I’ve been reading these with great interest. I’m a reasonable CI pilot, but I know I can play it tighter than I do. Internalizing a few more of the less-used lines should help me a fair bit.
I really like these articles, they’re extremely helpful. In this example
For example (3 cards in hand but 2 BL and 2 SFK, replacing RO(SFK) with SFSS and using BL to play SFK from hand. 22 credits.):
one SFK is enough, you can advance the GFI with your last click too (means you need 23c though). I love the puzzle of CI, even though I’m still not very good at it.
Strange to see no mention of Black File as hate card. Artist Colony -> Black File very tough to win through, usually lose games where it comes out after you throw deck away.
Yeah that’s a really good point. Somebody else mentioned it to me yesterday, and its on the small list of things I need to add to the articles because I either didn’t know or didn’t think about it. (The other main ones being reuse into double biotic after a vamp, to start the combo, and just generally trying to score the EC earlier than usual against durdley runners because it gives you so many options).
Writing these articles has been an excellent learning experience, unfortunately they’ve also highlighted a few areas that I don’t know about, but am still working on improving. Thanks for reading regardless.
Thanks also for writing this. I didn’t mean to just poke holes, it is just that the most recent time I saw this deck the Black File made it a tough game.
My take on it is that off a peddler or artist colony it spikes your wheels (they wait till you throw deck away,put it down and things get really dicy). If they are manually installing it there is a weird game of chicken.
It is much easier to deal with if they have to click install, like most crims do.
If they are on the “run till you drop” plan, they want to slap it down right before bomb goes off. You want to deceive them about when you will combo, so that they lose with it in hand, or blow it early.
If they have decided that you are ready to combo the next time that they run they will start frantically drawing for it. Their goal is that you put down the agenda to bait their run, they run, steal it, and black file, then having some more rounds to win after that.
Obvi if you end up on the “both wait till deck ticks down to just 3 cards left” state, Black File is poison.
No problem, poking holes is necessary to make a better outcome anyway.
Yeah I’m convinced that as the deck stands right now, insta-speed black-file is death to CI7. If you’re really worried you can slot a foxfire in the deck, but you’ll still have to be very careful, in case they install it just before you play the last SFK. If they do that, you can’t use foxfire in your combo, so you’ll ideally want it in hand, generate an extra click, and then still have enough money to beat them on the foxfire trace.
The new hatchet job also looks like it would be amazing in this scenario… If they don’t pop the black-file early you can just hit the peddler/artist colony. However I don’t think the deck has the spare influence to include it.
Your best option is probably to assume its not going to be present in the meta and be willing to just concede any games where it happens to show up.
Thanks for your kind words everyone. I have done some minor updates to the articles to add in the points that I’ve missed.
Also worth noting that I put my money where my mouth was and took this deck to our regionals, doing quite well. Helped solidify some of the lessons I was trying to learn, such as that scoring EC early is definitely something you should be aiming to do.
As a player who keeps up with the game, but doesn’t have much time for competitive play, this series was a fantastic primer to understand why NetrunnerDB is flooded with these decks. Many thanks.
EDIT: 5 month necro shows just how out of touch I am with the competitive game.
