The MaxX Thread

edmund_blake_nelson · January 5, 2015, 12:31am

PeekaySK:

I hope by “Daily” you meant Armitage…Daily Casts has always been bad for me in Anarch. Sink 3 credits to make 5 credits in 4 turns? Fuck that - unless I’m also running Aesop, not bothering. Armitage on the other hand is decent for getting up to running range within the space of a single turn - on the turn you play it you can go from 1 to 4 and run, on an arbitrary future turn you can go from 0 to 6 and run.

My usual bare minimum Anarch econ package is 3x Gamble, 3x Armitage, 3x {Kati or Feeders} and 2x Liberated Accounts. If I want to beef that up, the usual suspects until now were two copies of Queen’s Gambit and two copies of Infiltration. I’m thinking Day Jobs instead of Kati/Feeder #3 and the QGs, keep the rest and see how it does.

On the subject of Queen’s Gambit I can say two things:* Two copies seemed to be the sweet spot* Sometimes it won the game for me, other times it won the game for my opponent… but it was very rarely a dead card.

zeroisnine:
If going down to two Day Job is correct because you are drawing it when you need money but also need clicks, then I don’t see how Liberated Accounts addresses the issue.

Daily casts is great, you just need it to be support for Lucky find/Sure gamble/Dirty laundry/Stimhack/Queen’s gambit/day Job who do the heavy lifting, while daily casts gives you a trickle of moeny Daily casts also goes great with Day job actually, Daily casts when you have 3 money left, next turn click 1234 dayjob then go back to running with 12 credits and 4 left on daily casts.
armitage is shitty econ, like actual trash, Spending A card and 7 clicks to gain 11 credits is slow and weak no matter how I look at it. Day job at least is a card and 4 clicks for 8 credits. Maxx has good draw with his ability+inject+steelskin, so cards are worth less than a click for him, thus it is much more important to have click efficent rather than card efficent econ. Stimhack/Sure gamble/Dirty laundry/Daily casts all fit that bill well

Ok one thing i’ve noticed when building maxx is that fitting everything in while actually having enough econ is a challenge, later this will run smoother, but here’s my first pass at making Maxx function.
currently my biggest concern is levy dependance. Maxx both needs levy to have a good endgame, AND can often milll it away due to his ability.
###[Day to day MAXX][1] (45 cards)

[MaxX: Maximum Punk Rock][2]

Event (21)

3 [Day Job][3]
2 [Deja Vu][4]
3 [Dirty Laundry][5]
3 [Inject][6]
1 [Levy AR Lab Access][7] •••
2 [Queen’s Gambit][8]
2 [Steelskin][9]
2 [Stimhack][10]
3 [Sure Gamble][11]

Hardware (5)

3 [Clone Chip][12] ••••• •
2 [Grimoire][13]

Resource (3)

3 [Daily Casts][14]

Icebreaker (6)

2 [Corroder][15]
2 [Gordian Blade][16] ••••• •
2 [Mimic][17]

Program (10)

3 [Datasucker][18]
2 [Medium][19]
2 [Nerve Agent][20]
3 [Parasite][21]

x3r0h0ur · January 5, 2015, 1:35am

How I can tell that I automatically disagree with someone’s analysis on cards and econ.

Including the card as a cost.

Armitage is actually perfectly fine econ, I would value it as a baseline economy card. It cuts the time it takes to get to various levels of credits in half. It allows you to recover from dips in economy very easily, and it does it fairly fast. The difference in econ is fast vs efficient, as it always is. Daily casts, like kati jones, is incredibly slow. Kati is efficient, armitage is fast. Easy mark and sure gamble are fast, dirty laundry is efficient. Sometimes you need one or the other…to say armitage is trash has to be flat wrong. Not great is a better evaluation.

This game is not played 1 click a turn, this game is not magic the gathering. Things are dramatically different here and evaluations have to be done differently.

Xenasis · January 5, 2015, 1:53am

But the card is a cost. This is actually important - it’s why Lucky Find gains a total of 6 when Sure Gamble gains a total of 4 (and thereby making two Sure Gambles more profitable than one Lucky Find) - you only need to draw once to use it.

It really skews how efficient cards are if you don’t factor in the fact you need to draw it as a cost. Easy Mark seems like a fantastic card if you just evaluate that it’s triple efficient, despite costing a card - better than Opus! I’d never put Easy Mark in any deck without a type of draw engine, but it’s a lot better if you’ve got a lot of cards coming in (e.g. Earthrise Hotel or similar), triple efficiency for the cost of a card can be really good in decks with heavy draw, but really bad in those without it. It then follows that Codebusting is a lot better when cards are valued a lot higher - but not in the same sorts of decks we’d want QT or Earthrise in, in my opinion.

That said, I too disagree with the analysis of Codebusting, it has its place in some decks - it’s pretty sweet in some Noise decks since you can sell it to Aesop’s.

In decks with heavy draw, though, you tend to want instant, fire-and-forget econ as opposed to drawn out cards like Codebusting. I’m not sure that Codebusting is right for MaxX, whereas I feel Casts is, it only takes a click to fully use the card. Decks with lots of draw will want these sorts of cards. It’s wrong to think that decks that want Casts also want Codebusting because they’re completely different cards - Casts eats the card up immediately and Codebusting doesn’t.

In short - “using a card” is a cost (even if it’s not so obvious) and it can help us to understand which sort of econ is best for certain decks. Decks with heavy draw want event-esque, one-click-fully-uses-one-card type of econ, you don’t want to draw into a bunch of Liberated Accounts and Codebusting.

Because of MaxX’s heavy draw, she seems like a perfect candidate for Daily Casts if you ask me.

zeroisnine · January 5, 2015, 1:58am

But isn’t that almost every card? My point isn’t that you can’t run Liberated Accounts, obviously you can. My point is if you need to do more on your turn than click for credits, then you probably want a different card than Liberated Accounts. Daily, Kati, Feeders, Gambit, Stimhack or even splashing a card out of faction.

I suppose I should say that I’m not really a fan of Liberated Accounts in general. I might try it out in a Noise deck since Pawnshop saves me a click, but in general, I need a card to do more than cost 6 credits and let me click for credits.

hypomodern · January 5, 2015, 2:09am

All of the cards in netrunner have this feature: one must put them in a deck and draw them in order to use them. Since this feature is, to date, shared by all cards in the pool, we can safely discount it in our comparative card analysis. If we got a hypothetical Future Easier Mark that allowed us to play it without drawing it first, that would naturally change things.

What is a more interesting line of comparison is the sort of situational comparison: “Under what conditions would I rather have Easy Mark in my hand than Armitage Codebusting? Do those conditions occur frequently? Do I have other outs already in my list for some or all of those conditions?” and so on and so forth.

Point being: situationally-aware marginal comparative analysis of cards is what is interesting. There is to date no need to bring up the draw of the card as a cost, since it factors out immediately in comparison.

edmund_blake_nelson · January 5, 2015, 2:13am

So the reason to include the card as a cost is comparing temporary econ boosts (day job/Sure gamble) to economic engines like Magnum Opus, Kati Jones and Security testing, Engines have large numbers of clicks invested in them, and once you payed the transaction cost the marginal cost of using them is only in clicks. Burst econ Like sure gamble however needs to have the Card included as a cost to manage. As its spend it and lose it econ.

Also cards are a resource to think about strongly IMO, yes in some sense drawing the card is a Sunk cost, but at the same time Card resources are huge when comparing multiple econ cards to a single economic engine For instance CT stimshop vs My MaXx deck. CT stimshop runs 3x Opus and lots of tutors for that opus. If CT stimshop Puts opus in play then spends 20 Clicks Clicking it for credits, there was a cost of 1 card and 5 credits and 20 clicks, for a return of 40 credits. For a net exchange of 1 card and 20 clicks for 35 credits, or 5 /3rds of a credit per click. But the marginal cost of getting another 2 credits is only 1 click.

Compare that method of getting the 35 credits to the following
Install Daily casts (net 5 )
Use queen’s Gambit (6 gain for 1 card+2 clicks)
Use Sure Gamble twice (8 gain for 2 card+2 clicks)
Use Lucky Find (6 gain for 2 clicks and 1 card)
Use Dirty laundry on a run made anway (3 gain for 0 clicks net and 1 card)
Stimhack spending 6 of the credits (6 gained for 2 cards)

Without knowing how the cards were drawn this is not very useful
once you see this is how cards were drawn for that econ you can analyze the efficency
Inject Drawing 2 cards and gaining 1 credit net
Inject Drawing 2 cards and gaining a net of 1 more credit
Maxx ability Drawing 5 cards
3 Cards Drawn off of steelskin
1 Click to draw

So Maxx’s ability gave us 5 addional cards, CT’s ability makes the opus MU issue not significant, so i’ll ignore MU in the cost of Opus install. In return for maxx’s ability counting for free.

So MaXX spent a net of 4 Clicks Drawing cards and 7 clicks taking actions, for a net value of 35 credits or 3 and 2/11’s of a credit Per click

Xenasis · January 5, 2015, 2:14am

The difference is that you don’t really use up the card to play a Magnum Opus - it’s kind of still there.

Cards that you use up immediately are by nature more efficient than those that stick around, but the former needs a good draw engine required to be much cop. You need to take this into account when analysing cards that you fire-and-forget as opposed to those that you don’t.

MaxX, by nature, is a draw engine of her own. I’d find it hard to play Armitage over Daily in her.

kiv · January 5, 2015, 2:44am

Future Easier Mark is called Desperado + Security Testing Once you get it on the table, it’s like putting an Easy Mark in your hand every turn without having to draw it (as long as you have a target).

x3r0h0ur · January 5, 2015, 3:15am

But the card is a cost.
The problem I take with that is that every card is a cost, you can just write it off, don’t waste time including it. At least when comparing the value of cards.

There is far more to the analysis of easy mark type cards than their economy efficiency, including disrupting the corp’s idea of how capable you are. Putting econ cards into the econ vacuum and analyzing them makes lots of otherwise playable cards look like turds, when they’re not. Costing a card, a click, and 2 credits, PPVP looked like crap, until someone put it in a deck and tried it…

Also as you said and is said above, it is not often you’re getting 1 card for 1 click, so how does the value of the card relate to making money (how many clicks did you spend making the card)? Its far too convoluted to try to quantify for my taste in that regard. Comparing SG to Armitage is very awkward for that reason.

Here is the problem, almost every single one of those includes 1 card as it’s cost. I fail to see how that matters, remove the common denominator and you’re left with essentially the same analysis.

Also in your analysis, stimhack costs you 2 cards and leaves you with no credits…it is thus a terrible card. And it also brain damages you…terrible. However the effect is basically a successful run, what is that successful run actually worth? If it wins you the game, it might as well be worth an infinite amount of credits. In any case, you’re not gaining 6 credits or 9 credits or any of the above (note you didn’t include the cost of pornshop or the click to put the item on the pornshop). The in-game impact of a card can completely overrule the value-analysis more often than click-credit analyzers want to talk about. NB4 “edge case.” Also, you’re forgetting those turns you have to click 1-2 times for a credit to play the sure gamble, the vacuum ignores these too, and you can’t hit me ‘edge case’ that that doesn’t ever happen.

Off the armitage point, but onto other cards…since you can’t draw specifically the card you want, drawable economy lets you replay the click you spent drawing it as cash later. You’re also not always drawing for economy, sometimes you’re drawing for defense, drawing for breakers, drawing for board state…so the clicks are hard to value in the analysis as well. There was an old article…something to the effect of the click ‘market’ that touched on this and is a pretty good read if you haven’t seen it.

FWIW, I think an engine is far more effective in maxx than burst econ, simply because of the variance. If I find the econ, I damn well want it to stick around, because I can’t make any promises on when I’ll actually draw the next one (how much of my deck do I want to be drawing vs running out due to self trash?). I like kati, opus, tri-maf, etc for maxx, unless we see some faster recursion…deja vu’ing for kati feels like sitting on my balls on a hot day.

I think THIS is what actually killed burst econ, since half of the people playing this game play criminal, and these are the standard fare for criminal decks.

Xenasis · January 5, 2015, 3:30am

This completely isn’t true. Just because you didn’t think it was good didn’t mean other people did.

Prepaid VoicePad costs a card, as do all of the burst econ cards that go with it, making them go together perfectly. You’re looking at cards too much in a vacuum - as you say, there’s a lot more to cards than efficiency - and remembering that when you’re trying to figure out how to make a deck’s econ work is important.

Econ cards that stick around are greatly different to ones you fire and forget - and it’s very foolish to pretend otherwise.

I don’t think this is a reasonable analysis at all, you’re just as likely to mill your long-lasting econ as you are your burst econ.

Burst econ isn’t ‘dead’ and everyone’s still playing Sure Gamble and people are splashing for Lucky Find. Easy Mark was getting cut from decks before Security Testing hit.

Prepaid Kate is a pretty huge archetype.

edmund_blake_nelson · January 5, 2015, 3:38am

x3r0h0ur:

s cost. I fail to see how that matters, remove the common denominator and you’re left with essentially the same analysis.

Also in your analysis, stimhack costs you 2 cards and leaves you with no credits…it is thus a terrible card. And it also brain damages you…terrible. However the effect is basically a successful run, what is that successful run actually worth? If it wins you the game, it might as well be worth an infinite amount of credits. In any case, you’re not gaining 6 credits or 9 credits or any of the above (note you didn’t include the cost of pornshop or the click to put the item on the pornshop). The in-game impact of a card can completely overrule the value-analysis more often than click-credit analyzers want to talk about. NB4 “edge case.” Also, you’re forgetting those turns you have to click 1-2 times for a credit to play the sure gamble, the vacuum ignores these too, and you can’t hit me ‘edge case’ that that doesn’t ever happen.

Off the armitage point, but onto other cards…since you can’t draw specifically the card you want, drawable economy lets you replay the click you spent drawing it as cash later. You’re also not always drawing for economy, sometimes you’re drawing for defense, drawing for breakers, drawing for board state…so the clicks are hard to value in the analysis as well. There was an old article…something to the effect of the click ‘market’ that touched on this and is a pretty good read if you haven’t seen it.

FWIW, I think an engine is far more effective in maxx than burst econ, simply because of the variance. If I find the econ, I damn well want it to stick around, because I can’t make any promises on when I’ll actually draw the next one (how much of my deck do I want to be drawing vs running out due to self trash?). I like kati, opus, tri-maf, etc for maxx, unless we see some faster recursion…deja vu’

Because I was comparing 2 different economic strategies entirely one was a *magnum opus * economy and the other was spending cards to gain money, so depending on the cost of a card the 2 economies have different efficencies.
In the game described above The stimhack was actually the following sequence

INstall clone chip (-1 credit and 1 click)
Stimhack
Use clone chip to find Gordian Blade
Gordian to break Lotus field
Stimhack spends 7 credits but I cut 1 due to Clone chip install
I didn’t include the click to install Clone chip, correct, but it would cost a click to install gordian anyway so in terms of click cost. So I included having a gordian blade in play as worth 4 credits.
To my analysis stimhack is a busted card… absurdly efficient as long as you meet one of the following criteria

Have medium/nerve agent in play and the tax on R&D/HQ is 4 credits or higher
Have Clone chip/SMC installed
Be fighting a remote server

Realisitcally stimhack is better than sure gamble, and is the BEST of the broken 0 cost run event cycle (indexing, Account siphon, stimhack) but it requires the most setup to use. It is the BEST econ card in the game bar none. honestly perhaps even the runner best card in the game

x3r0h0ur · January 5, 2015, 4:12am

On stimhack we can agree. No matter how rated that card is, it is underrated.

strundle · January 5, 2015, 4:23am

For turns 1 through 17 or so, MaxX has less variance than any runner apart, perhaps, from Andy. With that said, including some long term engine might be worth it for the occasional game that runs longer than 17 turns.

x3r0h0ur · January 5, 2015, 4:48am

eeeehhh Being able to draw a card vs having to have a way to draw it back has to increase variance. You have to both ditch the card you want to the ability AND find the card you’re going to use to get it back. I’d rather straight up draw it. That said, obviously its FASTER if you’re gaining access to the cards…so it is still good.

Help me out with how it is more consistent than other runners.

edmund_blake_nelson · January 5, 2015, 5:09am

The more cards you draw the more well distributed your hand will be

mediohxcore · January 5, 2015, 7:00am

Desperado is an awesome 3-of because it gets better the sooner you play it. Day Job does not.

You can choose to include or not include the card as a cost when you consider two economy cards. If you’re trying to compare something like, the relative value or Sure Gamble when you have Opus out, you really need to include the card in the cost or you’re going to get wrong answers. @edmund_blake_nelson has it spot on.

While this CAN definitely be true, and should be accounted for, (maybe I want gamble in my Opus deck because it smooths out the bumps), The relative value of something like Easy Mark vs Armitage can be pretty accurately gleaned from a mathematical analysis. Corp decks can assume that the runner can ‘pull something’ in a lot of cases, and therefore will not play into something as simple as “oh shit, I thought he couldn’t afford get in but he had a Sure Gamble”. Also, as skill level goes up, runners just tend to sit on more money, making this kind of surprise burstiness less valuable.

I think Stimhack is the BIG edge exception here, mostly because it’s such a gigantic credit swing and it saves you a click running at the same time, allowing you to maybe install a breaker or make value runs on less important servers before going in on the Stimhack target. So, in a sense, you’re correct, that being quick has value, but unless you’re being almost impossibly quick, you should just look to mathematical analysis for comparing economy cards.

This is fallacious. As long as you can Levvy, Maxx is more likely to see her cards than any other player in the game. Drawing extra cards lowers variance, even if she mills some other ones that you never get to play. Variance only starts to go up when you can no longer draw cards.

Also, it’s funny how close to Deja->Kati is to Hostage->Kati. I agree; both plays are shit.

Oops you forgot Desperado!

edmund_blake_nelson · January 5, 2015, 8:00am

stimhack vs desperado is probably close, Stimhack works absurdly well with any sort of setup, while desperado is great early-midgame Stimhack is best mid-lategame. Stimhack+Self modifying code is super strong. Draw 3 cards (stimhack discard+SMC+Stimhack itself) and gain 9 credits + have a Icebreaker in play. The value level is more than 4 credits/click which is better than desperado IMO. I think that desperado has an edge in consistency (desperado is good whenever, stimhack needs support to truely be busted) but in raw power level stimhack has the edge.
They’re both the #1 and #2 cards, but it’s hard for me to pick a side, I lean toward stimhack for now but that’s mostly because I have been grinding lots of games vs NEH and RP with valencia and stimhack is at its best vs Glacier and Fast advance
My one issue with maxx right now is levy dependance Deja Vu>levy makes me vomit inside. against NEh you just never Levy but against anyone else right now you sometimes vomit value by having to deja-vu for levy. Also getting levy milled, and then not using deja vu due to the fear of not finding the other before it gets milled suck

anon34370798 · January 5, 2015, 8:36am

I’d consider tower deck + Wyldside, no inf for recursion, Anarch all the way and **** you mother*******

PeekaySK · January 5, 2015, 8:36am

I don’t know, man - the way LA usually gets played in my games is “drop LA*, take the bare minimum off so I’m not screwed if it gets trashed the next turn”. After that, it’s often sitting there as two or three copies of on-demand Sure Gamble, ready to be used. I’ll spend my whole turn on it pretty much only if I’m tagged, to make it a less appealing target.

In fact, the biggest disadvantage I see to Day Job is that you’ll be spending your whole turn “clicking for credits” (unless various stimulants and/or hot bounty hunter chicks are involved, of course).

*and this is where the problem has lain until now - having enough money to be able to drop it reliably. This is the thing I expect both Day Jobbin’ and all the new awesome card draw to change.

But Day Job does get better the sooner you have the option to play it, should a comfortable window open. I can think of quite a few decks/matchups where a first turn facecheck into a double-iced opening could be disastrous, or at the very least, needlessly risky. In those situations, “Gamble/credit, LA, take 4 off twice” hasn’t been too terrible as it leaves you set up for a really brutal early game. Dropping a turn 1 Day Job in those moments might be worth consideration, at least.

Is it worth thinking of it less as an econ card and more as another punishment tool for the corp handing you tempo?

strundle · January 5, 2015, 9:54am

Because until your deck runs out, you are seeing more cards than other runners (except for Andy, for the first four turns). The fact that you’re also trashing cards is mostly irrelevant if your goal is to draw a particular card or set of cards. The only impact on actual gameplay trashing straight from the deck has is that it changes the kind of card effect you need to pull those cards out via tutor (e.g. Retrieval Run vs. SMC or SoT vs Planned Assault).