Taking Community Temperature on Faust

I dunno why people act like PPVP Kate was the previous chapter and Faust is the current chapter.

Faust won worlds.

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When Faust is on the most wanted list with cheonotype and wyldside will people actually be happy? I think that new ā€œbest decksā€ will always fill that space.

cards build on each other in this environment. New decks overtake old, new cards provide answers to issues. The MWL has torn away a wide swath of Cards and left a vacuum. In that space there hasnā€™t been a flourishing of new fascinating decks. Top runner decks are now just anarchs. Similarly on corps, the nerf disproportionately impacted glacier and now yellow is returning as king with very little variance.

This is, bottom line, what things like MWL do. You canā€™t expect MWL to solve the problem that MWL created.

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Faust can be pretty ridiculous (especially if they donā€™t forget Mimic - I love, love, LOVE watching people faceplant into Swordsman after they do!) but, yeah, not always game-breaking. Turing and Spiderweb on a server, say, is pretty good at making runs cost-ineffective.

The one thing I guess I regret is that it lets the Runner definitely get in anywhere once if played properly - so it canā€™t win every run, but it can pretty much guarantee making that crucial run, and thereā€™s very little the Corp can do about it unless itā€™s loaded and precisely teched and draws into the right cards.

Arguably, ā€œThat is the game called Netrunnerā€, but it used to be much harder to get that sure a thing set up, and easier for the Corp. to plan around it / have time to react or adjust. Faust needs less such support - it eats literally anything. Sometimes I wish it had to eat a different type of card each time or something, so the rest of the deck wasnā€™t entirely fungible grist for its mill.

Pancakes Combo does make it all much worse, and make all the supports one could wish for way too readily accessible. Itā€™s at the point where I keep looking at Lizzie Mills and thinking ā€œDo Iā€¦could I?ā€ O my human brothers, I hope I stay strong.

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I think the main problem is that the best way to deal with Faust is surprise damage. I had good success against my brother who plays Faust noise with a Titan Supermodernism inspired deck. Snares and multi-sub ice did good work when he was forced to lean on Faust to try and contest my rush scores. I made him chose between ending the turn with 4+ cards in hand or being open to a SEA-Scorch. Sadly, the deck had consistency issues and was teched a bit too hard against faust/noise to work in the full field it needed to, but I enjoyed it going 6-1 the morning I tested it.

Only other thing Iā€™ll say is that I learned a new level of respect for Archer with that deck.

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As a guy who made top cut with a corp deck specifically designed to trolololo Faust into sadness (NEXT is +EV vs. Faust) and just tonight went 3-1 with a got-dang Stronger Together deck designed toā€¦ trolololo Faust into sadness, I am currently All About The Meta continuing to lean on Faust.

Seriously. I bullied through 2 Levys in one oā€™ them Faust MaxX decks to win. With ST. And thatā€™s with me feeding my opponent 4 points on an ABT I fired for the lulz (got me a Janus at least I guess).

That said, Faust is super-powerful against decks that are, you know, actually good against the more normal field instead of my half-sane brand of lulztech.

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Faust is damn strong. My argument is that it would be folly to MWL both Faust and Pancakes. Either are fair, but not both.

That said, if they nerf more Runner cards they probably have to nerf more Corp cards. Itā€™s a slippery slope IMO.

Gear check can still win versus Faust. They donā€™t always have Faust or enough cards. Upgrades still do work against Faust. The card is strong and it enables Anarch in a big way but I donā€™t think itā€™s ruining the meta.

IMO it would be healthier to restrict Chronotype as @hhooo suggested, which is only played seriously in faction. Restricting Faust hurts the other 2 factions and seems unnecessary.

To be clear, I am against restricting any more cards right now. Anarchs already play at 12 to use their signature card, Parasite. Problems in the meta should be fixed with good design, period. We pay money for a product and there are people who are paid to design this game. I want to have faith that they will do their game and customers justice and not just restrict cards.

I feel like there are a ton of ways to play against Faust effectively. I think the biggest frustration is that corps are feeling the frustration that old runners used to feel when they ā€œHADā€ to include plascrete. Corps donā€™t want to spend the deck space playing against a card that might not always be there. This is netrunner though people, plain and simple. Itā€™s a meta call and if youā€™re 95% sure it will be there, then so much easier.

Getting cards out of the runners hand means scoring windows. If they are running Faust and you know they canā€™t get in without enough cards, maybe itā€™s time to shift from the kill mindset to the one where using a scorch to get the runner to 0 cards becomes a good play. There are a ton of ways to counter Faust and just as someone said building decks around Faust is easy, countering it is pretty easy too. People just donā€™t feel like doing it. Itā€™s the old siphon debate all over again.

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I donā€™t think the MWL solves the faust problem. I think a Wyldside MaxX deck is in the best position to exploit faust, and that deck can easily find a couple of influence to include it while losing very little.

I would maybe like to have seen faust be 0 Base or something? But I donā€™t know how we solve it right now. Anti Ai breaker hate? But how to do that without crapping over all the other Ai breakers?

You need some (not one) good and actually useful AI-hate ICE or subroutines heavy ICE to push Faust back in support position.

I donā€™t think Faust is bad card design in general but itā€™s probably in the wrong faction and has the wrong cost balance.

d4v1d is in my opinion more of an issue because it seriously disturbs the runner/corp money efficiency.

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I guess NEXT could be good against Faust, but NEXT still suffers from the same problem of being weak to parasite. Are you leveraging an ability to rez ICE outside of a run to get more NEXT face-up?

My Faust Noise saw some NEXT ICE at my most recent SC, but it felt like my most uneven match of the day.

I played NEXT in EtF at the weekend against a Faust deckā€¦ it didnā€™t go well. They destroy your Silvers with Parasite, which drops your Bronzes so they can also be killed. Also Immolation Script. Gah.

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You could do it by set ups that punish Faustā€™s feedstock: ā€œTrash an AI unless the Runner trashes N cards from their handā€ would hurt the other AIs but make faust really bad.

Better stack destruction abilities by the corp might be good against Pancakes Faust. Like the spoiled version of underway renovation (1 adv:2 trashed or 4 when overadvanced) would be able to push ahead the time the faust deck needs to levy by 2-3 turns. Or something that trashes the top X non-program cards of the runners stack.

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Marcus Batty Trash, Caprice / Ash, Turing and Komainu are allready great solutionsā€¦

I think Archangel, Victor 2.0, Tollbooth, Wormhole, Little Engine, Ichi (1 and 2), Vikram 1.0, Archer, Assassin, Turing and Wraparound are all good against Faust.

About half of the Faust Anarchs arenā€™t running Yog to save influence (a stupid situation btw, Iā€™d rather errata Yog to 1c to break), so high-strength code gates are a powerful option. Little Engine in particular is quite good, since dropping 5 cards for 5c is a pretty bad deal.

With Mimic support, high-strength multi-sub sentries are also viable, with tracers having particularly good rez-to-break ratios. Archer is very painful to break with Faust.

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D4V1Dā€¦

I thought the broken part of Faustcakes was that you can slot it on top of a standard D4+fixed breakers rig? The existence of Turing alone should mandate at least one Yogā€¦

David wonā€™t get a runner through Little Engine, Ichi 2.0, Vikram, Archer, or Assassin more than onceā€¦

Is the problem Faust, or a 4+ card combo?

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the problem is chronotype. a 4 card combo is not OP, but having the means to easily draw into it is. limit 1 per deck.

I think you know Faust is a problem when a deck can run it as itā€™s only breaker and win worlds.

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I thought DLR and WNP were the problems with the world champ deck?

Also, Iā€™d point out that with Blackmail, breakers are less important.

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Swordsman, Komainu, Aggresive Secretary,Will o wisp, Power shutdown,taxxing ice whatever
if there are so many answers in the card pool why is the card a problem?

Didnā€™t we have the atman meta that Swordsman fixed?

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