Yeah, I played a few games with my mediocre RP deck and got absolutely wrecked. I think with a runner playing properly there wasn’t any way to win… runner economy has gotten very strong, and corp hasn’t been able to keep up.
HBFA can put up a good fight. I feel like they’re playing at a win level similar to what non-FA decks were playing before, and other decks just aren’t really competitive. That’s really a bummer. I don’t enjoy playing it that much so I try other things.
I’m honestly considering running Woodcutter with BWBI. It just doesn’t make sense to stack 5 ice on R&D. [Edit: what has the world come to?]
personal evolution is my favorite deck to be playing at the moment.ive always done well with it except against noise who thankfully seems to be less popular at the moment.
i also run tag n bag. i dont see much reason to try and score agendas unless you are HB.
Life as a corporation has been really hard for a while now. I don’t know if that will change with C&C, but I have doubts.
I have several corp decks that perform really really well the first or second time a good runner sees them, but once they’re scouted, well, they’re scouted. Winning vs. a good Gabe or Andy player takes a lot of luck. I dunno about Shapers yet, and I’m never really all that worried about Noise these days (haven’t played a C&C rebuild of him, but I have one to test).
You can still win, though! Case in point, I just won games with Jinteki: PE and my NBN:TWIY* rainbows deck.
jinteki is way way better then people think especially against criminals. when is criminal ever discarding something bad? my worst matchups with my jinteki deck is noise with wyldside and very buildy shapers who never run my remotes. its very hard to score enough points before the rig is up and RnD is locked. if the shaper isn’t greedy ie all 3 RnD interfaces they should win.
No one really bashes jinteki play here, it’s just that it’s inconsistent against a diverse field whereas hb is super consistent against a diverse field. I posted a tournament report where I flatlined 4/5 of my opponents at the last state regional with Personal Evolution. I brought it because I expected criminals to be idiots, and I was right.
My hunch is that the meta has actually moved against HB, though the cards have improved it – I think rig destruction will be even more important given how fast rigs are being assembled in Shaper, and tags seem more relevant these days with a lot of runners leaning on Kati Jones as their primary econ. Turn 1 Morning Star is just… ugh.
I’m starting to think 2xArcher is a strong include in almost any deck – previously there weren’t great 1-pointers worth playing that could be fed to it except in Weyland/NBN. Gila is actually a pretty solid card and I’d even consider running it even without Archer.
The other thing is Data Raven/SEA Source/BN as pure tagging seem relevant again, if people are moving away from Opus and using KJ. I know a lot of people only pack 2 KJ… losing one can be a huge problem.
These are just thoughts after playing C&C for a bit, though I guess it’s a bit biased because all I’ve been playing is Shapers. Agree/disagree?
I agree, but rig destruction is worse than ever now with all of the scavenge effects; however, you are spot on. blowing up their yog seems a lot easier than just stacking huge code gates everywhere.
i think the answer is attacking the runner from a lot of different angles and make sure you arent crushed by a single atman or cyber cypher or yog.
i am a little annoyed the new good HB ice is 3 influence though. strangely enough the awakening center is 1 influence…i wonder if other corps will get bioroids like the other runner factions got viruses.
Yeah, Awakening Center is one card I’m excited to play but haven’t had a chance… it’s tough to fit, and you kind of have to give up other critical cards. Still, the threat might be enough to ward off a lot of runners. I dunno.
I tested out Gila/Archer in 3 NBN games tonight, and I’ll tell you what, both those cards did some serious work. Minelayer on R&D was also really, really good. Getting it 5-deep without using any clicks or credits to set up is insane… either the runner gets greedy and ignores it or it’s a super-efficient piece of ice.
Archer, or even Archer + Troubleshooter, feels important for corps. If you blow half their rig up you have a chance. It also helps spread out your ice strength to avoid Atmans.
Empirically, it turns out that Next Design is terrible.
72-121 on OCTGN so far.
Puzzling.
Now obviously Next Design will probably float back to ~40-50% win rate when people stop durdling with janky brews. My initial guess was Next Design was ok, but after playing against it you quickly notice a few things.
First, even if you cover your HQ/RND and a remote with the intention of getting a Melange going, you probably can’t rez all of your ice first turn. Second, if you synthetically drew 9 cards to play 4 of them out, that means you’re expected to have ~4 agenda points in hand. This makes turn 1 Sneakdoors insane, and it means you can’t rez R&D because you probably have to defend your remote and hand.
If, on the other hand, you just ice up your three centrals and then take credits on your turn, that leaves you with 8 credits and three ice down. ETF would have 2 ice and 7 credits. Uh, plus the ETF bonus for the rest of the game, obviously.
Yeah man, those additional installs are useless if you can’t rez things.
Interesting. I thought the new HB idents were always struggle compared to EtF, since that is just so solid regardless of your overall strategy, but I’m surprised that it is so bad overall (but not surprised it is still doing better than the other two).
I figure the idea is to ice all your centrals and still be able to get some burst cash - compared to EtF where if you want to spend a click playing HF then you have to leave yourself open to Sneakdoor. So ND can ice all 3 centrals and still play HF - meaning they can play nastier ice and in theory discourage the runner face checking them. But that assumes you draw 3 ice in your starting hand, which is far from a given even with a mulligan. If you only draw 2 then I think you are basically $1/turn down on where you would be as EtF - essentially your identity power has come to nothing.
So anyone who has experimented with stronger together before C&C will probably have come to the conclusion that without ETF, you really want some transactions to help push your economy forward - regardless of your deck’s strategy.
In designing my next design deck, I came to the same conclusions as you, but capitalizing on it’s strengths and mitigating it’s weaknesses meant 2 things to me:
Play Huge Ice
Don’t pay for it
After calculating that I want to play 23-24 ice to get the most consistent 3 ice opening hands (~74% before or after mulligan), packing in free ice effects, and a lot of transactions to make sure I can still threaten to rez ice - I had zero room (and influence) for fast advance tricks. Which meant that the deck would either need an agenda package that was either six 5/3s and a 3/2 (with 3 additional slots for assets/operations) OR a more consistent agenda package of 2 pri-req, 3 ABT 3 PV, and 2 Gilas
The benefits of the 10 agenda package being:
Accessing me will be hard most of the time, and I don’t want to reward that with all 3 pointers. This way they need to steal 3 - 5 to win instead of 3.
Beta test is insane, and you can safely beta test most of the time in this deck
If I have to install advance something, I want to be able to cash it in for 3 agenda points, since there isn’t enough value in the 4/2 agenda abilities for this deck imo. (no psf or combo wins)
I think the ID is far from horrible, and that it has a specific niche right now, because it really easily stops account siphons from happening early/at all.
Yeah, I imagine it’s been doing terribly as people experiment with weird cards. I think a crazy runner deck can do ok if it’s piloted well – a bad corp deck… well, not much you’re gonna be able to do about that. If you go back and look at the stats after each data pack, I’ll bet dollars to dimes corp does worse after each pack for a little while.
Interesting that 2 of the three new Shapers are outperforming the older ids… but even a dedicated expansion isn’t enough to allow Shapers to threaten Criminal dominance, or even catch up with Noise.
(I guess you have to take the stats with a pinch of salt, but I’ll take stats over baseless rhetoric any day)
The only clue that we have that NEXT Design will improve over time is it’s average score, which currently sits at a second-best 4.5AP/game. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that it will pop up a ton, but as the “playing around with all the new cards and trying even bad-seeming strategies for fun” period begins to close we should watch that number.
If it stays high, I’d imagine the win percentage would have to pop higher as well. Since flatlining is less effective out of HB, I doubt it will settle as high as Weyland or NBN, but better than 36% I’d think.