Clot-style FA killers MaxXes may (may) want to play Djinn in their decks. I wonder if there will be enough room to put all of these cards without removing excellent attrition cards in a 45/47 larla MaxX without hurting a little more her tempo allready hurt by larla and deja vu / sot.
I agree with all-out warfare, but with Katie. I’m playing with 23 attrition cards / 77 cards now and yet this is still working with my poor piloting skills. So, hey, who’s the daddy troll now
1-2, say 3 siphons <<< 6-8 ice melts + a few other tutorable tricks arounds, imo. This is all about adaptation.
It never slows down until you win (especially in turns > 12). This is the price of the consistency : larla to prepare + no heap in endgame, this is what I called efficiency earlier.
Don’t underestimate Hivemind, Progenitor, Wanton and Amped Up. Hivemind in particular is super-impactful in how it enables old viruses that missed their mark just a bit - stuff like Darwin, Chakana and Gorman Drip.
edit: also, Spooning a Tollbooth with D4v1d is hilarious. Now we just need a DataPumper to make that particular solution work for Lotus Fields, and we’re all set
It’s probably too early to call, but I think it’s (somewhat) close.
H&P delivered Legwork, the single best HQ multi-access card in the game, Security Testing, the best criminal econ engine, and Passport, the best Criminal decoder. All of them are near auto-includes in criminal decks.
O&C gave us IHW, which is as close to an autoinclude as any of the previously mentioned cards, but it also gave us a bunch of less-universal but certainly useful cards in Eater, Knifed, & Wanton along with some less powerful but playable cards in the rest of the silverware, Hive Mind, & Amped Up.
I think the deal breaker is the IDs. The H&P Crim IDs were pretty much all overshadowed by Andy, but I think Ken is at least as good as Ed Kim. Really, the fact that Anarchs were hurting for standout, universally strong IDs make Valencia and Maxx look that much better and be that much more relevant than their Criminal counterparts.
Basically, H&P introduced a lower quantity of playable non-ID cards than O&C, but the quality cards were SERIOUSLY high quality. O&C’s power is more spread out. The IDs in O&C are definitely more powerful, but the fact that playing any Criminal ID comes at the opportunity cost of not playing Andy makes Ken in particular seem a lot worse than he actually is/was.
Could you expound on how you are having such success against Cambridge PE? I’ve been consistently losing to it with FF-less Criminal. Looking back, every loss was due to not running advanced things. But I feel that if I were to run at every advanced thing then inevitably I will hit an Overwriter.
Wanton Destruction, don’t sleep on wanton destruction. Knifed is also brutal. Vigil is a good console, but Anarch already had a couple of those.
I think the runners have been coming back hard since the middle of the Lunar cycle. The game is in a good place at the moment. Not sure if O&C is a runner or corp box though - there are a bunch of fun and strong Weyland cards in the box.
I haven’t even begun to test the new virus package; but so far this is a great box for runners. Power balance of O&C feels like C&C, where HB got almost nothing of note and Shapers got a bunch of staples. H&P had some real power cards in it like Sec Testing and Legwork, but also a bunch of criminal garbage. I swear there are no average Criminal cards: only great ones and garbage ones ;).
And yeah, my extremely vocal desire is for runners to be better on average than corps, so that part is good… but once the FA nerfhammer drops it might be too much, is what I’m saying ;).
The Weyland cards seem played out already, which is sad. Still probably better on average than what HB got, but screw HB anyway .
Criminals didn’t need a 40 card runner with an expose effect—there’s basically one good deck for Sil, which is too bad; Iain has too little influence to compete for a top spot. Ken’s fine; more than fine, actually, but the meta immediately shifted to include a lot of long-game corp decks which meant his ALL THE RUNS synergy struggles to maintain steam. Very wise to give him 17 influence.
All the Anarch IDs are at least interesting and disruptive so far. Valencia and Edward’s “things” seem better than Sil’s, and they all have reasonable influence, unlike Iain.
Anyhoo: MaxX, right? If the Mediohxcore Regular Anarch Stuff build is also really strong, she’s gotta be the queen of the set, right?
Man, they had a good 2 or 3 datapacks there, didn’t they? :trollface:
Ditto. Medium can also be huge out of the Eater style; building medium tokens while you’re clearing R&D ice seems really mean.
Even if Cambridge PE ends up being a problem match-up for MaxX, it’s not an especially hard deck to tech against if it’s a relevant portion of your metagame: there’s a wide range of answers you can jam in based on how much help you need and how willing you are to hurt your other matchups, from Inject so you can cheaply draw up at the end of your turn, to Deus X, Infiltration, or Feedback Filter, all of which which we get to tutor for and recur, to an extra copy of Levy if we’re really in dire straights.
Part of the reason MaxX decks are so sweet IMO is that Clone Chip eventually becomes SMC and Deja Vu turns into straight up Demonic Tutor, so you get to play the same silver bullet game that Shaper does during deckbuilding.
The only time the balance felt really heavily tilted in corp favor was in my opinion between The Space Between and Up and Over. Basically, RP got ELP and then we got Blue Sun and Architect, who together practically killed parasite kate, the best deck against RP who still had an okay-ish matchup against NEH without Architect.
If you can show me a deck that Hivemind actually functions in, I’ll believe you. To me it looks, at best, a 3 credit virus that causes the corp to purge (maybe?). And it requires support even to do that, what with its 2 memory. Cards that don’t do anything on their own are really hard to play.
Spooned I’ll grant you. In fact, right now Architect and Lotus Field (particularly Lotus Field) are the two cards stopping Anarch from being really, really strong. But they’re so good at doing that, it drags the whole faction down. But I don’t think O&C was a huge factor in this. Inject and D4v1d are the real power cards.
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.
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 ).
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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