The decklist might be weird, but it works surprisingly well. They have simplified the game considerably, which is the whole point of their decks. I think they work really good, I haven’t felt the need to change the lists.
Cheers man. Will do. Teaching with these decks next week!
It doesn’t work well trying to teach a new corp player. The article is not about changing the lists just for kicks, but teaching the game and having a round all within half an hour, keeping the game balanced for both sides and not favoring the runner. I got the idea after a friend of mine taught me how to play MtG with demo decks and visuals. FFG’s demo kits are still complicated to have fast explanation and a round.
I taught another friend to play this past weekend. I used the FFG decks again, mostly because I was hoping I could get two people to try it out, and then when I someday try the article’s lists I’d have a basis for seeing how the article’s decks compare for me in that situation. Alas, it was not to be. (I’d also have had to print out a few more proxies to take the article’s decks, and I was preparing for board game night at the last minute.)
However, I did pay more attention to my own play, and I’m now convinced that my tendency to lose these demo games is mostly due to the fact that I’m more focused on making the game interesting and fun for my opponent than on winning. In this particular game I won despite making a fairly large number of deliberately bad plays. So the main point of this post is to say that I remain unconvinced that the FFG Corp deck is hard to pilot.
Since I still haven’t tried the article’s decklists, I certainly haven’t ruled out the possibility that I would like them better. I do intend to try them out at some point! But I still think the FFG decks are actually very good at doing what they’re designed to do.
In terms of time, I didn’t manage to speed up this game at all. I did realize that I could definitely be a lot more pushy in advising the new player, but I would worry about making them feel like they hadn’t made their own decisions. I’m not sure how to balance that.