What’s your thoughts on going -2 Geothermal, +1 Hostile Takeover, + 1 Priority Requisition to get your Archers online more reliably?
Almost certainly not worth the risk of losing in 3 agendas. The number of games where you will draw the Pri-Req and an Archer early, be able to judge where the Archer needs to go, and find a scoring window for a 5/3 that doesn’t directly feed your economy will almost certainly be lower than the number of games you will lose because the runner pulled it from R&D. Also, an Archer they can prepare for is a shitty Archer. Generally it only gets rezzed when it’s going to utterly ruin a runner’s day, usually in conjunction with a Blacklist, and then you really don’t care about losing an agenda for it because you’ll have a giant window to score more.
It’s worth remembering you want to fire off a lot of power shutdowns, so you can’t rely on the same ‘hiding the 5/3 with Jackson’ shenanigans that Bootcamp Glacier is so keen on as you have more important things to be doing with the yellow messiah.
3 Likes
Thoughts on Corporate War vs Geothermal? With Blue Sun it’s easier to hit the treshold, and the deck suddenly produces a lot less BP.
Too risky. Even with Blue Sun powers you can’t reliably stay above 7 when scoring your first couple of agendas some games, at least not without having to cripple your boardstate during a runner turn, and possibly losing 6 credits while scoring isn’t worth avoiding some BP for. If you always have Corp War money when you score, you’re probably scoring too slowly.
I generally think avoiding BP is a half-measure that’s asking for trouble–either you’re playing a BP deck that cares more about gear checks and/or having a higher total credits than the runner, or you really should be reconsidering the value of the BP. So I agree that cutting the BP out of a BP deck is not smart, this deck uses its BP well, I would focus on other ways to control the game.
If I WERE going to try to master the BP, I think you should adopt a play similar to the OAI play from vegan glacier, where you present two options to the runner and force them to respond in real time and rely on the unlikeliness they can do both. For example, a blacklist in one server and an elizabeth mills in the other–they have to focus on clearing BL all the while their precious BP is evaporating in front of their eyes each turn they don’t run (and thereby aren’t collecting that BP money to begin with). This however assumes two online and fairly taxing remotes (though a good blacklist might make that easier) which is a much harder boardstate than just throwing a curtain wall somewhere. In general, it still feels like more trouble than its worth.
I might focus on a more versatile and resilient ICE package, because grail tends to be best in rush decks, which while this deck can rush, it doesn’t have the draw power to reliably rush, and too many of the ice here fall to basic breakers that can be hard to shutdown against many of the popular runners. OAI is probably not great with all the shutdowns going on. I kind of want to explore the cosmic ICE, even with the nonbo with Blue Sun, you’re forcing the runner to play the game or you’ll just take a big piece of ICE at a fantastic discount. And the saved Influence can buy an Adonis campaign so losing the BS bonus on your ICE is less of a hit.
1 Like
Is it or me, or does this deck have serious potential for tilt? Either you shut down and trash the runners programs, which can be incredibly frustrating and tilt the runner, or you fail to do so and the runner gets to go into whatever server he wants for a pittance while you watch helplessly.
I definitely think a corporate troubleshooter would go a long way towards turning your grail threat back on mid-game, especially if they are good at dodging power shutdown, nuking 1-3 breakers is a game changer and you probably have the money to back that play up. It also turns on the possibility of a 1-hit kill with Merlins, not something you should build around but nice to have in your back pocket, especially with Atlas counters to fetch missing grail pieces.
This deck doesn’t regularly out-money the runner. I really don’t think Troubleshooter is worth the deck slots. Vamping yourself is not something you should voluntarily do, either.
Batty would be amazing, but you can’t really afford Batty and the Grail suite, it’s one or the other.
Had a really poor game against stealth Andy with this. To be fair, I was completely agenda-flooded to the tune of needing to find two Jacksons to clear my hand, while he had Logos and Gang Sign out. What was hilarious, however, was laying down a naked Oaktown and bluffing him to believe I had Midseasons in hand. I got it up to seven advancements, and scored it on the same turn as a Hostile Takeover.
2 Likes
Played some more yesterday. Lost horribly to an Overmind/E3 deck out of shaper (Data Folding, Memstrips(!), Creepersaurus as backup killer). Cheapest Shutdown target was always one or two Memstrips, and I didn’t feel like dumping three cards into archives to shutdown maybesorta 3 Overmind tokens. Archers, Changeling and Merlin at least managed to tax credits, but didn’t tax enough. Later I played an Anarch deck that really felt the pain - running with an incomplete suit invited grails trashing programs, playing corroder got it shut down immediately, or hit Archer without enough suckertokens.
The point of the last games isn’t really that the deck owns mediocre Anarchs, but that I really missed fast track there. I think it’s key to rush and to be able to capitalize on windows opened by Archer. Sure, those windows may last several turns, but it’s pretty clutch to play Fast Track-Atlas and then just keep on scoring while the runner digs for more breakers. One game I had to use Jackson to dig through something like 10 or 15 cards to find an agenda.
2 Likes
For your shaper game E3 is a great shutdown target, hard to recurr, soaks up a chunk of the influence in an overmind deck and makes creeper worse as well as limiting his overmind tokens. Would def like to find space for fast track in a similar deck but haven;t been able to free up the space in my batty list. My most successfull games have involved scoring atlas and oaktown behind a hive or mother goddess they can’t break then hostile to finish… or milling two of a breaker and slapping down blacklist when I still had undreway renovation in.
Oh right, yeah. E3 never lived more than a single runner turn. Overmind with 10 or so tokens was still enough.
I think rush decks that rely on gear checks struggle vs AI. This isn’t really news. I think Swordsman is a good start. Is there anything more we can do? I have struggled to race the silly Overmind + London library jank that’s doing the rounds.
I should probably just ignore it. It’s not as if this deck can’t win that matchup, and I don’t expect to see that deck anywhere near the top of a tournament as it can’t beat RP. But I thought I’d bring it up.
Playing against that and the faust decks that have been making the rounds, I would swap the changelings in the origial list to spiderwebs or Hives. At that point you need to tax the counters or cards out and keep E3s off the field. A spiderweb/grail(+2)/archer server can tax 6 counters/cards (with them giving you cash) and that might be enough to weather mid game aggression, at least till they get a real breaker.
2 Likes
I took this to Nordics and bombed, but I can’t really blame the deck - I don’t think anything could have helped me there 
But anyway, I’m thinking that Batty should replace the grails in this deck. This deck is all about forcing the runner to rush unprepared into destroyers, and Batty capitalizes on that like nothing else. Batty and Jackson leaves only 3 influence, but here’s my first attempt:
Blue Sun BattyRush v1.1
Blue Sun: Powering the Future
Agenda (11)
3x Geothermal Fracking
2x Hostile Takeover
3x Oaktown Renovation
3x Project Atlas
Asset (3)
3x Jackson Howard •••
Upgrade (7)
2x Crisium Grid
3x Marcus Batty ••••• ••••
2x Underway Grid
Operation (11)
3x Hedge Fund
2x Interns
3x Power Shutdown
3x Restructure
Barrier (5)
2x Changeling
3x Ice Wall
Code Gate (3)
3x Enigma
Sentry (9)
2x Archer
3x Grim
3x Lancelot •••
1x Lycan
15 influence spent (max 15)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Underway
I think the Lycan has to go. It’s there to force a decoder to fend off the destroyers, but it’s just too expensive.
I played as Maxx against a similar list and I cried. A lot.
Is Lancelot still worth the influence here, without the other grails as support? I think the Blacklists are key to the original’s success, so I definitely wouldn’t cut those.
I think it depends on what you want to do. My original idea was to rush and force the runner into errors (ie facecheck destroyers without the appropriate breaker), Blacklist is then the backup in case the game goes long (as it will against Shaper). @Vapo, who actually won stuff with his version and started this thread, plays more around Blacklist, I think.
I do agree that Lancelot is weaker without the Galahad, but there just aren’t that many good Destroyers outside HB. Blue Sun might be able to run Lycan efficiently (as you pay the 6 to kill a breaker and then get the refund), especially when any advanced ice can be Changeling, Lycan or Ice Wall.
This deck was explicitly not about Batty, but I think the shell (Blue Sun, Weyland Agendas, Archer) may be one of the best for Batty, so I want to talk about it!
v2: Deckbuilder · NetrunnerDB (hope the link works)
I am surprised by the lack of Blacklist, I can’t see how you can ever beat Kate without it, the quantity of answers and recursion she packs makes trying to rush without something backing it up a thankless task.
Tbh I’ve not played this much since Faust came out, Noise went from being a virtual auto-win matchup to one of the toughest with that one card and it’s enough to make me look elsewhere for ideas.
I agree that a Blue Sun trashing shell is a good place for Marcus Batty, and there are a couple of other examples of people who have tried that further up the thread, but with Chronos Protocol finally round the corner I’m focussing on that for my program trashing fix right now, and I think it makes the most sense for a Batty-centric build since you can fire him off net damage subs to snipe breakers from hand as well, or shut them down if they install early without cover to avoid the snipe. The ID power is clearly nuts for this style of play, but it really hurts to lose the econ agendas.
1 Like
Added Blacklist back in, swapped Lancelot for Lycan and Blacklists. Going to miss Swordsman, but I suspect Batty and Power Shutdown is the better cards against Faust.
I think you’ll be woefully disappointed at Lycan’s performance. Every deck I’ve ever put it in to see if I can make it work I just end up taking it back out again at the end of the week. It just never does any meaningful work. Good luck to you, though.
3 Likes