great and interesting and new.
I mean, if we’re not optimistic that weird card interactions are going to end up with a more varied set of ‘Top Tier’ strategies, why buy new cards at all if we’re just winnowing them for how well they feed NEH-Astro/RP-Glacier/Prepaid Kate etc.?
No one else is actually waiting for Biotech: Life Imagined? As a Jinteki player myself, I saw that spoiler and was like, wow, matiybe that’s the next big thing after RP. In fact, I think building it with the Greenhouse like an RP build could be quite great. You can play that as a Never Advance deck, since you can score nissei in one turn. After you score your first nissei, it’s all downhill battle for you. Anybody thinks maybe that could be a potential deck for competitive glacier?
My problem with Biotech is that they’re one-time abilities that take 3 clicks to trigger. That seems really weak compared to all other IDs, who have automatic and persistent abilities.
Levying struck me as the best of the three, but there’s definitely a sort of pressure involved when you don’t know if staying at 1 card will straight up kill you. The scoring version, ironically, seemed the weakest (or rather, least unique) one of them.
maybe there will be an exec that allows you to reset the ID. there’s a lot of design space with this mechanic so i wouldn’t put it past FFG making cards that lets both the runner and corp interact in this space.
This id is a bit like the schrodinger’s cat. Until you reveal your ability, the runner must takes all into account.
Thus activating your ability need to win you the game (scoring a single Nisei or medical breakthrough will not). I think it’s something difficult to achieve with a blank id in Jinteki.
Problem here is, only one who actually wants to mill you to oblivion is Noise. All other mills tend to be just about stealing the agendas all at once, instead of one at a time in order to play around various things. So, in order to capitalize on the ability, you’d have to play stuff from that category - like Midseasons, Snare/Shock heavy RnD, Fetals and whatnot. Not saying it’s impossible, just tricky to do with the current cardpool (if you want it to be relevant, compared to other Jinteki IDs).
(against Noise, you’ll naturally never pick the reset ability, just let him assume you did - mindgames!)
This is exactly why i think this ability will never really be played. It doesn’t win you the game, it just help you to not lose in rare circumstances (assuming you will play Jackson Howard anyway).
I don’t think Biotech is T1 material (until future cards allow it to use his ability more than once) for the reason I have mentioned : it’s basically a blank id most of the time. All successful Jinteki ids rely on their ability to win.
Honestly, I think any half-competent runner is going to be taking two of those three of those things into account against Jinteki anyway. And the third is barely relevant, even against Noise.
I see hints of potential there and the concept is a fun one, but I think the cost of using the ability and the opportunity cost of not having one of the much stronger Jinteki IDs is very very high.
Agreed. It’s hard to see how the versatility is an improvement on function and focus provided by other ID’s.
With this I.D. and also I.G., I strongly believe that Jinteki will soon have access to some worthwile cards that throw stuff into archives. It won’t stay irrelevant.
34 runs in a row against caprice. Failed the psi game 34 times. One game.
I hate that card.
Don’t hate the game, hate the player.
Time to slot in S&W
10 bucks says she was on HQ 
sneakdoor then^^