Hey, man, where’s the Caduceus love? :’(
I haven’t seen that card in a long time. In HB I always end up cutting it for the last copy of tollbooth. It’s definitely good in blue sun glacier though.
It’s great in NEH, especially against Noise.
I think this is the first Lunar Cycle pack where the runners have a clearly better selection of cards than the corps. Not that the corp cards are terrible, just that there are some absolute bombs in the runner section. Because people seem to like that sort of thing, I’m going to give some ratings.
Architect (4/5 - in-faction staple). Fills a hole that HB have had for a long time, namely in faction ICE that punishes face=checking without any programmes. If the runner hits it, creating a server with a 3/2 or Melange and ICE is nasty and the Procog ability is pretty powerful early game. It taxes everything except Mimic ok as well. I don’t see other factions jumping up and down to play it though.
Peak Efficiency (2/5 - may see some niche/casual play). Provides powerful mid-late game economy, but does nothing for you in the early game. HB isn’t short of mid/late-game economy - I don’t think they get much from it. Nor does it fill an obvious hole in any other faction economy.
Labyrinthine Servers (2/5 - may see some niche/casual play). It isn’t Future Perfect. That alone is going to keep it out of most decks. Being a 5/3 it isn’t going to see play until the runner is fairly set, by then its utility is significantly reduced. But Cell Portal/Konimau loves it.
Ashigaru (3/5 - powerful in a limited set of circumstances). In the right deck, Ashigaru is a beast. CI is an obvious home for it - but there is significant competition for the influence. Probably better than Susanoo for those Jinteki builds that can afford a 9 credit ICE as it doesn’t fall over to Knight or Femme so easily.
Mamba (0/5 - unplayable). Significantly overpriced. If there wasn’t a psi-game associated with the second subroutine it would be a more playable prospect. As it is, its opening cost is effectively eight which is far too much.
Reversed Accounts (3/5 - useful in a limited set of circumstances). I long thought that GRNDL Refinery is the best advancable “trap” in the game because it’s a win for the corp either way. This is better, primarily because of the lower influence. But the old rule about “if you have a scoring window, use it to score” still applies. I think untrashable decks will enjoy sticking this down and burning the runner’s cash. Glacier might use it to force premature runs. But I don’t think it’s going to see play across the board, nor do I expect to see it in Astrobiotics.
Universal Connectivity Fee (3/5 - useful in a limited set of circumstances). If you can tag reliably, this is mean. It’s another Information Overload type card for Midseasons decks - closing out the game once the Midseasons has come down. It’s also another element for the tag-heavy Making News builds.
Blue Sun Identity. The best Weyland identity I think, but I don’t think it’s near the best corp IDs in other factions. It makes it very hard to avoid SEA-Scorch or Punitive on money alone. More importantly, it makes your ICE resistant to parasite, caissa and femme. But it eats clicks (to reinstall ICE) and is a nonbo with advancable ICE - which seems to be where Weyland ICE is going right now.
Changeling. (4/5 in-faction staple). I think Changeling is strong by the standards of Weyland ICE. The ability to throw it down early, force the runner to fetch a barrier breaker and then turn it into a sentry is potentially very powerful in aggressive decks like supermodernism and also programme destruction builds. But honestly I’m not convinced it would see much play in anyother faction (save Tenin, which is essentially a Weyland ID anyway).
Reuse. (1/5 no obvious use at the moment). I have a feeling that at some point, Reuse will become part of some crazy combo like Power Shutdown has. But not yet. I think it’s intended to power a surprise trace to kill the runner, but being a double seriously limits its use for that. At the moment it’s best use seems to be chucking agendas into archives as a Punitive trap.
Hades Fragment. (2/5 - may see some niche/casual play). It stops you being decked by Noise for a few turns. It gives you a potential out for agendas from a porous HQ which the runner needs to decide if they will close off or not. It lets you bring Jinteki traps back into R&D to be shuffled with Jackson. It’s all a bit underwhelming for a 5/3.
Docklands Crackdown (0/5 unplayable). If the runner leaves it untouched for a few turns (despite its cheap trash cost) and if you spend 2/3 of those turns powering it up then the runner’s probably installed everything they wanted to and probably won the game anyway.
Inject (4/5 in-faction staple). In Anarch, Inject is amazing. We’ve been discussing it for so long that I don’t feel the need to rehearse why. Outside Anarch, Shaper doesn’t need it and Criminal doesn’t have the recursion/redundancy to risk it. Perfectly designed card and has been badly needed for a while.
Origami (0/5 unplayable). By contrast, I hate this card. It does nothing to advance your board state, nothing to advance your win condition. You need to have 2 copies for it to even do its thing. And that’s 2 MU you could have spent on Keyhole or Morning Star.
Fester (3/5 useful in a limited set of circumstances). Once Incubator is out, this thing is going to make corps bleed. Until then, it’s an inconvenience but I’m not convinced it yet warrents a slot over DLR or Joshua in denial builds.
Autoscripter (4/5 enables new deck builds). I’m not convinced that existing criminal builds necessarily run enough programmes to warrant this. Playing it early is tricky, because you risk it being trashed by failed runs - and ideally you want it down before your rig. But anything with recursion is going to love it. One of the better reasons (probably the only half decent reason) to play Trade-In in Shaper I think.
Switchblade (4/5 enables new deck builds). This is the card that is going to make stealth “a thing”. Up to now, there hasn’t been a unique selling point for stealth builds. Breaking any sentry in the game for two credits is a pretty big USP.
Trade-In (2/5 - may see some niche/casual play). The hardware just doesn’t exist for this yet. Autoscripter out of Kate with parasites is the one thing that might justify it to my mind.
Astrolabe (5/5 - in faction staple with wider appeal). In shaper it’s nuts good relative to the other consoles (unless you are specifically using Dinosaurus) and you are going to get so much milage out of the card draw that I don’t see any reason not to run it in most shaper builds. Out of faction, anarch might be tempted by the card draw potential.
Angel Arena (2/5 - may see some niche/casual play). Noiseshop might like this. You can use it to dig for your resources early on and for your viruses later, and you can pawn it for cash. I don’t see an awful lot of other uses for it to be honest.
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Every Lunar Cycle pack other than Upstalk has favored Runner.
The jankiest thing I can think of doing with Hades Fragment is to ice up archives a lot, shutdown/diagnostics combo into scoring it and then hold on for 2 turns:
- Put Reclamation Order into R&D, Use it for Archived Memories and AM for Diagnostics.
- Put Jackson Howard in. Diagnostics an Efficiency Committee and use the extra clicks, Archived Memories, Jackson #3 and Accelerated Diagnostics to score a 3/2 or 4/2.
The more realistic thing I can think of is to score it somehow and assemble the combo at the bottom of R&D, removing the need for Jackson. Just Power Shutdown to R&D-3 cards. You could even chain diagnostics!
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Really? We’ve seen some cards that allow for new play styles but not much beyond that and very few that are universally good or worth splashing unless you are building around a specific mechanic.
Honestly, FFG probably printed more strong cards for the runner in C&C than they have since.
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If you look at Slaghund data, every pack other than Upstalk has caused the Runner winrate to increase.
“has caused” ?
Correlation != causation
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I strongly believe that has more to do with people playing experimental corp decks going up against tried-and-true tier 1 runner archetypes more than anything.
Can you give me a short list of runner cards you consider strong, from packs 2 and 3 of Lunar? Off the top of my head, all I can come up with are D4v1d and Cache.
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I truely believe Nasir can be strong in his own right, or was he in pack 1?
On Topic:
I’m not too sure about Reversed accounts. Yes, it’s powerful, but it’s a non-agenda,non-ice, non-econ(sort of), which makes it hard to slot in your deck. And then it might not even hit and you are a sad, sad panda
As @PeekaySK said, I don’t think it is as simple as that. I think that owes as much to established runner decks coming up against experimental corp decks.
First Contact is still evolving, but Crisium Grid and IQ are both top tier corp cards, with Manhunt and Lancelot both “up and coming”. On the runner side, The Supplier and Refractor will both be strong I think, but I don’t think they are there just yet.
Spaces Between I accept you could argue either way. Cache is the best card in the pack. D4V1D is solid and Ghost Runner will be good once Switchblade is out. On the other hand, the corp got ELP, Targeted Marketing, Eden Fragment and Wisp - all of which are solid cards.
Runner play stats don’t bear that out. Chaos Theory is more popular than Andy and Reina sees more play than Gabe. Nasir has seen over twice as much play as The Foundry.
D4v1d, Net Celebrity, Cache (super huge), Ghost Runner, Quetzal (potentially huge), BlacKat, Refractor, Hades Shard.
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Autoscripter looks very interesting, especially that I’m playing with Savoir-faire/Stimhack lately. So what are good programs to install on the run in Criminal? Faerie, Grappling Hook, Femme with Stimhack, Parasite with powered-up Datasucker, Knight with Deep Red would be great but it’s 9 inf if you want 3 of them. Probably Box-E would be the right console here, to keep many programs in hand. Maybe Gorman for money or Cache just to get 1 click for free? Sacrificial Construct to keep Autoscripter on the board just in case of a failed run?
While I haven’t looked at the data, even if there is only a few good played runnercards what they have done to the Noise-builds should have an impact on the statistics.
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It don’t seem good in Shaper either …
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Thanks for the list! What I will say is that you listed a card I straight up forgot about (Net Celeb), and some cards I haven’t actually played with yet, so I don’t feel really safe evaluating them. I’ll have to meditate on them further and throw some decks together.
Oh, Noise is back in a huge style, no arguments there. I don’t attribute it strictly just to Cache, though - the corp meta is a significant part of it as well. Inject will kick him (and Anarch in general) into overdrive, obviously.
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Good point. I should read these things more closely! I would probably move it down to a 3 then. The extra click is strong enough for there to be a playable build out there, but not as good as I first thought.
If you look at Stimhack tournament winning decklists more has changed with corps than runners in the last 6 months. And the changes with Runners are many times in response to Corps.
Not Janus!
Twenty Chars.