If I could agree more, I would. I think any discussion of Faust needs to recognise that any runner plan involving spending money to break subroutines is dead in the water. Even most PPVP Kates were on D4v1d before MWL hit, even though previous versions of her breaker suite were specifically chosen for their low break costs.
Enough good corp ice has been printed that runner economies just can’t keep up. Faust is so popular because it solves that problem, but does that mean it needs to be restricted? That’s not so clear to me - you could certainly argue runner was due a power card to solve that particular problem.
So, Wyldslide, D4vid, Chronotype, Faust, Parasite. These are the cards that come up for mention in the un-iceable Anarch rig strategy. The elements tend to work together. It’s best for future design if you pick the thing to restrict that has the most vacuum power level. That makes it less likely that future cards interact with the remaining offenders to recreate imbalance.
Wyldslide : 3 credits to get 1 click per turn, but a requirement on how you spend 2 of your clicks. That’s like a 3 to install that give you at least 1.8 credits per turn in value, which compares rather favorably to PPVP’s 2 for 1. Pays off faster, and condenses two PPVPs into one card, more or less. The downside is that requirement on how you spend some of your clicks and the Uniqueness.
Adjusted Chronotype : 3 credits to get 1 click per turn if you have Wyldslide or Globalsec peek-at-stuff installed. Similar to PPVP again, but downside is that it is Unique and does not do anything until you have one of those two cards. The upside is that it obviates the choice narrowing effect on Wyldside.
Parasite : On Rototurret, trades a Runner card and 2 credits for a Corp card and 4 credits. The additional logistical benefits are difficult to measure. It seems harder to insist on a high vacuum power level here.
Faust: You pay 1 Extra credit to make your Corroder break any type of ICE you want, which is a bit ridiculous. However, it costs a 2 credit value to break a subroutine. It costs a fairly typical ~2 credit value to gain 2 strength. This is a very powerful card when you consider paying just 1 credit to be an AI and the logistical benefits of running with an empty credit pool, but does not seem to have the vacuum power level of Wyldside and Chronotype.
D4vid: For lack of a better baseline, this card can break 3 Fire Walls for 3 credits and a card. Assuming Corroder was indeed installed but didn’t need to be used, the 3 credits spend on david produce 12 credits. That is a Lucky Find that is not a double that does not cost influence that did not cost an extra click that can be sold to Aesop’s that logistically allows you to facecheck.
Fire Wall seems like one of the most generous choices for Anarch, since it matches Anarch’s best pumpable breaker and is not extra large beyond 5. And yet the value is nuts.
Based on what I see when I look at these cards in a vacuum, I feel like Faust only outranks Parasite in vacuum power level and doesn’t seem to be the most important element to target.
The thread kinda became “this card should be on the MWL because I lost game to it”.
We had Andysucker dominance before.We had PPVP Kate dominance before.Now we have Anarch dominance and everybody seems to be so pissed off and blaming MWL.But the fact is with or without MWL Anarch will still be strongest faction at this moment.They have a lot of good stuff.
I voted MWL but if there are enough good multi-sub ICE being released,I don’t think Faust is that overpowered.
As for the people who think D4V1D,Faust,Chronotype should all go on the list,I think it won’t be long before Sure Gamble and Hedge Fund on MWL.
I get the sense that many people don’t know how FFG’s restricted lists have historically worked, which is this: you are allowed to include 1 card from the restricted list when you make your deck (you can still have 3 copies of it). Putting a single card on a restricted list doesn’t do anything; the point of such a list is to disrupt a synergy that is too strong.
In this case, it would be something like “Faust” and “Adjusted Chronotype” on the list, to allow you to include Faust but not also have Wyldcakes, or vice versa ( or “Faust” and “D4v1d”, etc.). To break up NBNFA without also harshing on flex NBN archetypes, “Astroscript Pilot Program” and “Project Beale”. Prepaid Kate got you sad about costing events correctly? “Prepaid VoicePAD” and “Kate” on the list. Insta-Parasites? “Parasite” and “Clone Chip”, etc.
I think the premise of “let’s evaluate cards in a vacuum” makes all this analysis completely abstract, sadly. You need to consider card interactions. In fact, you say “in a vacuum” and then analyze value by reference to existing cards (e.g. Rototurret, Fire Wall). There are all sorts of “in a vacuum, this isn’t that valuable…” statements that fall apart when considering one or two other cards. The DLR suite is the best example I can think of: none of the cards (DLR, WNP, Fall Guy, Paparazzi) are overpowered on their own, but combine them all together and it’s so oppressive that nerfing WNP was necessary.
Didn’t thought the number of decks playing Sure Gamble is the same as playing Faust and D4V1D.
There are something I think is a little too overpowered like Astro,and Faust is not that level and will never be that level.It’s annoying to play it around but I won’t call it unfair.It’s personal opinion,let’s agree to disagree.
Looking at the tournament winning decklists since Kala Ghoda, there was one (!) Anarch deck not running Faust (but D4vid), but four decks (two Hayley, two Noise) not running Sure Gamble.
The point of the vacuum analysis is not to prove whether or not something is broken at all, it’s to decide, if the whole combo is considered broken, which part of it is healthiest to remove. Indeed, you could not apply the analysis to DLR to figure out the DLR deck is overpowered. You could use it to determine which element of the DLR deck is the healthiest to remove. The raw numbers on WNP greatly outdo Fallguy and OCA.
Agree with this. These are issues that have existed before. The difference is that Fantasy Flight has essentially sanctioned this sort of talk. Six months ago people talked about what the solutions were to prepaid Kate. Now they talk about what they want on the MWL because why wouldn’t they?
The problem here is still, from my perspective the MWL itself. Anything that is considered to be be even a smidge too good will end up with people who want it on the list. If it ends up on there, another deck will be considered too good. Rinse and repeat.
This would only be a problem if the player community were the ones who got to decide what goes on the MWL. Happily, this isn’t the case. (I say this as someone who, two months back, thought Faust was “strong but essentially fine” and have since come to wonder if I was wrong.)
I took an 111 card MaxX deck that was 3 Faust and endless draw and fuel to ANRPC events and won about 50% of my games with it, often against quite good opponents. There should not be a card that enables such utter garbage.
these problems all apply to regular breakers, only with credits at a worse exchange rate
This is the major valid criticism of faust, but the bulk card draw also makes faust surprisingly hard to kill outside of the turn they have to snipe a remote, and being able to find IHW and plascrete without slowing down for running money is a big deal. Faust decks are more resilient than they should be just due to everything anarch has.
You don’t need to explain glacier, and the upgrades aren’t ‘tricksy’ they’re pretty standard and how the deck scored against old rigs as well, where they’re just as effective if not more so due to economy strain.
decks that are planning to wait for the runner to run through their deck multiple times over are bad, and not due to time constraints, by the time you’ve waited through a levy against a runner that knows what he’s doing, the runner has accessed almost every card in your deck and probably won. waiting for them to run out of gas doesn’t work because if the cards aren’t getting pitched to faust they are used for their intended effect to help the runner win the game.
In SC I ran against a 3 turing, 2 wrap 2 swordsman 2-3 chronos project hb deck that still lost pretty handily. That theoretical IG deck with no win condition would also lose more often than not on centrals as fitting in agendas, big ice, traps and endless recursion tends to leave you without enough money to pay for all of it, especially against anarchs running around with their host of things to help trash cards, survive through damage, kill big ice and disrupt your economy. The only time net damage kill decks really do well is when they cut most of the ice to pay for their kill, in which case faust doesn’t really matter and the faust deck is better setup to draw enough cards to live through it.
The difference is that when andysucker was dominant, you could play other decks to do something it couldn’t (noiseshop, atman, siphon anarch), same thing with prepaid kate, you could make decisions based on the metagame or based on wanting to having a different plan and play a different deck. Faust isn’t a deck, it’s a card that goes in several decks, and whatever you’re trying to do should probably include faust because it already synergizes with cards you have and costs less influence then other rigs.
Faust is one of the best cards in the meta at the moment, but I’m not sure anything special should be done. Maybe it should be put on the MWL, sure, it’s certainly a better card than Yog is by a mile (and a lot more dominant than Desperado is…). It’s very easy to break AI breakers, and I guess it’s testament to the card’s power that you can build decks around it in every faction.
It’s worth pointing out here that Faust only got crazy popular after the MWL and there was a far lower amount of Faust in the meta. There were significantly lower numbers of Faust pre-MWL and I think that’s good enough to conclude that the card isn’t completely meta-warping in the right environment. Adding the MWL to the game and constantly using it to rebalance the meta will make for this sort of extremely “this card is really powerful please add it to the MWL” effect after each MWL update.
There will always be a card that’s a bit ‘too’ good, but the artificial ‘shake-up’ that the MWL has just seemed to have made both sides of the game less diverse and that’s why we’re seeing more of the same cards on both sides. I feel like turning to the MWL to try and fix the metagame that’s mostly lopsided because of the MWL in the first place is largely misguided. We can’t keep saying “no no, this time it will definitely balance the metagame because we’re taking out the clearly too strong cards, see!” It’s easy to argue that Faust is special for X reason or Y reason, but you can do that with any card that has been strong in the past. Again, I want to reiterate that Faust was just fine pre-MWL.
To be clear: I think that Faust probably shouldn’t have been printed with the stats it has, but that is absolutely not the same as saying it should be banned or whatever. Anarch traditionally have the best breakers in their faction, and it’s part of their ‘faction pie’, so I guess that’s why the numbers were pushed on it. I think the breaker imbalance should probably be taken out of a faction’s identity and levelling the field a bit might mean other factions won’t turn to Faust as often.
It’s probably fine to put Faust on the MWL, but calls for banning the card are most certainly misguided. If nothing else, Faust should be an example of the dangers of artificially trying to ‘shake up’ the meta just for the sake of shaking it up.
You mean printing it as is was a misguided attempt the shake things up, right? In this case I completely agree.
I still think that the pancakes combo is far more at fault here than Faust. I will reiterate, that a two card combo that gives you an outlandishly high chance to win the game if assembled quickly, is stupid, no matter what breakers you are playing. Faust just happens to be an absurdly powerful breaker that’s nightmarishly synergistic with said combo by not making you spend clicks to turn a profit on your cards.
I don’t actually agree with this 100% – Faust does synergize with several very dominant builds right now, but that doesn’t mean it belongs in “whatever you’re trying to do” (e.g. it wouldn’t be a great fit for CT Stimshop, but few people are running something along those lines these days).
But even if it were accurate: so what? Jacksons, Gambles, and Hedge Funds basically belong in every deck. This is not an indication that they are broken or unfair: it is an indication that they address a pressing need from the perspective of deckbuilders.
I don’t mean to derail this, but I’m still stumped by the notion that people are going after runner cards at all at the present moment: is there really a perception that this is a runner-dominant meta right now? I know this is anecdata, but the only game my corp deck dropped at store champs was a complete statistical fluke (Jackson drew through about at least 1/4 of my deck without seeing an agenda when I had a 4 or 5 turn scoring window, leaving a huge agenda density in R&D when the runner finally got his situation straightened out), and there was more than one game I could have played in my sleep. All that while playing Foodcoats, which most folks suggest is weaker than FA after the MWL. By contrast, I won enough runner games, but I can’t say that any of them felt particularly easy. Even a nut-draw starting hand feels pretty dicey against yellow these days.
That’s what I mean when I say above that these player-driven calls to alter the meta come across as shortsighted. You don’t like Faust, but have you considered what a Faust-less (or Faust-diminished) meta looks like? I’m less concerned with something that is “too powerful” relative to other cards in the same half (corp/runner) of the game than I am with balance tilting too far towards one side or the other. Jackson Howard is markedly better (in most circumstances) than Archived Memories or Rework (ugh), and I have zero complaints about that: this game would offer a lot more terrible play experiences as corp without something akin to Jackson’s power level to mitigate variance.
This.
(Although I disagree with the notion that the MWL is ‘artificial’ – or, at least, that it’s any more ‘artificial’ than any other regulation in a completely constructed environment.)