Whenever you use a thrash ability, draw a card.
I think he’ll be fun, but I don’t see him being amazing. He’s the most shaper of criminals, but he’s still criminal, and will likely need to try for early pressure all the same. I suppose we’ll see – and maybe the unspoiled Criminal “when the corp scores an agenda” virtual resource in the Underway will be of use to him, I dunno.
Chrome City looks to be shipping, by the way. Soon I get to see if Little Engine is actually as good as I suspect it might be, or if it’s as bad as many others seem to think.
So, in comparing Little Engine to Tollbooth, as they seem like they might occupy a similar slot in NBN, Little Engine is:
- 3 cheaper to rez
- 2 more strength, so harder to Parasite
- Femme costs 3 instead of 1, and they don’t get the money back
- Similarly, if they Spoon it, they don’t get the money
The downside of course being that once you CAN repeatedly break an (effectively) 2 sub, 7 strength code gate, it ceases to be much of a tax, and in some cases may actually net the runner money. I think its best home may be in a rush deck…maybe HB? Where you can leverage the fact that it is a 5 rez 7 strength ICE with 2 ETR subroutines to an early AP lead and then once they can break it switch to a more FA strategy. This is all spot balling of course, but I think it is definitely worth testing at least.
The thing that kills this ICE is that it’s free to break if you’ve got Cyber Cypher.
Incidentally, it’s a good ICE to use to protect the Blacklist if both CyCy are already on board.
4 Likes
He shines in a flatline heavy meta, which may never exist again. Every other crim, save silhouette and Iain, has much better general game than him.
Cyber-Cypher is probably the most common effective way to break it, doing so for 5 credits and breaking even overall. (Knight can technically do it for 4 or even 3 with E3, but even with Qimpossible it’s not super common these days.) Refractor takes 2 real credits and 2 stealth, so you might make a profit there.
Yog takes 4 datasuckers or equivalent but gains the runner 5. Not ideal but harder to repeat.
Gordian and Zu take 7 and 8 respectively, taxing for a total of 2 and 3. Passport and Eater fall in there, too. Rex takes 6 and a counter, for 1 credit overall once you break it.
So it’s not the most taxing ice, no. But those are all reasonably large up-front costs. I think that as the base of a scoring sever Little Engine could do a fair bit. If they Cy-Cy it, ditch the server. If they don’t, they need to have resources up front, especially with most any kind of reasonable ice in front of it.
NBN needs more ways to rush effectively. Wraparound is solid but it’s pretty easy for a runner to grab and use a Corroder in the same turn to stop a score from behind it alone. To SMC out a Cyber-Cypher and break in is 9 credits – not impossible, but hefty enough on a remote to be notable.
Tollbooth is largely better on the tax front due to the on-encounter ability, but LE is harder to Femme and substantially cheaper. Rezzing a tollbooth in the first couple of turns is pretty difficult if you haven’t had a great deal of fortune in terms of econ draws. Rezzing LE seems like it’ll be much easier to manage, letting you rush an agenda pretty easily. It’s not really great at protecting assets (except, as Calimsha notes, a Blacklist if they have both Cy-Cys out), and I wouldn’t put a SanSan behind it, but for rushing non-NAPD agendas? Yeah, seems useful.
I also like the idea of popping a Quicksand in front to make the server slowly more taxing over time, but that’d require too many runs for what LE is best at – protecting a remote fairly cheaply. A Data Raven or something might be good, though, I dunno.
Point is: it’s terrible tax, but a lot of NBN’s ice is pretty bad at taxing in many circumstances. It’s great cash-check for a faction that already has a lot of ways to tax outside of ice and needs a way to make their money-draining more relevant.
[quote=“hhooo, post:1740, topic:2197”]
He shines in a flatline heavy meta, which may never exist again
[/quote]I hope it does. I really like flatline decks.
Say that to the guys in UK.
2 Likes
please, please, please tell me this is not a real card that’s going to be printed
EDIT: Missed the “in a server part” nvm
It does raise another question, though: what are the targets for this? What do we have in servers would remain unrezzed and unadvanced even after the Analog Dreamers run is initiated? A copy of The Root or Eve that the corp can’t afford to rez yet? Hmm…
The “unrezzed” part about this kills it, imo.
I don’t think there was ever more than 1 flatline deck in a UK top 8 - 2 Butcher Shop (London, Sheffield) a Punitive Glacier (Oxford), and 2 Blue Suns (Manchester, Edinburgh).
1 Like
Titan in Edinburgh, 3rd, was murdery. But yeah in general not all that much about at top tables.
Well, flatline are still popular even if it didn’t make the cut. And forcing people to play 1-2 plas in every deck is still huge, imho.
2 Likes
And apparently, the Criminal cybernetics is better than the previous version.
[Not sure it is great, but now it works for ANY damage, not just meat damage]
And I really wonder how this works against the upcoming Chronos Protocol.
1 Like
I dunno, I don’t pack Plascrete and not many people do (except the odd Crim). Kill decks aren’t much more popular in England than elsewhere I don’t think. I can’t remember the last time I personally saw one on the top tables, and because of that, you don’t need to play a Plascrete, just play better than them.
2 Likes
You’re not forced, people are just scared
I agree with you and I really don’t like to slot a plas but then, we aren’t the field as well.
If there’s a good proportion of the playing field who either play kill deck or are afraid of kill decks, it skewer the amount of plas in a certain direction and I feel (but I’m probably wrong) that it happens more in the UK than in the US, or even in EU.
The 6 Agenda Blue Sun kill deck is one that i’ve seen quite a lot here, but not very much anywhere else.
This is why Iain wins.
(one of the many reasons)