NAPD, caprice, sundew during spin followed by H&P brought the balance back to 50/50. Then Upstalk dropped two giant bombs, NEH and Lotus, and corp domination began then. Perhaps in some hypothetical “omniscient” metagame the balance was not so skewed, as plenty of anti-NEH tech was already in place (bank job, medium) but people didn’t figure it out for a long time. It took until worlds for andro-medium to show up, and until after for stealth andy. Regardless of the actual power level of NEH, this social aspect cemented its dominance. Then right as that starts to fade, DBS shows up. Since NEH, I don’t feel that the meta was ever not heavily skewed until late-The-Source.
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People already played AndroMedium during the French National to counter TWIY * Astrobiotic ;). In fact, the guy playing this deck ended 4th (he lost to a weird broke ass RP in LB ).
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I do think that ever since H&P, which enabled RP and modern PE, and then NEH coming out in the first pack of Lunar, and later on Blue Sun coming out, runners have had a very tough time building a deck that could do reasonably well against all four.
I felt like runner decks were built around how to beat specific corp strategies rather than bringing their own particular threat to the board.
Now that Lady came out at the end of Lunar for Shapers, Switchblade and Refractor for Andy, and O&C powering up Anarchs a great deal, corps can’t expect that their game plan won’t be fundamentally disrupted.
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I definitely agree with this: I’d throw Leela in there too; she’s phenomenal at disruption and dropped late in Lunar.
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Leela was the start of the swing back. A shame that she’s underrepresented.
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I played against a Valencia version of this yesterday, and lemme tell you… man was I six degrees of fucked. Blackmail for early lockout, unpurgable Chakana for late lockout. EBC doesn’t work all that well when all Parasites come in at 5 tokens minimum.
If I were playing Cyberdex Virus Suite, I could have maybe gotten two agendas scored… maybe. But winning wasn’t in the cards.
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I feel like this only gets worse with Clot and Traffic Jam (if they exist), as they’re in faction. Once set, there’s some ugly pressure.
Pretty sure Cyberdex will become FA’s Plascrete.
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And, before anyone starts to complain that we are no longer discussing MaxX and derailing the thread, look farther up this thread. You’ll see that the train crashed leaving the station.
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I thought I was the only one doing that! I’m currently playing a Hivemind Valencia deck that is absolutely crushing vs. unprepared corps, the trick seems to be making it less win more as my meta adapts. As I side note I still almost milled a weyland deck that played a turn 1 Mills, bootcamp, and power sutdowned about 6 times to kill djinns, chakanas and esp. progenitor.
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So, back to MaxX. Pretty great how those first two cards go in the bin and then you get to draw one for free, eh? Discuss!
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This all sounds about right. Despite good players putting up pretty absurd win rates with this deck, games all feel like they could go either way. Like Kate, this is the sort of deck that has relatively even matchups across the board, but that gives you a ton of options and therefore opportunities to outplay your opponent. Drawing an extra card a turn is a positively insane ability, but it’s far from trivial to make the best use of it.
Coming out of a meta where corps dominated, I’m totally happy with this sort of deck that can beat everything and allows you to leverage skill, even if it doesn’t have any blowout matchups like Stealth Andy.
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Andy’s boring. I prefer punk rawk, righteous indignation, or abject racism…
well, two of the three IDs are pretty neat.
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My gut says that knifed would pull a lot more weight here than david. Obviously getting both together is insane, but assume you can’t. David at the right time can kill an OAI, but at the wrong time only gets into the server once. Knifed on the other hand is 9 cred more expensive, but there’s no wrong time for it; plus the corp can’t really protect curtains from it.
My experience with blue sun glacier matchups vs anarch is that you win only by avoiding losing hives/tollbooths to parasite. It may be a different story for supermodernism blue sun but I doubt it.
If you put an ice wall or any other barrier in front of it, even a 0 sub Hive, Knifed won’t be able to get to it.
Ya but then your 14 cost ice is only taxing the runner 7.
As corp, perhaps accepting that fate is better than the alternative though.
But, as runner, if you wanna blow up blue sun pilots who aren’t respecting it, you gotta play enough copies to punish.
Truth is, a lot of Blue Sun deck rely waaaay too much on OAI/Curtain (or Orion) to jumpstart their econ engine. If you can kill an Oversighted Curtain on turn 1, you basically force the Blue Sun to play on the backfoot for two third of the game.
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no they just wait a few turns to lock you back out with a Hive and recover pretty easily. Blue Sun at its best is in “early game” for the first 3 or 4 turns, at its worst maybe 5 to 6
personally I don’t think Runner is phenomenally stronger right now, I just think people are playing worse Corp decks trying to get value out of the big box. I don’t just mean IDs, either
Ok I lost a game! I forgot my opponent had used jackson to recur his ToLs and decided to play for the mill-out rather than Wanton’ing my way to a win. Whoops! Trick of Light: Never Forget!
Played some more tonight, MaxX went 3 for 3. The 2nd David was good and a 3rd Knifed would not have been good as Knifed does nothing when I don’t have a breaker.
Not sold on the Scavenge yet - it sat in hand for a while and was eventually good. But Lucky would be good as soon as I draw it every time and I felt poorer without it.
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I’m so glad this ID is good
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