She’s the one in the Day Job art. Awesome.
I love the ability. I can’t wait to dig through my stack with abandon.
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As @karmaportrait said above, I’m just not a fan of putting so many cards in the heap. The corp gets to see all your tricks in the heap and the lines of play for such a runner would be very obvious as well. Deja Vu and Same Old Thing are great, but they lose a lot of their efficacy if they are used for cards that were never played in the first place. In other words, they become very, very slow.
I know a lot of people love Inject, but I haven’t seen it be that awesome so far. The ability is definitely better than Inject though. It’s a fun card, for sure, but my initial response was “Ugh, that is so bad.”
Instant star. Anarchs tend to run redundant breakers since we don’t have in faction tutors, so it’s much less of an issue than it would be in Criminal or Shaper. It’s great with both aggro builds (like Siphon) or comboish builds.
I’ll always love Noise the best, but she’s easily the best of the rest simply because her ability effects her, rather than the corp, meaning is easier to build to take advantage of it rather than relying on meta calls.
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I think everyone instantly assumes recursion is necessary with MaxX, but I’m not sure that is the case. I don’t think you have to build MaxX around Levy. Clone Chip? maybe, but that’s nothing new in Anarch. Same Old Thing? Not so sure. Roughly 2/3rd of the time it’s a dead card. but I guess that goes for anything in MaxX. Recursion could be unreliable. I am initially going to test her as just super aggressive, try to win by turn 10 or gtfo
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I can’t wait to combo her with Q-Coherence Memchip! Instant combo magic!
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Seriously though, while a free draw every turn is very powerful, I don’t know if she’s going to make it as far as competitive by herself, without some strong new recursion coming in the next box. Simply due to consistency issues.
You’re going to go through your deck at the same average chance of seeing any one card, but at a substantially lower chance to get multiples of cards you want multiples of (IE, Legworks, econ events). Rather, you get more value out of cards you take multiples of just to draw one early (IE, consoles, reusable econ engines).
So to get consistency, the deck is going to have to be crazy robust. And nearly auto-lose versus ping-you Jinteki PE.
In my mind, I’m thinking Magnum Opus Economy (3x MO), Corroder, MimicFemme, Zu, 3xCrypsis using Spinal Modem. Possibly Wanton Destruction as the HQ attack, RDI import as the R&D attack. Plus a lot of econ events.
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well yeah she is an anarch
She might work alright with Power Nap and Queen’s Gambit and other doubles
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This only seems true if you expect the game to go long. Let’s compare a runner who spends 1 click a turn to draw vs. Maxx never spending a click to draw. Both will be equally likely to see multiples of any given card in their deck. Maxx may mill her second copy of, say, legwork, but this is no more likely than it being on the bottom of the stack for the other runner. Both runners are seeing the same number of playable cards, and so have the same odds of seeing multiple copies of any given card. It’s only if Maxx runs out of cards in her deck that she is disadvantaged- she can no longer dig for extra cards, whereas another runner can, so she will see fewer cards in total, and so have less chance of seeing specific cards. But in the short-to-medium term, I don’t see why she would be any less consistent than any other runner.
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I play a lot of the Game of Thrones LCG, and in that game card advantage is king. Netrunner is inherently different since you can simply click for a card, but Maxx is going to take card advantage and recursion to another level.The only thing better than playing an OP card, is playing the same OP card a million times. To do that, though, you have to gain access to the card. This is either done by drawing it, or by milling your deck so it can be found in your discard pile. Maxx not only draws you cards for free, but she also seeds your discard pile with important cards that can be brought back later.
The Game of Thrones of LCG has essentially been broken several times, and there has always been a common threads in those deck- self milling and recursion. A deck emerged that could win on Turn 1 before your opponent could play a single card. It went through an enormous amount of trouble to mill it’s entire deck, and then used recursion to create an infinite loop. Maxx has the mill ability built in and draws you free cards at the same time.
The important thing to note is that milling was the engine that set up these enormous combos, but recursion was the mechanic that facilitated actual win conditions. Compared to Game of Thrones, the recursion FFG has introduced in Netrunner has been very conservative. So far, every card we have is a one-time use (Deja Vu, Clone Chip, Same Old Thing) or exiles itself from the game (Levy AR Lab Access, Trope). It seems like they have been very conscious when designing recursion mechanics and this has kept things balanced. If, however, they let a single card through the cracks - a recursion card that stays in play and can be triggered every turn - then Maxx’s strength will reach astronomical levels.
In summary, I’m excited to run with Maxx. She will be exciting to build for and she will open up a lot of creative possibilities. With the existing card pool, she will be great. With Trope she will be even better. And, if we ever get a repeatable source of recursion, she will be absolute insanity.
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Despite their conservative nature, recursion is what caused good cards to become ridiculous cards. Parasite and Account Siphon are absolutely fine without recursion, but when a deck can replay either one 9 times it gets pretty stupid, and because these cards can be recurred so aggressively FFG has been forced to release silver bullets to these cards.
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I think @ossa and @MoocowTG are looking at the right things. I predict MaxX will be strong because you get to find out where 3 of your cards are, for free, every turn. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a little more in-faction recursion in O&C beyond Trope, just to make sure MaxX works, but it’s definitely going to be conservative.
Speaking of Trope, here’s how far you can drag out the game if you play 3-of on your first turn. I’m assuming that you pop Trope the turn before you empty your stack, so you still get your free draw the next turn.
| Turn | Cards in stack | Trope 1 | Trope 2 | Trope 3 | |------+----------------+---------+---------+---------| | 1 | 37 | 0 | 0 | 0 | | 2 | 34 | 1 | 1 | 1 | | 3 | 31 | 2 | 2 | 2 | | 4 | 28 | 3 | 3 | 3 | | 5 | 25 | 4 | 4 | 4 | | 6 | 22 | 5 | 5 | 5 | | 7 | 19 | 6 | 6 | 6 | | 8 | 16 | 7 | 7 | 7 | | 9 | 13 | 8 | 8 | 8 | | 10 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9 | | 11 | 7 | 10 | 10 | 10 | | 12 | 4 | 11 | 11 | 11 | | 13 | 1 | 12 | 12 | 12 | | 14 | (+12 - 3) 10 | - | 13 | 13 | | 15 | 7 | - | 14 | 14 | | 16 | 4 | - | 15 | 15 | | 17 | 1 | - | 16 | 16 | | 18 | (+18 - 3) 16 | - | - | 17 | | 19 | 13 | - | - | 18 | | 20 | 10 | - | - | 19 | | 21 | 7 | - | - | 20 | | 22 | 4 | - | - | 21 | | 23 | 1 | - | - | 22 | | 24 | (+22 - 3) 20 | - | - | - | | 25 | 17 | | | | | 26 | 14 | | | | | 27 | 11 | | | | | 28 | 8 | | | | | 29 | 5 | | | | | 30 | 2 | | | | | 31 | (no draw) 0 | | | |
Probably the most interesting thing to see here is that even a turn-one trope only buys you an extra 3 turns.
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Good stuff, @endgame
To be fair, you should assume that you only see one of those three Tropes, right?
Yes, and I expect it to be a mulligan-for card when playing MaxX, otherwise you have a 2/3 chance that the first copy of a critical recursion piece goes straight to the heap (unless you’re clicking to draw). You’re also going to want to have a trope installed on turn 2, because then you can still fire it off on turn 13 and get to the end of turn 17 with its cards. Otherwise you may consider waiting until turn 5 because any extra cards you add are just going to get dumped (unless you draw, other recursion, &c.).
That’s assuming your using trope to restock your draw pile. I think a stronger use is to use it to just let it build up to 3-4, then use it when your deck is already fully milled to get whatever cards you want and draw them immediately. You basically spend a turn drawing in order to sculpt the perfect hand out of your entire deck, if you time it right.
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Yeah, one important thing to remember is that the runner doesn’t need cards. It’s good to have them to handle meat/net damage, but it’s not essential. Keeping a hand at 5 or so for a few turns to let things build more is entirely an option.
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But if your opponent has a he-3 deposit, you can mindslaver them and use it to put more counters on your trope!
(while fair in magic, mindslaver would be extremely overpowered in netrunner.)
This may be a critical insight. Once your stack is empty, Trope becomes a fetch-on-demand system for your entire deck! There’s still the risk of never hitting one. And it exiles itself :-/ But still sounds useful.
I don’t think trope is all that in Maxx by itself. It takes a long time to be actually effective, and unless you draw the cards immediately, you just mill a bunch of them back in. It might be worthwhile to play with quality time or something in place of Levy, but waiting 11-13 turns for a multiple-tutor seems a little lackluster to me if you’re not getting almost every card you put back in your hand.
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