Tournament Report: Delusions of Grandeur

Discuss the latest StimHack article from Narziss here.

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Anonymous Tip combos very well with the Weyland burst economy cards. Seems good in Weyland.

Fueled by the combo enabling card acceleration of Anonymous Tip/Green Level Clearance, I’ve been considering the construction of a Haas-Bioroid deck that runs both Oversight AI and Bioroid Efficiency Research.

That deck has a major problem, which is that tutored-for Deus X absolutely crushes it, breaking and derezzing the Heimdall2/Janus. E3 implants also crushes it.

I feel that most criminals are playing at least 1 E3, and most shapers should be playing 1 Deus X and tutoring + recursion. In testing shaper on octgn yesterday, I played against two HB Oversight/Bioroid decks, and Deus X recursion absolutely crushed them.

Also, the anecdote about playing old netrunner was interesting. The card All-hands was definitely a beast. You pretty much decided on one point where you felt agendas had begun to pile up in their hand, but they hadnt started playing them, you played All-Hands, took them all, and never had to think about HQ again.

Its a good think that card isnt in A:NR right now, as it would greatly increase the already significant runner advantage.

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Narziss, your analysis of Snare! in this article is one of the key elements that makes my original Never Advance NBN deck work. That deck was built in an metagame environment of significant R&D hate as well, so I thought it would be worth mentioning here that there’s one more additional influence tweak that is worth exploring for your Weyland deck given that we have returned to an environment of R&D hate.

Since you are already taking advantage of Snare!, you might consider including a couple copies of Data Raven as well. This makes you lose some potential to misrepresent your deck to the Runner as the build from Maryland that you mention which doesn’t run Scorched Earth, since Data Raven is a powerful tell in Weyland for that. However, you gain a much more likely scenario that a surprise Snare! will grant you the flatline if it comes from behind a Data Raven, given that the Runner now has 2 tags instead of 1. That’s particularly helpful with R&D hate, since you don’t even have to have the Snare! in play to set off the bomb, and because any decks that don’t play tag-me lose a click to drop the tag when they run R&D. That’s often enough to prevent them from running it twice.

This would be a metagame decision for your deck, since running Data Raven has obvious ramifications for playing against tag-me Criminals, but many of those decks still run Kati Jones, so this isn’t quite as much of an issue as it once was. If the current rise in popularity of Shapers continues past the initial blush of C&C (or even Noise; tags are hell for him), finding room for 2 Data Ravens could be a good counter to the metagame for this deck.

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Thanks, interesting read.
What do you think about 2x flare in Weyland? It helps getting rid of pesky carapaces and otherwise will usually have a good target as everyone and their mother is playing R&D interface. It’s also a decent card to oversight if you don’t have an archer around (I can see this being slightly inconsistent even with anonymous tip).

I think including Data Raven is a really great idea. Seems much better than SEA Source.

I really wish I could have 2x Data Raven and 3x Snare. I’m going to have to see what I do with influence.

A deck like this might be nice, but I’d unfortunately have to dump the Anonymous Tips:

Weyland Consortium: Building a Better World

Agenda (10)
3 Government Contracts
3 Hostile Takeover
1 Private Security Force
3 Project Atlas

Asset (3)
3 Snare! •• •• ••

Operation (15)
3 Beanstalk Royalties
3 Green Level Clearance • • •
3 Hedge Fund
3 Oversight AI
3 Scorched Earth

Barrier (5)
2 Eli 1.0 • •
3 Ice Wall

Code Gate (3)
3 Enigma

Sentry (11)
3 Archer
3 Caduceus
2 Data Raven •• ••
3 Shadow

I could also try keeping 2x Anonymous Tip and dropping 1x Snare and 1x Enigma.

I’m very curious to test these variations, yet I’m also content with the deck in the original post (so I can always fall back on that build). However, it’s unfortunate that CnC brings me no upgrades, whereas runners are all improved.

I tend to win most of my games via scoring agendas, so I’m a little hesitant to lose focus on that strength. The ability of Flare to destroy hardware like Carapace is quite nice, but when you Oversight AI the Flare, no one is going to run it if they can’t break it. I actually tend to feel like with Anonymous Tip this deck is consistent enough that I always get to Oversight at least one Archer. However, my real issue with Flare is that 3 influence just seems like too much.

If you aren’t going to play any cards that let you tag the runner (because let’s face it, data raven doesn’t tag the runner) why not drop 1-2 copies of scorched earth as well?

I was the guy who played the sixth place Maryland Regionals deck. First place was my roomate and we ran almost identical decks. I also piloted a similar, pre- Future Proof, and slightly less good version of the Maryland deck to first place in the DC regionals and I was the first seed after the swiss with another very similar deck at the New Holland Regionals (I lost to my roommate in the first round of the top 8)

I like the version that you listed and I’m going to try it out for sure. Here’s my current list that has remained Scorched Earth less:

3x Government Contracts
3x Project Atlas
3x Hostile Take Over
1x Corporate War

3x Archer
3x ICE Wall
3x Wall of Static
3x Enigma
2x Chimera
1x Bastion
3x Eli 1.0 (3)
3x Rototurret (3)

3x Oversight AI
3x Beanstalk Royalties
3x Hedge Fund
3x Green Level Clearance (3)
3x Anonymous Tip (3)

3x Corporate Troubleshooter (3)

I totally agree on your take on the economy. I’m pretty sure the Weyland Operations/ Agenda economy with Anonymous Tip is the most powerful corp economy available and it does let you out pace the runner, espessially in the early game. This is defiantely good when you are trying to use SE, so I approve of the change there. I like how you can use your money advantage as a threat to prevent runs, espessially if your opponent sees a SE in your hand or on top of your deck.

The changes I’ve made reflect what has been giving me problems over the past few months. Fearie is this deck’s nemesis, hence the added Rototurrets to shield your oversighted Archers. This also encouraged me to run more CTSs since there were more cards to combo it with. The other thing I changed was taking out the trace ICE (Viper and Caduceus) since they were pretty useless against the best deck (that is to say Datasucker Andromeda, who happens to have 1 link and use Compramised Employees). I would keep the Shadows in your deck, but I think I would swap the Caddies for Hunters. One of the best upsides of running SE is that you make some cheap, good strength ICE extremely relevant, and hunter can be some great early R&D ICE or sit out infront of your Archer. Caduceus on the other hand is extremely weak to Andromeda right now, seeing as both a single link card or a mimic can completely nueter it.

As for Data Raven, I’m not a big fan. As someone pointed out, you’re not actually tagging anyone with this unless they are ready for it. It’s a decent piece of ICE just because it can be so expensive to get through, but it’s really not worth the influence.

Snare! is awesome and I think 2 is the right number considering the importance of cards you are using your other influence on. I also think 1 Sea Source is also the right number, just because that card is so bad when it’s not winning you the game. I think drawing 2 would make me contemlate suicide.

Awesome deck, thanks for the shout out and keep us updated on how the deck is doing.

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There are a few different ways to play tags. I see the main methods as:

  1. Try to exhaust the Runner by having a bunch of tagging ICE
  2. Try to surprise the Runner by giving them a tag they’re not ready for
  3. Try to actively tag them on your turn

I find #2 to be the most effective if you only need 1 tag on the Runner to do what you want to them. (It’s not necessarily as good with Psychographics that needs more than 1 tag). Narziss has obviously already discovered one way this tactic works based on his analysis of how Snare! works in his deck. Bernice Mai and the newly spoiled TGTBT agenda serve a similar purpose, and Ghost Branch + Posted Bounty/Breaking News do as well in a different way.

Data Raven’s contribution to this strategy can be viewed in a similar fashion to Hollis’ work compression concept for Jinteki. The on-encounter tag is the part that’s important, not the subroutine. If you put this ICE on R&D in a tag-and-bag deck, that takes away one click they can use on this turn if their plans for the turn include running R&D, unless the Runner already has sufficient protection to ignore Scorched Earth or can bypass Data Raven. If they also need to account for Snare!, that’s two clicks they need to remove tags instead of one.

If Data Raven never tags the Runner but forces them to adjust their running strategy to be slower according to this need to clear two potential tags, it did its job. If it forces the Runner to play bypass effects to get around a 4 credit ICE, it did its job. If the Runner simply doesn’t run it at all, it did its job. If the Runner doesn’t ever keep a tag till your turn with this strategy but has to pay clicks and credits to remove them, it did its job. If the Runner ever fails to account for these tags and dies to Scorched Earth, it did its job.

While I agree on its own it doesn’t typically tag the Runner for the Corp’s turn, it does definitely tag the Runner unless it’s bypassed. That’s pretty good taxation on its own excepting the case of tag-me Runners which I did mention already. It’s not a good enough reason to spend the influence on it if that’s the only benefit you’re getting from it though, so it would be bad in a version of this deck that ran the Ghost Branch/Posted Bounty tag strategy, because there’s no synergy between those cards and Raven. That said, stacking Data Ravens with the Snare! strategy definitely works, and it’s that synergy that makes it worth examining.

Remember that you don’t have to win with Scorched Earth - that card is there to punish Runners that fail to abide by the tempo dictation that you’re setting for them in the game by using this strategy. If they do slow down to account for the possibility of flatlining, it makes winning via agendas much easier. Narziss himself said he typically wins games via agendas, and the Ravens are a handy tool for that.

Most of the benefit of this comes from having Data Raven on R&D though, because it’s an agenda-hemorrhaging murderhole for the Corp. If you don’t see R&D as a point of weakness for your deck, then you’re probably better off spending the influence on something else. For my part though, it’s always seemed like R&D was the biggest point of weakness for any Corp deck during any point of the lifecycle of the game thus far, simply because there are so many Runner cards that destroy you there (Maker’s Eye, Indexing, R&D Interface, etc.) and only one Corp counter card (Snare!).

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I’m hot/cold on Data Raven. It’s a deterrence/work compression card, as Lluluien suggests, but with ok-tag-me decks on a clear upswing, I haven’t observed it serving that purpose very well. At 4 credits to rez it becomes a bigger liability vs. a very popular archetype.

I’ve had vastly more success with SEA Source as a 2-pt splash in Weyland, since it is “active”. While I have a slight preference for active approaches, if the tag-me archetype fades in popularity, I’d definitely bring back Data Raven as a static deterrent.

@Narziss - No matter what you do though, hold on to at least 1 copy of SEA Source. The ability to fetch it with a Project Atlas counter makes it far too powerful not to include one for the search capability!

I only wrote a few words, but I feel like you didn’t read them at all. This is stimhack, no one is debating that tag threats are not a viable deterrent, and no one is saying that data raven is bad in a scorched earth deck. No one is saying that scorched earth decks only win one way.

Honestly Lil, I’m not joe board game geek user, and I actually agree with most of the things you say about netrunner.

I am saying that if you give up the ability to lay a tag on the runner when you need to, and not just whenever they feel like taking tags - why not free up some deck slots by cutting a scorch or two?

Sorry Chill, I apparently came off a lot more argumentative than I meant to be. I was really just trying to explain my position more on suggesting Data Raven for this particular build, because while I would normally agree w/ you that Data Raven won’t tag the Runner, the combination w/ Snare! is actually the one place where I’ve found a reasonable amount of success w/ doing just that.

I definitely agree w/ you that the general level of expertise is about 10x higher here than anywhere else I’ve seen. My post wasn’t really geared toward telling you something you didn’t know, but since you brought up a point which I thought needed clarification w/ regards to my previous post, I wrote that for whichever readers that might come here looking that would have found the clarification useful.

If we don’t think that the deck is connected deeply enough to the flatline strategy to make Scorched Earth useful, what other cards would you include in their place? Any time I’ve run Scorched Earth Tag&Bag in Weyland, I’ve always found having 3 copies useful if for no other reason than I can usually get a counter or two on Atlas, then when the time for pain comes, do 8-12 damage instead of 4. That’s particularly handy if your tag condition is surprise and not SEA Source, because if the Runner got the tag before you got your 3 clicks, you can get all 3 copies out in one turn.

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I apologize as well, players new to weyland would benefit from your post, so I’d like to emphasize that the information is as substantial and useful as the rest of the things you post about.

I think it’s safe to go to 2 or even 1 scorched earth for the following reasons:

Without sea source to enable scorched earth, you are cutting down your ability to just get lucky and combo off early game, meaning your games will go longer on average compared to a version with at least 1 sea source. This means more draws, and more likely that you will actually just draw 2 scorches without needing any atlas counters when the opportunity comes.

The existence of plascrete carapace means that you can’t kill the runner with any amount of scorch damage as long as they have 2 or more plascretes in their decks.

1 plascrete means you can kill them with a double scorch when they have 3 or fewer cards in hand; however 2 plascretes installed makes it so that you can only kill a runner with 3 scorches, and then only if they have 3 or fewer cards in hand.

If you are playing 3 scorches, and you throw a non lethal scorch at a runner, expecting to just blow up a plascrete, you will be really sad when the runner only removes 1-2 counters from plascrete and discards 2-3 cards from hand, now your chances of killing the runner that game have dropped to almost zero.

So it is my contention that giving up “the combo” sea source + scorched earth is certainly a viable strategy - it’s just that because it requires you to get lucky or have the runner make mistakes before you can flatline them, you might as well not commit so many card slots to it because of diminishing returns on scorches versus runners that get plascrete into play.

You can still get lucky and kill them after they hit a snare, but unless they had 7 cards in hand when they ran on their last click, you still only need 1 scorch to kill them. If the runner was playing plascrete carapace you were going to have a hard time killing them no matter what anyway.

In my opinion, it’s reasonable to overclock an atlas by 1 or 2 counters and be able to flatline them until you score your 5th agenda point, and then you can just go fish hostile takeovers instead. Additionally that overclocked atlas can stack 2 snares into your hand before the runner accesses your HQ for another way to win.

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This is a really great point about how the value of Scorched Earth changes at the beginning, middle, and end of the game. I hadn’t ever really thought about it in this way before, particularly the part about how the Hostile Takeover fishing at the end game has the deckbuilding implications for how long Scorched Earth is useful if we’re planning on having a few Atlas counters anyway. I’m glad we got started down this road, since that’s a new idea for me to chew on :smile:

How many copies of SEA Source do you think the deck needs in order to advocate having all 3 Scorched Earths for the early game potential? Is 1 enough to make it worth the space, or do you need more of them than that? I’d probably never run a Tag & Bag deck without 1 copy of it, but I have run it quite a few times with only 1, which may be the wrong move based on some of the timing things you bring up.

I’m personally partial to holding on to all 3 Scorched Earths, but that doesn’t mean your point about why you can reasonably cut 1-2 copies of it doesn’t apply, I just need to apply it in reverse and make sure there’s enough justification for the early/mid-game draw chances if I want to play it that way. I also typically don’t run Oversight AI in my T&B deck for space reasons though, so Narziss’ deck might be precisely the one where your observation on cutting Scorched Earths might make the most sense. Definitely food for thought.

@Narziss - Hey dude I think I need to make sure I’m clear on something - I don’t think any of my thoughts here are necessarily improvements to your deck. You’ve got a damn fine deck already :slight_smile: I just meant this as food for thought on a variation; I definitely think your version is good enough that it would require some pretty extensive testing to jiggle Ravens in to make it “better” instead of just “different”, and the “better” case might not even be possible!

Not to get too far off of the subject of Narziss’s deck, but I’d have to think about how many SS’s I’d play in any given deck.

Right now I am playing 2ss with 3se but one of my reasons for using 2 is that I want to be able to sea source a katie if I need to without compromising my ability to combo off.

My other reason is that I am using some influence for advance-able traps so I don’t have as many data ravens and snares as a stock TnB deck.

@Narziss’s Deck

I think 3 OAI’s with just 3 Archers is too narrow as well. If it was like bioroid efficiency and didn’t kill your ice after it’s broken, I could see 3 OAI’s as anti-shutdowns being good choices. If you draw 2 oversights and no archers or vice verse you are gonna have a bad time.

You could give yourself more archer food by converting your PSF and 1 OAI into 2 posted bounties. Posted bounty sets up a scorch win, masquerades as government contracts, becomes archer food, or bluffs the runner into thinking you dont have scorched earth in hand. I think it would be a reasonable include.

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any thoughts on splashing closed accounts instead of playing scorched earth everyone is ready for?

there is huge suprise element, closed account give us room to score some agendas with poor runner, then all runners bring plascretes that are dead card, finally all runners who face wayland play over scorch anyway giving us some tempo advantage :slight_smile:

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@Chill: Regarding your comment on OAI, I really like having all 3 and 3 Archers. Yeah, it can suck a little bit getting too many OAIs, but not all that much really. Either it’s a card that sits in your hand offering some HQ padding, or it’s one of the cards you discard after playing a Tip. Drawing Archer without OAI is not a big problem at all. The deck does run Hostile Takeover and can even just sac an Atlas if it really needs to. Archer flood has never been a problem for my SE-less rush version, and I don’t see how any of the changes Narziss made would make any difference.

On the other hand, getting both can give you huge leg up during the early game, and let’s you get the win only giving up 1 or even 0 zero point along the way. I toyed around with the idea of cutting OAI to 2, but 3 just felt a lot better.

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Yeah, I really recommend you try the deck. I seriously feel like every game I can pull off at least one oversighted Archer. Between using Hostile Takeover and Oversight AI, I have been really happy with the consistency, consistency enabled by running 3 Anonymous Tip.

Thanks for posting here! I’m really glad to get to communicate with one of the creators of the original, non-SE deck. I’m curious to try your current version out a bit on OCTGN. Corporate Troubleshooter seems very deadly with both Rototurret and Archer.

Chimera is one card I personally haven’t gotten into, and I tend to want to see just any normal ice instead (but I suppose it can be good early on, although can really hurt against Compromised Employees).

Has Corporate War treated you well? Maybe I’ve just had bad luck running CW (and I guess a SE deck may prefer scoring PSF). But yes, your recent version seems deadly!

Thanks for your suggestions. I’d like to hear what you think if you test out this SE variation.