That’s not true. I’ve won an SC with it, and watched another player win an SC with it in February in a field that was well-prepared to face it. There are plenty of SC winners playing that archetype since the initial week.
Oh god I love that deck!
I know people have been able to make it work even against experienced players, and I don’t deny your successes. I also haven’t played against RegAss MaxX yet so I won’t comment about the relative power of the two MaxX archetypes running around.
However, I have played against a few Siphon/Keyhole MaxX decks and they were definitely able to be played around. The pilots weren’t experts I’m sure, but if you’re able to keep MaxX out of HQ for a little in the early game and then set up taxing ICE, MaxX is pretty easy to keep poor. Would a better player be able to clean the floor with me? No doubt. But maybe what people are seeing is that a lot of people who wanted to try MaxX went with the Keyhole/Siphon strategy, including the people who weren’t going to be good at piloting that. So we’ve seen a lot of MaxX fails with the Siphon strategy and probably less failures with the RegAss strategy, which probably influences what players feel about the relative strengths of the two plans.
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Kate, Leela, and Maxx will be the three best runners going into the regional season, with Andy/Valencia/Hayley all right behind being a bit more metagamey.
I’m fairly certain that every corp will be sort of bad by the time Regionals come around, so you’ll have to figure out which corp has the least hate being run for it at any particular tournament.Feedback crushes PE, Reg Maxx crushes RP, Leela will stomp NEH, etc.
It’s going to feel like Worlds 2013 again, with more runner diversity.
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That’s a perfectly reasoned response and I agree. I certainly don’t think the deck is unbeatable, and you can play defensively against it with a degree of success. On the other hand, if you draw your regular economy early, and with MaxX that happens more often than you’d like as an opponent, you aren’t reliant on landing siphons. Against slower decks if you get a favourable draw you can accumulate 20-30 credits before you even need to start hitting servers.
MaxX’s ability is so strong that lots of deck archetypes will succeed, including the more vanilla variants, but after a hell of a lot of games, I’m pretty convinced that siphons just sometimes win games themselves! 
I agree with most of what was said here, but I think there is a lot of trouble figuring out which of the good runners are best/tier one without really thinking about a specific metagame. Both Andys, Leela, Kate, and both Maxxes seem to be on close-to-even power levels right now, and the playstyle/experience of the player and the metagame is going to factor in too much to determine how to rank out those runners into simple tiers. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a tier one Val deck that someone is killing it with but hasn’t spread to the collective consciousness.
The corp meta is much simpler. Flatline is too hard to achieve because of IHW. The best corp decks are RP Glacier with or without Grail, Blue Sun Glacier, and NEH Astrobiotics. I think NEARPAD is possibly tier one as well but I think it has a little bit of the PE factor going for it-- people don’t know how to play correctly against the huge amount of remotes yet.
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@gumOnShoe’s Valencia experiments were pretty terrifying in our local meta. I’m not sure how to beat the deck without teching directly against it, which in most decks (not Bootcamp Blue Sun) doesn’t come naturally.
My experience with RegMaxx who arguably play more econ cards than Siphon Maxx is that if you’re lucky, you will see something like 5-6 econ cards before your Levy and RegMaxx draw way more often than Keyhole/Siphon Maxx. Most of the time, you will see at best 3-4 econ cards out of your first draw so I truly doubt that you can just sit on money and not pressuring with siphon.
Could you educate me. With whatever deck I’ve had, I’m struggling in that matchup and I’m not terribly close to getting a feel for it.
Faster and enough traps if you can get there before I can set up a medium dig you have a chance. If you have enough components in hand you might survive if I don’t check there.
@nordrunner beat me simply by using that rush HB strategy. NEH beat me by also be quick enough. When clot comes out there might be more play here for valencia; I’m not sure on that. But all in blackmail is absolutely devastating to a mid-range/late game deck that hasn’t teched for it. And that means RP/Red Coats/Weyland decks. Titan has some play if it can train it out or remove the BP.
- Crisium Grid out of Blue Sun / HB crush this kind of deck.
- Caprice on HQ and Crisium on R&D out of RP make this kind of deck a joke.
- Wraparound / Eli / Architect on your central and being able to dive down to 0 creds by rezzing stuff with NEH is pretty important. Architect on HQ early on when they try a Knight + Siphon without much creds is also a great play.
- Early on, you can probably let your R&D open one or two turns, it’s more important to protect HQ against the Siphon and Archive against Retrieval Run.
- Don’t panic and don’t let them dictate the flow of the game. It’s really easy to keep them low on cred with the right play.
A build that I haven’t seen people mentioning is HB Deadcoats, which to my mind is at least tier 1.5, and might even be tier 1. Certainly it’s always a solid choice for me, given that I dislike RP and sometimes switch from NEH for meta reasons.
Not with IHW and Utopia Shard being there in almost every deck.
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IHW turns most anarch builds from free wins into just average matchups. It’s really not that scary.
I’m not sure I’ve actually played against a Utopia in meatspace, and it’s certainly a long, long way from being inalmost every deck.
Yes. Everyone keep sleeping on her, as I don’t want to face her.
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but what if they don’t run siphon?
Then just stack all your ICE on R&D and win the game?
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Just make your R&D annoying as hell, don’t bother to protect HQ that much if you see them playing LF instead of Siphon. One annoying ICE (Architect, Lotus, Wraparound) on HQ is enough, the rest can go into your R&D.
Slightly off-topic, but can we get @Calimsha the title of ‘Kate’? I see ‘Calimsha Kate’ everywhere, so why not every time I see him post? XD
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NEARPAD is very good, but I feel like the good ol’ standby of “get money, check remotes early” is hard for it to overcome. With the amount of Noise in the meta recurring Imp is a bit of a nightmare for it as well.
Basically life is hard as a corp right now.
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