Oh no, I didn’t mean to imply that I actually thought they were a problem, personally. Especially for decks that actually have some meat on the bones (so to speak) I think they are often a lot of fun; especially if they a bit tongue in cheek.
More just making the point that I think the OP’s issue isn’t actually “I wish people tested their decks more thoroughly” as much as it’s “I wish people communicated more humility/uncertainty when posting about decks that have been tested only a small amount, rather than acting supremely confident.”
I think a deck has been tested and proven effective when more than one people have won a tournament (with an acceptable number of players in those tournaments…at least double digits, more is better) using it. Either that or you need to have a huge number of games online with a high win-%. Even then online is kinda dubious unless you’re playing in SHL or similar field. If you win 8/10 games in SHL with a deck, it’s probably at least quite good in the current meta (but more games needed to get a good idea on how it fares against different archetypes)…
Of course you can say that a deck has 90%+ win-rate on Jinteki.net, but it doesn’t really mean that much vs. the general population, IMO.
Step 1: Build deck, draw sample hands, goldfish, make small changes.
Step 2: Play against randoms (some of which end up being good players) for about 20 games. If do worse than 19-1, scrap deck.
Step 3: Play against a player I know is good playing a tier 1 deck. If win less than 70%, scrap deck.
Step 4: Repeat step 3 to determine rough match-up %s.
Repeat until Dumblefork is born
I probably scrap about 5 ideas per week in Step 2.
I play a bit against myself, tweak the deck a bit, play it against myself a bit more and then, in the best of cases, play it once against real opponents before taking it to a tournament.
A funny poster can make 1st page way easier than a boring or non-descriptive poster, and that’s not because of the work they put on their deck or the supposed deck efficiency.
I think fluent English speakers have a huge advantage of visibility over other people there, and it’s not because of their work with the cards, that’s because of lol / wall of text.
Well I’m not sure of the official definition, but what I usually take it to mean is:
Shuffle up
Deal yourself a hand of cards
Play out an imaginary first turn or two, imagine what could be happening, what your opponent might be able to do.
Repeat
In this way you can find out some quick information. How many times do I draw a useless hand? Am I going to be starved of econ/ice/breakers/etc in the early game? How well would I typically deal with first turn Siphon/insert common scenario here?
It also helps to give you a feel of what you’re looking for when you decide to mulligan, among other things.
The original definition of goldfishing was from Magic, where the question was “if my opponent is a goldfish (i.e. passes every turn without doing anything at all), when do I win?”. If a deck that you think is a turn 4 goldfish turns out to be turn 8 then you have, um, issues in your card choices.
Netrunner “goldfishing” doesn’t really work because the interaction of the game is different and subsequently the “what turn do you win” question isn’t very useful. Drawing sample hands and the first couple of turns can be somewhat useful (e.g. discovering your expected # of ice in your corp hand on turn 1 is only 1), but “goldfishing” is a misnomer really. It’s just quicker to say which is why people probably use that term.
