Dude, he won because of deck choice in the worlds meta, player skill and the deck’s different attack angles, not because of Faust. Also, one deck winning worlds doesn’t mean that any cards of the deck are instantly broken.
Playing 3xHive (and 3xSpiderweb, 2xCVS) in my Blue Sun deck felt quite good against anarchs relying on Faust/D4v1d/Mimic/Parasite. Blue Sun ability + CVS + less Clne Chip means the ice are relatively Parasite-safe Hives and Spiderwebs. Unfortunately that’s about all Blue Sun has currently going for it.
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Every faust deck is also a mimic deck making the first two not great answers, there isn’t room for Agg Sec in HB decks or influence for it in other decks, wisp is a poor answer to AIs in general because the runner will be running multiples (also too easy to trash in R&D), taxing ice isn’t taxing when the faust decks have free card draw and ice destruction.
It was well said in the Woes of Weyland article that adding subroutines is a powerful design space to explore. A simple sysop that adds ETR’s to an ice in the server for the rest of the turn (similar to corp troubleshooter) would hamper faust without hating out other AI breakers directly.
One problem that hasn’t been raised is that anarchs have easy answers to faust’s counters. D4vid breaks high strength ice where faust flounders. Multi-sub ice is a great faust counter but often has low strength and gets chewed up by parasite. There are ways the meta can evolve to beat faust, much like corps learned how to beat account siphon. The issue is that anarch has access to easy counters for the counters.
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Missing the point completely. I didn’t say it was simply because of faust. I’m stating the fact that the deck only needed ONE breaker. The fact that your rig can consist of a David and Faust and you can get in anywhere and only worry about swordsman is mental.
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Uh well, Noise decks could play with Crypsis as the only icebreaker in the beginning of the game and be very successful?
What’s your point, there were always powerful decks who only needed one AI-breaker.
Faust is going to be in every tourney winning deck, and invalidates a fair amount of ICE.
BAN
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Which is analogous to the Clot/CVS situation we had pre-MWL… And lest not forget: if both players knew what they were doing, Kate vs. NEH was probably the most skill-intensive matchup you could get. Same deal with Faust + other Anarch bs right now, if you ask me.
Wyldside and Adjusted Chronotype are both resources. Unfortunately, running a little bit of tagging for the core tag effect (trashing resources) tends to get poo-pooed.
I don’t think that Faust (or Faust-Wyldside-Adjusted Chronotype) is overpowered. Rather, it is perfectly positioned to counter certain factors of current Corp deckbuilding tendencies: undervaluing of multi-sub ICE (since in many cases it’s just an extra credit), reliance on gear-checking or powerful ICE effects over long-term taxation, no tags unless it’s the point of the deck, lack of willingness to include “toolbox” cards (singleton Swordsman or Marcus Batty or advanceable trap, for instance) in favour of singularly-focussed decks.
Rezzing a Checkpoint against Faust seems like it ought to be funny. I doubt many people have tried it out though, in which case it might be premature to say that Faust is a problem in the current card pool. Deckbuilding card games will always have something of the rock-paper-scissors to them, and Faust is currently the only icebreaker that runs on cards rather than credits. So it kind of inhabits its own category: let’s call it scissors. If scissors never existed before, obviously paper is great and rock is rubbish, duh! Maybe with the advent of scissors that needs re-evaluating.
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I fully agree that countering the counters is part of a healthy metagame. I feel that influence needs to be a part of the calculation in every faction. One faction cough anarch should not have influence-free access to both powerful cards like faust and cards that counter faust killers without spending influence.
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Then Snare! is going to be in every tourney winning deck, and invalidates a fair amount of runners.
BAN Sea Source - Scorched (?)
There’s at least 10-15 cards that counter Faust. Solution = play them ?
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I’ve seen this happen and it was funny! The anarch jacked out after the checkpoint and then came back with D4v1d, and used the bad pub to help them trash everything in following turns.
Or did you mean funny from the Corps perspective? 
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That doesn’t seem like Faust being too good then, does it!
For sure no, but you don’t beat a card you beat a deck, and Checkpoint is not a good answer against Faust decks.
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Well, it is. Just not a good answer against D4v1d decks! (At least not on it’s own: a Checkpoint-Wormhole-Little Engine deck is probably going to cause D4v1d overload issues.) So now you are talking about a Faust-D4v1d-Wyldside-Adjusted Chronotype deck. Is that four-card combo an issue? And if it is an issue, is Faust the problem?
In terms of limiting future design space, a card that breaks ICE of unlimited strength and is actually better against strong ICE seems far more problematic than a card that uses your resources and life-force to break ICE.
So, after collecting data for little bit more than half a day; I feel its safe to say that Faust has taken the position of “siphon” in our current meta.
- It causes 1/5 to feel bad enough to want to play less
- A couple people who enjoy the power trip appreciate it (7% want to play more but only 2% think the card is a good addition to the meta)
- 51% of people think Faust can be fixed by play and/or new cards, so there are optimists that this isn’t the end of the world.
- 41% of people think Faust needs to be responded to by FFG either through the MWL or banning, but the majority of the people (35%) trust the MWL system enough to try that first.
If this is where we are after a few months of playing with it then a few things could happen over the next few months.
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Faust will either become the new normal, potentially due to Stockholm Syndrome, potentially just because people learn to accept it and work around it. If Faust becomes the normal, we’ll probably lose some people who just can’t cope with the meta shift/power imbalance, but it probably won’t kill the game.
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The community doesn’t accept that this is the way the game should be played and unhappiness grows. The game still might not be killed, but unhappiness levels rise as more and more people play more and more Faust because its the thing you should be doing to win. If we go this route FFG ultimately responds.
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We’re all crying wolf something else comes out in a month or two that shakes the game’s very foundations and we move on to the next crisis.
I’m betting on a hybrid of 1 and 2, but who knows.
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I’ve seen you espouse this viewpoint about Kate neh before, and I have to say: I just don’t get it! Kate vs fastro was like 75 - 25 Kate. I think it was a fun match up, but what makes you think it was so skill-intensive?
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Love the Faust/Siphon comparison. 1 is 4 INF, the other is 2 and you only need 1 in play. No one runs 1 Siphon. Faust uses an alternate Econ engine: cards. As @TheBigBoy noted, one thing every deck has is cards. Any deck can play it easily. It’s the best AI we’ve seen, making it the best breaker we’ve seen.
It should’ve been an Apex card, at the least. Makes sense Skynet would have something this powerful. Also, it should’ve been more cost, and lower STR. This makes more sense:
5 cost
1 STR
Trash card from hand: +1 STR
Trash card from hand: Break a sub
I just don’t like the card. Sorry.
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I didn’t mean that the card was siphon. I meant that it’s taken the position of a card that the meta is generally concerned about and divided over. The above was just data analysis and edumucaded guessing.
This far down in the topic I feel like I can express myself. I’m pretty sure that only an MWL’ing of half the Anarch card pool or all of the anr draw+faust would have much real impact on the game and lesson Faust’s pressence. If action is taken banning is probably the tool I’d use, but I don’t know that I expect FFG to do it at this stage. 
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