Top Competitive Decks Post O&C

First post on the Stimhack boards. Not to kiss too much ass, but this site contains some of the voices I trust the most in the competitive Tube Sprinter community, so I figured I’d join up and start talking real ass Web Jogger with you all.

The thing on my mind lately is this: What, now that O&C has dropped, does everyone think are the top competitive decks for Store Champs season and what lists does everyone have their eyes on for Regionals?

I’m pretty sure that MaxX, Andy, and Kate will form the trifecta of widest played Runners for the foreseeable future, but is anyone else as impressed with Haley as I am? Also, if Clot shits on FA as hard as everyone thinks it will, do other IDs become good or even great? Valencia looks awesome, but I’m afraid to run her with so much FA in the meta.

Speaking of FA, is it altogether invalid when the meta gets Clot and does NBN die? NEARPAD style decks seem like they would still work fairly well. RP and PE don’t seem to be facing any new hate, so I think those will still be good. I’m loving Blue Sun and have an eye on Titan. That new HB coming our in SanSan also looks fairly brutal.

Anway… I’d love to hear what some of you think.

My thoughts based on the two store champions I’ve attended since O&C:

Corp side the decks to beat are Blue Sun, RP and NEH with Blue Sun being the most popular in my local Meta. I did see other IDs being played but either they didn’t do very well or I believe they could be made stronger if they switched to one of the above archetypes. I’ve seen a bunch of HB:EtF decks but there hasn’t been one that I thought was so strong that it was the best possible choice.

Runners are still struggling trying to deal with the stronger corp decks. The problem is that all of these archetypes win in different ways and demand different builds so that the runner has a difficult time constructing an all comers list. It’s hard to deal with the scorch threat from BS, the glacier in RP and the blazingly fast NEH scoring all in 1 deck. The most successful runner decks I saw were Stealth Andy/AndySucker/Leela/Prepaid Kat and eater MaxX. I wouldn’t have expected Leela Patel to appear in the above list but the winner of both store championships played Leela so she may be a top competitive runner. I also think that eater MaxX is not the best MaxX but that’s personal opinion and not reflected in what I saw people play.

TLDR:
Blue Sun,
RP,
NEH

Andy (Both varients)
Prepaid Kat
MaxX

I like Leela.

Runner Top Tier: Calimsha Kate, Stealth Andy, Datasucker Andy
Solid or Top Tier but with strong hate: Bunch of different anarch builds (max/noise)
Meta Call/RNG Prone: Leela, Parasite Gabe, more anarch builds, Stimshop

Corp Top Tier: NEH FA, HB Rush
Solid or Top Tier but with strong hate: RP Glacier, RP Rush, Blue Sun Glacier, NEH DRT, Hinkes PE, NBN Scorch, Grail NEH, ITD
Meta Call/RNG Prone: 7 Point Shutdown, Argus Mushin, various grail builds

You can call it tier 1/tier 1.5/ tier 2, I just think tier 1.5 is a silly term.

What do you consider RP Rush? RP with 2 points agendas?

rp with a lot cheaper ice that tries to score out a nisei behind 2 ice or ice + caprice. ELP makes it brutal to check a server and get a breaker for it. You run the same agenda suite because those cards are all really high powered.

EDIT: The smoke hasn’t entirely cleared after O&C so I’m not really sure which anarch build is best atm.

Pretty much this. I’m gonna say that Andy (both version) have somehow better good matchups than kate but worse bad matchups. The strength of Kate right now is not having a single bad matchup, even if some of them (like Standard RP) are more a cointoss on the psi-game than anything else.

[edit]

Also, as much as I like RegMaxx ( also known as Minimum Punk Rock), I think the main issue with the deck isn’t so much his inherent strength (it’s in my opinion as strong and versatile as kate if played perfectly) but the fact that you can’t make a single mistake playing the deck. Both Kate and Andy have some way to recover from a mistake or a (very) poor start but it’s not the case with Maxx and you need to take that in consideration when it comes to evaluate a deck. On a 6 rounds tournament + top, even if you’re the best player in the world, there is a point when you will take a bad call and it will blow you up a couple of turns later and ultimately lose you the game.You usually don’t have this kind of issue with Kate and Andy.

Reg-ass is the only competitive O&C deck imo. Val is too slow (or too inconsistent depending on build), kim underpowered, and max eater keyhole drops from like 70% winrate to 30% when the corp opponent understands the matchup. I can see Val with 3 SMC 3 clone being good with Clot.

Tier 1.5 makes sense to me. It means either a deck with mostly tier-1 matchups but one or two particular opponents that it stone loses to (PE vs FF crim, gabe vs blue sun, HB rush vs RDI shaper), or a deck that’s only slightly underpowered (I’m coming to believe reg-ass is here). Tier 2 either relies on unskilled opponent play, has 2 or more unsalvageable matchups, or can’t mitigate variance.

So IMO…

Tier 1 corp: NEH biotics, NEH biotics+grails, BS glacier (with crisium), RP, RP grails, HB IT dept (ignoring time limit problem)
Tier 1 runner: Calim kate, stealth andy, andysuckers (with or without switchblade), leela (maybe??)

Tier 1.5 corp: HB FA+rush, NEH scorch and/or midseason, NEH ToL, BS glacier (without crisium), tennin
Tier 1.5 runner: Reg-ass max, parasite gabe, leela (more likely imo), stealth shaper

Tier 2 corp: HB CI, supermodernism (any weyland), Titan ToL, Argus shell game nonsense, Jin PE, NEH DRT, foundry grail, Jin IG
Tier 2 runner: Noise, max eater keyhole, valencia

Y’all underestimate Leela. She’s tier 1 imo.

HB Rush top tier? Are you just referring to good old ETF FA or some Foundry/NEXT Design build?

He’s giving it slightly more credit than it deserves, but it’s really well-positioned until clot. Stay tuned, we’re working on an article about it

(hint: the secret is 3x DBS)

NBN won’t die. There will be intrepid NEHers who maybe switch out Fast Track for Cyberdex Virus Suite and do well. Or just ignore the existence of Clot and still have success.

I think Clot should be thought of to FA as Plascrete is to Scorched. People are still getting scorched. And once plascrete hits the table there are ways to get around it and still scorch. It’s just harder.

Yeah, I don’t really get why Leela still seems like a dark horse to folks. Leela’s been winning store champs and I’m pretty sure she’s got more than Valencia or Edward Kim, but for some reason people are still always thinking Andromeda when they think Criminal. Not to say Andromeda isn’t still awesome or anything, but Leela’s showings since her release should be making people sit up and take notice. She’s got incredible strength against players who don’t know what’s coming, and the aggressive builds of Leela maintain that strength against high skilled players as well.

Maybe it’s because people saw and learned to play against the Logos Leela when Leela first came out and didn’t realise that, like MaxX, there was a very powerful traditional build in the offing?

@Paranoid

I agree with Leela’s overall power level but I feel that Tier 1 decks are decks that have stood the test of time and have had many different people play them and play against them. Leele still isn’t common enough for people to have enough experience playing her and playing against her so it’s hard to tell if she’s really that good or people are just not good at playing against her. Andysucker is T1 because everyone has known about it for years and knows how to counter it and it still wins consistently. Leele is good but she hasn’t been popular long enough to be sure she’s tier 1.

Sounds quite interesting, I look forward to the article!

That was that stuff you were playing the other night. Yep, it was fast.

Still seeing this same opinion about MaxX/keyhole being a junk deck against opponents that know her. My win-rate with her in Stimhack league is 83% and my corp game is 10-15% worse despite playing top tier decks that I know how to pilot. Every deck I come across has wraparounds, chronos projects, swordsmen and they still lose the majority. At what point do we admit the deck is good? I just don’t get the weird refusal to give credit to that one deck archetype despite massive overwhelming evidence in its favour.

Might be time for an exhibition series!

I think there is a difference between having cards in your deck that are good against Eater MaxX (chronos, swordsman, etc), and knowing how to play against it. I think the largest evidence against it right now is that, aside from the first week or so after O&C came out, Eater MaxX hasn’t been on top in any SCs. I think that’s because the good players simply have the matchup more or less figured out. It can still do very well, though, because if you don’t know how to keep siphons from crippling you, etc, you can lose the game very fast. Against newer players or players that aren’t familiar with the archetype, I’d imagine it has a very high winrate.

I definitely respect it. I’m not a Stimhunk elitesman though

It won another SC–I like the twist on this version: http://netrunners.co.uk/forumdirectory/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=634&p=8264#p8264

Edit: ALMOST won