What is the thought on dropping 1 of these into criminal builds to deal with Caprice Nisei and, to a lesser extent, Jackson Howard?
You have to run to get them to rez the Caprice Nisei first, you have to make a successful run on HQ (what if the Nisei is on HQ?), you have to spend two clicks. It’s just not very efficient at all.
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You also have to install the card, and it’s dead outside of the matchup.
The problem with S&W is that it isn’t even that good at what it’s meant to do, and it’s completely dead outside of that context. You also don’t want to have to dig for your one-of either.
Maybe it will be better in combination with Drive By, but we’ll see.
it’s a real bummer how bad they made this card. still, sometimes i’ll jam it in a criminal deck when i find myself at 44 cards. guilty pleasure
ASH, Caprice, and Jackson can pose a serious threat to a lot of decks, and I think that the possibility of handling them (especially against IG and/or encryption protocols) at a steep discount is not to be so hastily discarded.
That being said, it is clunky, its hard to justify more than a 1-of, while not really providing the level of consistency to handle those threats when you want it, and hardly validates 3. I think some Gabe decks with 3x Sneakdoors might be happy to play 1, and if they get it great, if not, its hardly a lynchpin of the strategy.
What it boils down to for me, is cards like Unregistered S&W or Zaibatsu Loyalty, even if they are meta-dependent or sometimes wasted abilities, but they provide a way of interacting with the game that fundamentally can’t be done with different cards, and savvy players absolutely can make do with a surprise S&W in the right match-ups (and if you don’t want to regularly lose tempo with it, just use Mr. Li as your card draw)
If you’re already on sneakdoor + spend your turn to get around caprice, you might as well just run a quest completed
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You know what else deals with Ash? Trashing him when you get to him, which costs slightly less than installing and using S&W.
God, why did they make this card so bad.
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Based on when it came out, I think it was intended as more of a safety valve than a viable counter. Like in case Caprice was too broken.
Edit: I mean they want a counter to glacier to be available for that “fuck caprice” guy, but not for it to be an actual nerf to the strategy they’ve been trying to buff since Genesis.
But then it’s either in the wrong faction, or should have triggered off of a successful Archives run. The way it is now, it’s completely shut out by the very problem it attempts to solve for the runner.
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Well… I think this could be a solution in those decks that use Eater+Keyhole combo when there’s a Caprice on the R&D. Still, not very efficient, but… it is there.
I guess if you want to shoot up clones, you have to pull an All-Nighter or get hopped up on Stims.
This card never made sense. You have to install it before-hand for zero surprise value, run HQ first click, double click the Caprice you probably already hit and wasted money getting to, and then make a most likely expensive run to the remote.
And not possible with ELP.
Quest Completed is better in every way. And I never thought I’d say that.
EDIT: S&W ironically gains value when Drive-by enters the meta. Preemptive rezzing to protect from Driveby actually adds immense value to the gun.
I agree with dan.
It looks like one of those silver bullets FFG uses/needs to curb the meta. If there’s ever the day and meta where you are a criminal, the corp has set up some impenetrable servers with upgrades, you could have dealt with it with this card, possibly combo’d with sneakdoor. So if they ever let a glacier-upgrade strategy get out of control, or you ever feel like that’s the one thing that’s consistently beating you, they have a card in the pool already that could give you a fighting chance.
That we call it bad now only means the problem it could possibly solve hasn’t arisen yet, or isn’t important enough to us.
Just compare it to Feedback filter, because that looks like an example where such a silver bullet actually worked for FFG. That card was a joke, we thought similarly about it. Till the latest iteration of Jinteki PE decks happened to have a decent matchup against the criminals, but didn’t compete economically on creds at all. Apparently that matchup could be greatly improved for the small cost of just one influence and including that silly card (because it is, the situation where you’d want to pay 3 creds for a card is rare).
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You might be right that there might be a time where S&W is the right meta call as it seems to be the case with Feedback Filter, but the fact that it’s 3 influence instead of 1 makes it hard to swallow.
Very cool flavor though…
No doubt. Cart before the horse, here.
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even so, why the double click to activate and not just a single? was that really necessary
if only it could trash eli, maybe it would be played. no reason to use real bullets to kill a virtual child, though
Instead you just Knife him. Poor kid.
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Yes, it was really necessary. Otherwise you wouldn’t get to say “Click, click, boom!”
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Too bad IT Department is not a Sysop. That would have made USW35 better.
I’m still looking forward to the day of unlocking the achievement: Silhouette/Blackguard; run HQ, expose/force rez Caprice, click click boom, run remote and steal Nisei Mk II.
Rules clarification: you could run HQ, install USW35, then use it that turn, right?
1 Like