If either of you have a Noise list I’d be much obliged. I’m working on it, but whilst you are both right about how strong it is when it comes together, my build falls over and dies if it doesn’t see Pawnshop and Parasite early (as Nord said, consistency…).
More generally I think of Valencia like ETF, just better at doing everything except very specific builds - so I guess I see Noise as being like CI in that anaolgy.
snow-jax’s post on SA. It’s behind a paywall, or I’d be linking it. I wouldn’t trust it overmuch, but he seems to have been right about everything for a while now. Suppose we’ll see, but seemed like increasing the sample size would be useful.
while balancing runner IDs is obviously a good thing, it is unfortunate that newer, balanced runners are/will be weaker than older runners when it comes to deck size/influence. it is probably generally agreed that kate and andy are the best runners of their factions, and they get full influence. still don’t understand how Iain got 10 influence…
Having played Iain a moderate amount, I’m quite confident he would be broken at 15 influence.
Statements like this require support… If he would be “broken” at 15, he would be at least viable at 10. If he is viable, why is he in last place amongst runners in tournaments this season? (according to Stimhack tournament stats) If you say this is because no one is playing him, why isn’t anyone playing him (if he is viable) ? 5 influence doesn’t bridge the gap between unplayable (see: worst) and broken (see: best).
People aren’t playing him because he’s weird and takes a while to learn. As Damon pointed out in his recent interview, most of the community isn’t big into experimentation.
It totally can, I think. And FFG has a habit of over-correcting. GRNDL would be broken at 15, so they made it 10 – but 12 is probably the right spot for it. I imagine the same might be true of Ian, though he also seems to be a massively different kind of deck, which can be tricky to pick up and learn effectively.
I think that sentiment is wrong; “most” of the community I see experiment a lot :).
Having piloted Iain to some success in conjunction with the Colorado meta (where Ryan Burke’s done quite well with a build we went back and forth over on NRDB) I regret to report that I don’t think he’d be broken at 12 or even 15 influence. Locally, we have a Andy-Iain build that imports core pieces from my Iain build and it has an equivalent or better winrate without the weakness of Iain vs. 5/3 scoring.
He’d be stronger at 12 influence, and great at 15. Not “broken”. I’m a fan of great IDs. The more great ones we have the more we’d actually see diversity in tournaments.
This statement is basically completely false in any meaningful sense.
If so, it should be easy to disprove rather than just asserting the contrary, no?
Sure. What would you/Damon accept as proof? Here’s a picture of the contents of my deckboxes. Not pictured: the 4 decks I was going to bring to GenCon ;).
Yeah. I think FFG is a bit too worried about creating another “broken” ID. So long as A) Criminals are at least as good as the other factions, and B) A deck wants to generally draw specific cards, and C) Early game power that can turn into late-game power is good… Andy’s going to be Top Tier. That’s not changing.
Having other things as good as Andy isn’t a problem if they’re spread out and good in different ways.
Which, on the subject of Anarchs, Noise is poised to be (though he dies hard to Deadcoats, so I’m not terribly worried, personally). Valencia might be, unless they hit her deck:influence with a mighty big hammer out of fear. Kim could be, if he hammers NBN as hard as it seems like he might, though he also might, uh, not, for lack of consistency/economy.
But, then again, the thing that tickles me isn’t so much the idea that they’ll all be Andy/Kate levels of good so much as the notion that Anarchs will be able to exert an entirely different sort of metagame pressure than just being top decks. Having a bunch of Tier Two Anarch IDs will mean that you’ve got to be able to handle all of them to beat the field, and if some of them hammer particular builds, then you’ll need to go after others. So, by screwing ever so slightly with the viability of decks in Swiss, they might push different decks into the split than would otherwise make it, even if they themselves don’t necessarily make it in.
I dunno, might not be the most likely, but the idea of it/of local metas shifting as different Anarchs are favored just makes me smile for whatever reason.
You should hold your own statements to this level of evidence.
At the last LGS night I personally brought Ian and Jinteki: PE. At that game night I saw basically no Andy / NEH because they are “boring”.I watched one player playing Nasir over and over again, trying to make him work. This is generally what I see at game nights, and it has been many many months since I have even played Andromeda in a non tournament or tournament prep setting.
Recently @hollis had been playing lots and lots of Nasir because he is novel and interesting. If you look at @mediohxcore’s latest streams, you will see that he bounces around between all kinds of stuff:
A casual look through /r/netrunner shows a hivemind that does nothing but circlejerk about how you should not “copycat” tournament winning decks, and how valuable it is to play all manner of chaff.
If you look at Hall of Fame · NetrunnerDB you will see the fun decks get way more discussion and love then the average and expected.
You are not just wrong, but you are emphatically wrong.
To clarify, I’m not saying that people like playing around with silly decks. They totally do, and the community lauds that (for good or for ill). I’m saying that few people understand how to actually test/experiment with decks to refine their concepts against serious competition and develop working archetypes.
This isn’t particularly hard but it is very much not the default “playing around with X” behavior. It’s this more sophisticated form of development that the community tends to lack at this stage. We’re fine at playing around with whatever, but few people are putting serious development into new archetypes and testing those in competitive play.
We already know there are many deck archetypes that are totally valid in the present environment but don’t get played because they’re out of fashion (Supermodernism is the most obvious example). Think of all the archetypes that haven’t even been discovered yet!
This, in truth, is what I consider both most exciting and most frustrating about Netrunner and its community. There is a vast frontier of unexplored possibilities out there, but most players seem loath to explore it in depth.
“playing around with X” leads to “seriously testing X” in my group if X shows promise. Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, but that’s how things seem to go for the folks I keep running into at tournaments, too :).
I would love to engage in that “sophisticated form of development”, but I don’t have the necessary infrastructure to do so. If I make some deck and I want to see how it plays against NEH, how am I supposed to do that? Just randomly message the handful of people I’ve added to my friends list on OCTGN like “hey, would you mind playing NEH against me for like 5 games?”
What I would like is a group of strong players who don’t mind being bothered by each other via skype/gchat/whatever with such requests.
edit: I’m thankful for the Stimhack League because it does a lot to help you avoid wasting time against people who don’t know what they’re doing, but it doesn’t help me test specific matchups like I want to.
this, so much this.
I have to agree with Kingsley on one point (or maybe he wasn’t arguing this) - Netrunner players are NOT into experimentation when it comes to competitive play. bringing jank/fun decks to game nights is cool and all, but how many people here pack up jank/fun decks that might win and might surprise the meta when they head to a tournament? not many. even on OCTGN, it’s pretty rare i run into people playing stuff i’ve never seen before. I think this is a symptom of how small ANR’s competitive circuit still is. people don’t want to lose, so they don’t risk anything. it’s understandable, but unfortunate for the meta and game overall. i also understand that many see tournaments as a test of skill, which is valid. it absolutely requires skill to win a regional with any deck; i’m not down-talking that. my hypothesis is that ANR is still a small and young community, with a small competitive circuit. this leads to the majority of players piloting a very small pool of archetypes/decks. it is a vicious cycle. the more wins an archetype gets, the more people play it, and the more it wins. for all we know the ‘best’ decks right now may not even be the best…
on this site specifically, not many people really respect jank/fun ideas. basically anything new or different that is posted on stimhack in my admittedly brief experience gets shot down if it is not ‘optimal’. netrunnerdb is a bit more open minded, and i have never visited the sub reddit so i cannot speak for that
I wish I could like this post a second time, Damon saying we don’t like to experiment just shows how little he knows about the state of netrunner (actually the whole interview suggests he doesn’t know much… doppleganger, really?). The netrunner community doesn’t just like different things, they want it to be completely removed from the top identities. If you have a tournament deck with a really interesting metagame change, it will have less interest than a random guy posting his “attempt to break the meta and revive anarch” even if that deck is literally just the bog standard tier 2 anarch deck with suboptimal influence.
While I think Iain is probably the strongest of the H&P bunch, the reason he isn’t played isn’t because he’s different, he’s not that different or difficult if you’ve played a vamp deck before. The reason Iain doesn’t see play is because you can score astro and count to 7 before he gets into gear, and the money he makes doesn’t really provide the effect of an andy start.
Those are just my winning jank tournament decks. There was about a 2 month span where we’d have a tournament every week, and I’d bring different decks to each tournament. The reason this died out is, as much as you metagame against top decks, you might just hit other jank and lose. You can make decent decks that aren’t andy or kate, but they lose to suboptimal cards, and your second round opponent will have said card every time.
I think this is somewhat true, with the caveat that some decks are MUCH more effective in the hands of an experienced player than in those of someone who has just picked up the deck. This often leads to people dismissing decks before they have the requisite plays in to figure out whether the deck is actually strong or not when piloted by someone who knows all the kinks.
Typically, I believe that having a strong local scene or good practice partners is fairly key. OCTGN is good for testing the absolute basics of a deck, but isn’t particularly useful for high-level development or refinement unless you know high-level players and can reliably get good matches instead of random publics.
Even then, you lose something relative to real life, but OCTGN practice with good players is close enough to real life practice that the convenience often (but not always) makes up for this.
Losing to suboptimal cards is IMO an unserious concern. Making News was clearly the best deck for some time despite getting stomped against bad decks that played tons of link for Underworld Contacts.
To put it another way, even if you take a random loss to some janky deck that happens to have your perfect counter, if you’re good you should be reliably making top 8/16/whatever anyway. Losses to janky nonsense are much rarer in the elimination rounds…
are you having a laugh calling these jank? the only jank deck among those is the Chaos Theory/Workshop deck, which is a pretty cool idea btw. moreover, bringing jank decks to store tournaments at your local shop isn’t the same as showing up to a regional with jank.
i wish i had a dollar for every time someone used the term ‘suboptimal’ on this forum 
netrunner community is very hypocritical. they may drool over “a random guy posting his “attempt to break the meta and revive anarch” even if that deck is literally just the bog standard tier 2 anarch deck with suboptimal influence” but very few of them will play it or take it seriously. most will think 'oh that’s cool but is suboptimal and thereby sucks" and keep playing NBN and Andy