Sometimes. It depended on how broke the corp was, and if I have a Fall Guy lying around. I normally cleared them, but spent the back end of at least one Foodcoats game tagged and my opponent was too pressured to trash resources.
Most NEH games I went tag-me and didn’t play many long term resources (if I started with a Data Folding or Mr Li I’d usually play it). There was no time or money for trashing them, as they both went hell-for-leather Biotic scoring Astro, and I had sufficient burst from Bank Job to trash Pad. Pop-Up on R&D doesn’t help as much when you pound with Maker’s Eye.
Regarding RP, Sneakdoor through Crick makes me sad.
I finished second, tied for first, using the same decks as the previous tournament. I’m very happy because I beat a lot of strong players and my only loss was against a Foodcoats that rushed behind a NEXT Bronze I couldn’t break and a Caprice.
Little play-testing note: Savoir-Faire is actually kind of hilarious with Geist because it can allow you to drop Crescentus/w/e after you get it with a Geist pull.
Doppelganger is ok. Doubling up Sec Testing/Bank Job-ing/Account Siphon/Indexing on one click is kind of nice, especially with Faust because he makes it so easy. Forger is probably better once Tech Trader drops (assuming the text is as guessed) if only because it turns on the cloud.
Having Geist draw power fuel Faust mid-run feels really good.
With Clone Chip and SMC costing the same influence now, I wonder if it’s better to play SMCs?
I’m not sure if Indexing is better than Maker’s Eye, but I like being able to pick the steal. Having to be aggressive against Jackson kind of sucks, but I think that’s overall to the runner’s advantage anyway.
Anyway, still testing stuff out. Hopefully Mumbad actually comes out soon so we can play around with that stuff.
I just started testing multithreader and savoire fare with the B&E breakers and some central only breakers, and it was quite fun getting the corp to rez when I can get in on TME or Legwork, and even more funny to surprise crescentus when they do rez. Its actually not an awful program really.
Tested a game last night with a list similar to one of kiv’s newer ones. Turns out NEXT Silver is the most annoying ICE I’ve ever seen as Geist. When not running Apocalypse, I’m not sure how to deal with HB campaigns behind ICE while HQ slowly gets more and more protection (Drive By is fine if you get it for the first one, but they eventually land a campaign - they always do). It’s already hard to afford influence for R&D multiaccess, and once they’ve got a 3 or 4 deep HQ + remote and 20+ credits, it kinda feels like the game is over. My personal experience with Geist is that he’s consistent, but not ultimately as powerful as I’d like, since making a bunch of runs eventually becomes impossible.
List for reference:
Armand “Geist” Walker: Tech Lord
Event (9)
3 Account Siphon
2 Drive By
2 Emergency Shutdown
1 Legwork
1 Levy AR Lab Access
[quote=“GwiLo, post:1173, topic:4242, full:true”]since making a bunch of runs eventually becomes impossible
[/quote]
So this is kind of just a general opinion about Netrunner, not specifically about Geist:
I think the game is moving away from making low impact quantity runs, and more towards high impact run events. That is to say, I generally don’t make a run unless it’s Siphon, Legwork, Maker’s Eye, etc. Making runs just because I have the money and I can seems like it might be an ineffective use of clicks. I feel like it’s much better to build my board and plan a big hit, over just throwing accesses against the wall and hope I pull out 7 points. I feel like this is especially true with the decks I’ve been playing most recently, Apoc MaxX with DDOS and Geist with B&E, because they have a limited number of resources to use to make cheap accesses.
Also, like I said a bit further up, it just seems wrong to not play Faust right now. It’s the most cost effective breaker in Netrunner at the moment, and being able to turn dead cards into accesses/power events effectively turning your entire 45 card deck into money should not be overlooked. I think you need a really good reason not to play Drug Dealer Faust in Criminal right now.
I hit a double turing remote and chronos protocol 4 times yesterday with my Faust Gabe test deck. Even my miser’s E3 couldn’t save me. Make faust big and faust will be awful.
I think that whether I had Faust or not, going through the following on HQ is quite a tax and very annoying:
NEXT Silver (6) -> Assassin -> NEXT Bronze (6) -> Ichi 1.0
Assuming ridiculous amounts of corp money from solid play, that’s rough, even with Crescentus to derez the Assassin. I couldn’t Siphon efficiently, and there wasn’t much more in the deck for high impact runs. Which meant that I needed to choose my remote runs carefully (except there was a Caprice + ASH on the remote) and get lucky on R&D runs when Legwork wasn’t available (and I Legwork’d twice, and one of them didn’t have to go through all four ICE, of course).
I’d say that corps are moving to high sub, midrange-y glacier-y builds overall to counter Faust. At least, that’s generally what I’m doing when not playing fast advance. Sure Faust is strong, but it certainly has its drawbacks. I think any Criminal build, Faust or not, will likely have the worst late game out of any faction, and Geist is no exception.
I’ve also found that Geist suddenly can get very weak for a time right after Levy if his breakers don’t draw him anything good on the next run.
That said, +1 Faust +1 Maker’s Eye -1 ZU.13 -1 Corroder might be worth it to pressure multiple centrals.
And there are some builds that never run out of being able to run - many Sunny builds, for instance - though I have no way of commenting on their overall effectiveness and their ability to win games.
You know, I don’t want to be the guy who jumps in and tells everyone to play his decklist but after seeing the problems you have, yeah, you should totally play my decklist.
I mean, if Apocalypse gets you out of all these situations why not play it? If there are 6 NEXTs on the board, you are not going to win no matter what you run so better blow up everything. Sneakdoor Beta should also help quite a bit because it allows you to snag agendas.
Similarly, running Breach and Passport over Corroder and Zu saves influence that you can spend on Maker’s and the former is better against big barriers by a very wide margin.
I don’t know, I think the solutions are there already!
I think I’m just way too wary of Apocalypse flipping too many cards I want to keep. It’s more a personal thing, I think. Still trying out way too many things with the MWL to focus too much on a single ID. From what I hear, I might be spend more time with Geist once the new cycle releases.
[quote=“GwiLo, post:1176, topic:4242, full:true”]
NEXT Silver (6) -> Assassin -> NEXT Bronze (6) -> Ichi 1.0[/quote]
How did that happen? That’s 20 Credits and 4 clicks dedicated to one server? Nevermind that there are apparently 4 other NEXT rezzed on the board. I can understand if it was a couple of crazy ABTs.
They got a rezzed Eve at the end of my first turn, built a scoring remote and put about 3 campaigns in there before they started scoring.
To be fair, by the time I was in this bad position, I’d gotten 4 points and was eventually just one agenda from winning. Final turn hail mary on HQ (since more likely to have agendas at that point) but was a couple credits short of firing Legwork from heap for the 3/5 chance instead of the 1/5 chance it ended up being.
Clearly I wasn’t entirely locked out, but I needed more time to set up runs. I was a turn behind on many of the high impact runs I wanted to make and got punished for it.
Edit: also never saw Siphon until 3 ICE in front of HQ. Bad beats sometimes.
There are solutions to ensure you don’t lose your cards to facedowns, most of which aren’t that onerous. Try including a one-influence one-of (Independent Thinking, Chop Bot) that can utilize facedowns. Clone Chip back an unneeded cloud breaker to overwrite your whole rig. In the example ICE setup you gave, that’s perfect for Apocalypse because Ichi 1.0 is on the inside; run HQ last & don’t break the trashing subs, so your breakers end up in your heap. It’s a fun puzzle to find the right window for Apocalypse that maximizes impact on the Corp & minimizes it on yourself. I’d recommend everyone try it out for fun or at least as a mental exercise.
While I agree that MWL pretty much killed Geist for me, there are builds out there without Desperado. They’re the builds that avoid @GwiLo’s problem of not being able to run constantly by maximizing the impact of a handful of runs, they probably have Forger & Apocalypse. Fun, experimental stuff that won’t be as consistent. The fun of Geist for me was crazy Street Peddler-Clone Chip-B&E breaker plays where you’d somehow get into a server you had no right getting into & net four cards plus a credit in the process. Those glorious runs may have seen their heyday.
