I’m bracing for a a few months of Jinteki terror in ANR. Once Breached Dome comes out, I assume we are going to be seeing lots of 6 Shock Jinteki decks.
But the real fuel for the Jinteki surge of late, it seems to me, has been the presence in the card pool of new Corp operation econ (IPO) along side the soon-to-be rotating operation econ (Restructure, Celebrity Gift, Sweeps). Everywhere I turn, I’m seeing Jinteki decks that are filthy rich because they can ram so much econ in their decks. When rotation hits, Jinteki should return to its old cash-strapped ways, which I will enjoy a lot more.
Do you think we will see an ebb of Jinteki once rotation hits?
I think you’re right that the glacier-style Jintekis - your Palanas and Aginfusions - are probably going to disappear along with the majority of the operation econ. But the same thing is going to hit a lot of other corps too - losing Sweeps Week is a huge deal for NBN, for example. I guess my main concern is that all the good operation econ rotating out just pushes asset spam corps even further ahead of the pack. It seems pretty likely to me that IG will be top of the Jinteki pile.
I really only like Palana and AgInfusion, because they’re the only Jinteki decks that feel like Netrunner. They do corp things—make money, install ice, score agendas—but they come with a spikiness or unpredictability to back up some of their fragility. It feels like Netrunner.
Every other Jinteki deck seems like it just uninteractively installs facedown cards in remote servers until the other player guesses wrong or gets unlucky on multiaccess (or has an insufficient supply of silver bullets like Feedback Filter + unlimited money).
Economy seems largely irrelevant to dumb net damage decks, so it’s a shame they’ll be the least affected by a shake-up in operation econ. Honestly the design of the Jinteki faction is a bit of a mess. Obokata Protocol is—just to pick one—in a vacuum an example of what a 5/3 should be power-wise, it’s only good in a vacuum and it has had a constipating effect on the larger metagame. It first pushes everyone onto Film Critic, then the corp decks go back to GFI because there’s no use slotting Obokata if everyone has Film Critic.
It’s a shame, it’s probably the faction with the best art, but what a mess.
Rotation will be unkind to jinteki, but they’re at an unnatural high right now. They get to be the only corp spanning glacier and damage (LOL WEYLAND). Hopefully they reign in a bit to damage, where they should be. There will be good and bad things for jinteki with rotation, stuff like Deus Ex rotating is good, but stuff like FBF not is not as good. Obokata is a huge boon, and TFP not rotating is great when you have these two in conjunction. I like the idea of the runner having to make well prepared, often multiple swings at central servers, which helps save ice for remotes.
They will also suffer against siphon though, so hopefully something is done about the power of siphon. At least aginf is strong against it. Make work compression great again.
Grooooooooan, no no no no. Net damage is totally overrepresented in the Jinteki card pool. It’s like they threw mechanics at the wall (traps, ice placement, uhh, redirecting the runner, compromises that give the runner something uhhh), abandoned them and just settled on net damage because it’s dumb and flashy and loud and you don’t have to play Netrunner which is complicated. Why not just do damage until your opponent runs out of cards? Potential Unleashed is the deck I imagine a gloomy fifteen year-old virgin would like most when seeing Netrunner the first time. It’s got a bloody sawblade on it dude, cooooooooool.
There are things I really love about Jinteki—including, believe it or not, net damage in a tastefully applied quantity, one that deters but does not grind—but I think there’s so many sort of aborted, half-explored, or flaky ill-conceived themes in the faction, net damage is just a lazy way to take it forward.
“But but but your cards become hit points, you just have to play differently.” Sure, fine, does anyone know any LCGs that sells packs of blank cards with the words Hit Point written on them? I’ll join.
Salt rant over. Always bring a feedback filter kids.
I’m already playing with a rotated Jinteki PE deck, so I’m not seeing either any silly card abuse or some cruel demise at rotation. My deck works, and its post-rotation version may be my most potent yet.
I don’t think ‘six Shocks’ is a particularly good use of slots, though it could create an amusing deterrence to Archive runs.
The meta will always mess with the relative value of certain cards. I don’t think this pre-rotation period is any different.
I feel like you might be fundamentally missing the point of jinteki. Open the core set, its all net damage cards. All the things you claim they threw against the wall are extra things because its bland to have a faction that just does damage. Those things are admittedly worse than basically every other factions auxiliary functions…but they’re not totally awful.
I can concede that the deck as HP idea is a bit annoying, but its another invisible hand the forces runners to not just tech against 1 or 2 corp archetypes and be safe. Hence the last part of my post, about work compression. Think about how RP (and now aginfusion) work. Its about forcing the runner to do more work in a narrow window, and manage tempo via cards, money, breakers, etc, to get in, and balance that vs dying. The great jinteki kill decks push the runner into the choice of “do i go in unprepared and maybe die, or do I let them score and fight another day?” A return to that style of jinteki would be great.
On PU, the whole deck collapses to money and 1 or 2 tech cards, so I don’t really find it worth complaining about. It might feel unfun if you 100% tuned your deck against everything but it, but if you make even the slightest concessions on card slots for net damage, the ID is fucking neutered anyway…or just employee strike it away…then you have a blank ID with 12 influence and built to not actually stop the runner…its not so great then.
Yeah, the more I think about it, Breached Dome doesn’t feel like a problem. IG is already pretty good with 3 Shock to keep a lot of runners out of Archives, and if that doesn’t stop runners, then Breached Dome probably won’t help much. If assets are going to be a problem, I blame Moon and Infrastructure. And after Moon goes on the MWL, if Hostile Infrastructure + Bioethics becomes a thing again, we’ll see. Honestly, I see Jinteki glacier sticking around a bit more, especially out of Aginfusion, and there’s interesting possibilities with Ben Musashi in PE. Keep in mind that Voter Intimidation exists if you’re that worried about Film Critic. If someone plays more than one Critic, the meta is in a bad spot tbh, and if they put an Obokata on one, what are they gonna do, let it sit there?
If there’s salt about Bioethics locks though, I’m totally on board with that. The corp side of Democracy and Dogma was arguably the worst mistake in Netrunner, barring, perhaps, a couple notable cards.
i’ve been playing agi with Ultraviolet Clearance and Jeeves and eventually cut the celebrity gifts… but i’ve been running sundews, so i’ll have to find replacements for that if i plan to keep with it
i’m also only running 2 jacksons (due to influence), which would mean only 1 whampoa or, more likely, dropping down to 2 UVCs
Yeah, I think that for a lot of people who have just picked up Netrunner, net damage Jinteki decks are one of the most appealing. It’s definitely “real Netrunner”. If you like killing people (and who doesn’t?), what seems more fun in a new game: crazy traps and bluff plays, or trying to have more money than your opponent and playing sea source-scorch-scorch? Traps and bluffs! It’s only after seeing how difficult it is to actually kill experienced players with net damage that you start to gravitate to meat damage strategies out of NBN and Weyland.
I completely disagree with your proposal that Potential Unleashed (as indicative of a grindy, damage deck) isn’t “proper” Netrunner.
Yes all of your cards being blank would make for a boring game. This is not the case though. What you have is effectively the ability to choose to blank your own cards. How many and which ones you blank is up to the Runner moreso than the Corp. How many cards can you afford to play? Which ones do you really need and which ones will you keep for the traps?
This is a deck style than promotes “proper” Netrunner as far as I see it. The important decisions are being made in game, interactively with your opponent. What is being nudged out is the pre-game decision making, the deck-building side of things. If you have just built a deck and then expect to turn up and blindly “execute” it, regardless of the other side of the board, that’s what will throw you off.
Grindy damage decks prioritise in-game decision making. They prioritise useful single cards over overblown combos (the more of your deck is combo cards, the less you have to sacrifice and the more likely you’ll lose a bit of your combo leaving the other cards useless!). They prioritise a risk-reward approach rather than installing a whole “solution” before making a first run of the game. These, to me, are all things that epitomise “real” Netrunner.
And you can think of this as another form of work compression. The cards you generally want to be leaving unplayed are the “efficiency” cards in your Runner deck. Why play Diesel when you can click for cards anyway? Why install Liberated Account when you can always get credits? You can never replicate the ability of Archives Interface, so maybe install that one. So your deck ought to be going slower than usual with all of the useful-but-not-crucial cards you choose not to play (or else you take the gamble and play the cards anyway and maybe you die for that).
I think the cards that people really have a problem with in terms of what kills you in a Jinteki deck are Bio-Ethics and Hostile (typically in that order, but I’d argue Hostile is more important in an Asset Bio-Lock deck and is thus more NPE). Without those cards, it pretty much forces the corp to set up a scoring remote for bluffing agendas and scoring since they can’t rely on the Bio-Lock wincon and killing Runners through just Snares and Shocks is impossible against a halfway careful opponent.
However, in a hypothetical situation were you made those 2 cards disappear from the game somehow, you lose some diversity in deck construction and gameplay. If the game were to be only corp decks that played “Real Netrunner” and scored agendas in remotes, Runners would probably win 80% of the time (especially now-a-days with Runner econ).
I think that’s why these kind of decks are necessary. They keep wombo combo decks in check and push Runner decks towards more tactical decks then strategic decks.
Now after de-railing the thread pretty hard there, I think that rotation isn’t as much of a problem for Jinteki as is just all the Siphon going around. What little econ received through events being taken away like that just sucks. Celebrity gift will be missed for sure (mainly since it’s 3 to play), but I’d rather play IPO anyways (since showing your hand currently is sometimes game-losing). AgIn will probably feel the blow the most since its the one that wants to run huge Ice.
Any ideas post-rotation for econ in AgIn? I’ve been experimenting with everything from Medical Research Fundraiser to Launch and Marilyn Campaign (I even tried Successful Demonstration and it wasn’t the worst thing ever).
I have to agree with you there. I honestly wish Hostile had been MWL’ed instead of Bio-Ethics, simply because Bio-Ethics can be a really interesting card in decks like Bio-Tech or PE to add that extra tick of net damage to set up the kill. It doesn’t feel anywhere near as degenerate when it isn’t protected by Hostile Infrastructure and adds a bit more teeth to shell game. Run and you might hit a Psychic Field, don’t run and you may take an unexpected damage down the line. It’s really only in decks that aim to make Bio-Ethics impossible to trash that it’s ever truly oppressive.
I’ve heard of people experimenting with the different Clearances from HB. I can definitely see how you could free up some influence and squeeze in a pair of Ultraviolets.
Absolutely! Bio is cool when its a surprise Neural EMP and insufferable when its 10 credits and 3 net damage to trash.
I’ll have to try that out. Haven’t had a chance to try any of the Violet/Ultraviolet Clearances in anything yet (since I’d never thought to use them outside of CI and I don’t ever touch CI). Always worth experimenting. Thanks!
