StimHack Draft Cube: Current Lists (Updated for Earth's Scion)

Thanks! Seeing the crypsis in the runner list I assume you play your cube with a custom set of starting cards including something like 1 Force of Nature, 1 Aurora, 1 Pipeline? I think it would be interesting to also write down your full list of starting cards for each side as this directly impacts the cube list itself.
Could you talk a little about the thinking that went into building your list? Are there any particular balancing issues that you tried to address?

SneakySly · April 17, 2014, 4:40pm

Yup!

Corp Starting Cards:

Priority Requisition x5
Private Contracts x2

Runner Starting Cards:

Armitage Codebusting x2
Force of Nature x1
Aurora x1
Pipeline x1

I will write something on cube balancing in a more in-depth article soon. This is for the people who were really eager to know what the cube is in the mean time.

SneakySly · May 14, 2014, 2:46pm

Updated Cube for Honor and Profit.

http://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/5563/stimhack-draft-cube-corp-honor-and-profit-edition-v-1-1

http://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/4706/stimhack-draft-cube-runner-honor-and-profit-edition

I will get to that cube article… eventually…

EDIT: UPDATED THE CORP LIST @Alsciende was super awesome and removed the agenda point restrictions for draft IDs.

Remorhaz · May 14, 2014, 7:26pm

me and cspieker drafted with your honor and profit list last week using the grid draft.

pretty fun. the decks seem to fal in a space between constructed and FFGs draft.

or games were over real quick thanks to pri reqs ,maybe change the starting agenda comp to 3 pri reqs and 3 PSF so playing all two pointers would be a more viable strat?

SneakySly · May 14, 2014, 7:30pm

I have actually been thinking hard about this or something similar. @Alexfrog has his own heavily modified 2 player only cube, and he made all of his starting agendas Sentinel Defense Programs. I think a mix between PSF and Priority sounds like a good way to approach it. Next time you guys try the cube, test with 3 of each and let me know how it goes.

cspieker · May 14, 2014, 10:16pm

Sly thanks a bunch for putting this cube together and posting it. It was fun to play.

Here’s my quick take on this cube versus the FFG set. Sly’s cube is all reasonably good cards but because there are mostly only 2 or fewer of each card, you are very rarely going to get a card that you’ll feel confident of seeing in a game. On the other hand, with the FFG set there seemed to be more stinker cards, but I got the feeling that the FFG draft set (the one time I played it) oversampled certain strategies (e.g. tag + punishment, ambushes) to make alternate win-condition approaches more viable.

Take Sly’s corp cube with respect to tag 'n bag. There are only 20/240 cards that give tags (two of which are Ichi 1.0), and only 12/240 that punish tags. That makes it pretty unlikely that someone can get enough critical mass to go down the tag road. Both games I played, we drafted Corp first and saw zero tag related cards (maybe a hunter?) which of course on the runner end made all tag protection cards auto-trashes. It seems to me that the only viable strategy to take in this cube is no-frills: get ICE, money and agendas. Single-card tricks might help, but two-card combos are out of the question. Motivation > Oracle May is not going to happen in this cube as there are only two of each, out of 240 cards.

The FFG set seemed like it tried to support more combos. In the draft I played, I ended up with like 7 access to globalsecs (likely the last card taken in many packs :D, I didn’t put any in my deck) and played against one person that actually got an underworld contact drip going.

Do you think it might be a good idea to choose an archetype or three and oversample the support cards for those archetypes in a new cube?

Alexfrog · May 14, 2014, 11:51pm

My thinking was that in a draft format where you are playing to 6 points, that 3 pointers are just way too swingy. Therefore I removed ALL 5.3s form the cube entirely. And replaced all the Priorities that you are given with Sentinel Defense Programs because its the weakest 4/2 agenda that still actually does something. (And I would love to see one actually get scored and matter!).

SneakySly · May 16, 2014, 5:03pm

Glad you like it! I appreciate the feedback. The Cube is something I want to keep improving and refining over time.

This is actually a point we have been talking about internally. @mediohxcore at least was heavily in favor of having some more tangible archetypes that you can draft around. I think having some archetypes in the cube is a positive idea overall, the tricky part is the implementation.

I guess a starting point is what archetypes do we want to support?

mediohxcore · May 16, 2014, 6:11pm

In terms of Archetypes, I would be in favor of supporting the constructed-viable ones that don’t depend on specific identity abilities to function. On the corp side, the important ones are Glacer (Can be pushed by overrepresenting Ash, Caprice, Herrings, Eve, Adonis, Melange), Tag&Bag (SEA, Hunter, Data Raven, Shadow, Snare, Scorched, Closed), and Fast Advance, (SanSan, Biotic, 3/2s, and potentially Shipment/EffComm, though I support the lack of Astro). FA is trick to implement without possibly breaking the game, and I think the best way to keep it fair is to choke drafters on 3/2 agendas. On the runner side you have a little more flexibility but also a harder job to do, as most of the strongest archetypes exist in the form they do because of influence considerations. The main archetypes that play cards other decks don’t play those cards because they work well with an ID ability, but you do have some reasonable options in Darwin and DLR Tag-me. Parasite decks are sort of out of the question because Datasucker and Parasite are such strong cards that they’ll get scooped up early regardless of what anyone is playing. Oracle May/Motivation/Eureka is a cool idea but I think it suffers from the cards being so bad on their own that no one will have reasonable motivation to try it and the presence of worthless cards in the draft pool will make too many late picks trivial, (one of the biggest problems with FFG’s draft format).

brodee · June 19, 2014, 7:28pm

I have been enjoying using your draft list to run 1v1 grid cube drafts (like the ones you have been streaming). Thank you for providing the list.

I would like to throw together the list for a physical 8 person draft, but I dont’ have enough prireqs/private contracts to support giving each player 5.

Do you just have people bring their own starter packs?

an alternative is to take other 4 advance and up agendas to do one additional pack of agenda drafting. I was leaning towards doing it at the end. I didn’t want to include 3/2s because the idea for this final pack is to draft agendas you’ll need to make your deck legal, not to draft the powerful agendas you need for your strategy.

This also fixes the problem of having to include 5/3s simply because you didn’t draft enough. I seem to remember there being many more 4/2s than 5/3s

has anyone tried something like that?

SneakySly · June 19, 2014, 10:11pm

You can totally do this, and in fact I have done this in the past. I currently have assembled enough Priority Reqs that I can fully stock the cube with them as long as they are not needed in my Constructed decks.

This idea is very interesting actually. I have not tried it myself. Maybe test it out and let us know how it went?

JohnnyCreations · June 20, 2014, 1:49am

Understand this is the first time I have looked at this thread. (Take my opinion as a big pile o’ shit)

Seems like with so many one- or two-ofs in the cube that there would be very little consistency. How have these cubes actually worked out so far?

Final questions, how many core sets and expansions would one need to buy to build this cube?

SneakySly · June 20, 2014, 5:14am

Really great! In Magic the Gathering Cubes, every single card is a 1x. Part of the fun is that you are not opening tons of samey packs with the same picks in them.

I have some videos with 1v1 draft against @mediohxcore here: http://stimhack.com/netrunner-cube-1v1-grid-draft-w-mediohxcore-the-draft/

For the current cube lists, one of every data pack and one or two core sets. You could always proxy core set cards you do not have enough of.

Salem · August 27, 2014, 8:09am

Hello and thank you for you Draft Cube. I just finished to add it into qasu Netrunner Draft, the Android App for shuffling Netrunner draft boosters. I hope you’ll like the StimHack icon.

bblum · October 15, 2014, 4:33am

I just put together the cube. Trying to convince some of my magic-playing friends (who often play a magic cube) to try out netrunner. We’ll see how it goes!

I made a bunch of changes, adding cards up to First Contact, and taking out some cards that I felt like I’d never draft. (I also took out 1 grimoire 1 toolbox since I only have 1 core set.) It seemed like the runner side needed a lot of help adding more tutors and powerful cards and removing dead ones, and I also added a tag-me theme with josh B and some DLRs and a link-matters theme with 3x underworld contact.

Recording my diff for posterity: http://pastebin.com/LpbYVhwz

TheBriarfox · October 18, 2014, 8:39pm

How many people do the above lists support?

JohnnyCreations · December 15, 2014, 6:18pm

Do we have an updated version of this? Going to run a cube tourney in Vancouver, WA so I’d love to have the most updated version of the Stimhack Cube.

SneakySly · December 15, 2014, 6:21pm

Yup!

http://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/12165/stimhack-draft-cube-corp-all-that-remains-edition

http://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/12164/stimhack-draft-cube-runner-all-that-remains-edition-