I love this card - I consider it to be the quintessential Big Rig ™ breaker, and few cards if any give you the raw feeling of power that this card does. I want to play decks that bring this powerhouse to bear!
I was having a lot of fun a while ago with a variation of the “Dinomite” CT deck that was winning NZ tourneys, but Blue Sun and their big bad curtain walls made it really hard to play, and adding in enough support for that matchup slowed the deck down too much against faster decks.
I constantly hear elsewhere that morningstar is a real threat that people are seeing in their metas - how are people playing it, and in what decks/IDs? My sense is that Anarch finally has a healthy enough econ to support big pieces like this, but I’m not sure where to slot it in and have it not just be dead weight or a weird gimmick for long games only. If someone’s making it work in shaper (or even crim) I’d love to hear about that, too!
As far as I’m concernet anarchs don’t have a big fracter. While shapers have Torch and criminals Garrote, anarchs are stuck with Morningstar, which doesn’t work against Curtain Wall (or even a single advanced Fire Wall without support). The fact it needs support to work across all flavors of ICE (unlike the other two big breakers) really kills it for me. I’m hoping the big fracter from ONR gets reprinted (6c, 1mu, 3 strength, 1c for +1 strength and 1c to break a sub). I’m assuming it will be a 3 influence anarch card.
My original maxx build was heavy RR focused, ran morning star, 3 femmes and yog+eater. I found that morningstar was very very good to eliminate the standard taxers (eli), and femme with scavenge helped me cope with big ice. Add in d4v1d and I had a fine blue sun/IT match up. I also slotted 3 akamatsu memchips to help fit it all (often installing 2 morningstars to scavenge into femmes later). It worked pretty well, the weakness was the ebb and flow of the econ in the deck, not the morningstar.
I built it into a chaos theory big-rig siphon deck too that worked very well, crushing 95% of all barriers at the time, leaving femme to once again handle bigger barriers (before D4v1d). It relied on TR+Scav to get it out.
I really don’t buy this assessment (though I know it is a popular viewpoint). while it flounders against the big guys without support, it crushes so many powerful ICE so hard (and so many more with even a bit of support - 2 DS tokens and a credit is a steal for heimdall 2.0), my experience has been that it’s worth it- if you can fit into a deck that can actually get it out.
this is basically the setup I was using before blue sun came out. it worked when I only strictly needed femme for stacked heimdalls or the rare hadrians - once BS came to town with their “i can rez 2 curtain walls to protect this remote and not go broke forever also your femmes last for 1 turn at most” I felt I needed a new plan. datasuckers are great, but require early aggression to really shine, which that deck didn’t have. I’d love to find a way to make d4v1d work, but card slots and influence are tight for all the recursion/influence/e3/etc. I’d really like to have to rely on that solution.
if maxx’s ability dumps a MS but no femme, and archives is open, it makes sense to use it to get MS so that when femme hits the heap or hand, you can scavenge her into play paying 1 credit more. The idea is that it holds the value of the install off retrun. Its unconventional but worked quite well in practice.
hmm, knifed is something I haven’t experimented with! since most people pack knifed to deal with Eli’s and the like, which aren’t a problem for MS, I guess it didn’t occur to me to use it to snipe barriers MS doesn’t like.
I’ve been saying for months that Morningstar is Quetzals best friend. (NOTE: I’ve been saying for years that Morningstar is amazing.) No fracter other than 1-2 MS with her is just an amazing setup.
Morning Star is the best thing in the world when your playgroup has that wannabe competitive player that reads up on things people write and accept them as given without actually giving thought into them and/or doing his own processing. Then he’s like “hah! Eli to tax you out!” and you’re like “Suck my digital mace, bitch” and he’s all like “sadface”.
Quetzal
Professor
Anything with both Knifed and D4V1D
Virus-light Anarchs (Peanut gallery says “Is there such a thing?” I say “Shut up”)
Incidentally, I didn’t find it all that useful with Test Run/Scavenge - too conditional with the 2 MU.
You hit all the right points! I use Morningstar in Kim as my digital sledgehammer. Firewall, Curtain Wall, really inconsequential. You’re ANARCH. You have Knifed, Stimhack, David, Corroder, all in faction. Virus light indeed- I run two Medium and two Datasucker, that’s it, and it allows space for an end game rig of MS/Mimic/Yog/Atman/Medium/Datasucker. Stimhack + SMC/Clone Chip is such a delicious way to suddenly make a Corp realize that for the rest of the game they might as well start throwing away those barriers; I run two Ice Carver (with my two experimental deck slots) so with no suckers I still eat 6 str barriers for one credit. When you can’t keep an anarch out, you’re going to have a bad time.
The more I play it, the more I enjoy my fixed breaker, SecTest and Personal Touch Quetzal deck. Morningstar + Yoga at STR4 just invalidates 2/3 of the ICE out there. Medium + SecTest + Suckers = cheap, brutal runs. Still waffling on Vigil vs Spinal Modem, though. One of the strengths of anarch is straight up ignoring a certain amount of ICE, either through tools or destruction. With enough of that together, its hard to feel like you have any defense.
I’ve played a BigRig CT deck with Torch, Garotte, and DinoStar for a while. It had trouble with Oversight/Curtain Wall, but found some new help once Lady came out.
As much as I’m a huge fan of Morningstar, there is one piece of ice that makes it really troublesome. It’s called Ice Wall. It costs just 1 for the corp and you have to pay 1 every time you go through it, the same like with corroder. And paying 8 for breaking a piece of ice that costs 1 is inefficient, to say the least. I’d say it doesn’t fear Curtain wall as much.
And while Weyland exists, Morningstar will kinda suck because Ice wall is a must 3x in their decks
If I’m getting accesses, I don’t give a shit if I’m paying 1 credit to however-the-hell-many you spent. The game of trades doesn’t really exist in this asymmetrical game. It only matters if you can’t make more money than your opponent AND you have to compare money at some point.
Also no on is paying 8 for morningstar (1 in 10 maybe).
Honestly, Morningstar should never be your answer to most early barriers, unless you’re running 3x Test Run and 3x Scavenge. Or Retrieval Run MaxX. Ice Wall can be dealt with using Parasites, Inti, Lady, and Quetzal. (and Corroder, if you’re running both for some reason.) Like all Anarch cards, Morningstar is an AMAZING tool that doesn’t quite cover every case. You pair it with their other oddball tricks to be effective.
