I firmly believe runners are better than corps at high levels of play. My overall runner winrate is 70%+ when I’m using a deck that I’ve tuned and played for a while.
So, is your corp win rate around 30%?
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Canada must have some pretty poor players then because at Canadian nationals corp win rate was 61%
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I agree there’s more skill to the Runner game, but that doesn’t compensate the fact that Corp strategies are just more robust and efficient at the moment. NEH could pilot itself to a 40% win rate with a below-par player making just the basic no-brainer plays. I’m not saying I don’t believe your win rate but it’s either a statistical anomaly or your opponents were just plain dreadful.
I remember last year when you said that Gabe was better than Andy at the highest level, when all the stats pointed to the contrary. This feels like that conversation all over again. The reports from US and Canadian Nationals were unequivocally that NEH was everywhere and highly successful. I think I remember the guy who came third at Gen Con wrote a report and said that his NEH deck lost once in three days (16 games) and he was eliminated by two Runner losses in the double elimination.
The OCTGN data shows the NEH win rate is over 50%, even against the top criminal IDs:
- Vs. Ken Tenma 64% (55%)
- Vs. Gabe 60% (57%)
- Vs. Andromeda 59% (58%)
- Vs. Whizzard 65% (60%)
Everyone else is a country mile away. Those numbers are the full data set win rate and then in brackets are the games that pass the “competitive play” cut. Those numbers are derived from only 100 games in some cases, but I’d wager that’s still a larger data set than your own personal experience. They do support your assertion that the runner does better at higher skill levels, but nothing like to the extent that you’re claiming.
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I am really curious to find who against do you play to constantly get 70%+ winrate as runner. Is it friendly games with your buddies? local FLGS? Regionals? Gencon? OCTGN random games? OCTNG leagues?
My OCTGN random game winrate is huge, to the point where I stopped using it as a meaningful measure of anything. My OCTGN league winrate is a little lower right now-- I’m around 64% with runner. I went 7-1 as runner at regionals and took 1st in Swiss, 5th overall (both my losses in elims were as corp).
I suspect the overall winrate is between 50-50 and 55-45 Runner at a high level of play, at least pre-Upstalk. It’s possible (but seems quite unlikely) that NEH is so good that it will shift this dramatically.
A couple months ago I was playing Tennin fast advance against OCTGN randoms (“intermediate/advanced” in title) prior to Boston regionals and my win rate was 95% in a sample of over 40 games. Not a typo, I was literally winning 19 of every 20 games. Tennin must be insanely OP, right?
In Boston it went 3-2 (60%) in Swiss and I only made the cut by having a super-bye and my lady Andromeda showing no mercy. Tennin’s unexciting performance was well in line with what experts and tournament stats would suggest.
The point is that if your win rates disagree with common wisdom, it’s likely that your opposition is just weaker than you in piloting, building or both and it doesn’t reflect the competitive meta.
IMO the way to beat Near Earth Hub is to wait. Something will come along that boosts a Runner enough to take it out (like Noise just got boosted with Cache) or some brilliant deckbuilder will come up with something nobody thought of yet.
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Right, that’s why I don’t rely on my OCTGN random game winrate-- like you, I have 90+% winrates with several decks that I don’t think are up to par. But I still do quite well in games with known good players. I suppose we’ll have to see what happens at Worlds.
Wait, so the numbers you are quoting are pre-Upstalk? Try playing with the new cards my friend, the difference will be bigger than you thought possible. The OCTGN data thread demonstrates (with statistical significance) that Runners lost about 5%. Was that all Near Earth Hub? Possibly…
I’m only looking at OCTGN data here, but Upstalk shifted the Corp win percentage upward by 6%. Not sure if you consider that “dramatic” or not, but it puts the general corp win rate at ~57%, solidly in “beating the house” territory.
The same analysis indicates that the good Criminals are ~55-60% win rate overall among players 1 SD above normal, which is pretty much exactly what I’d expect-- it’s actually a little bit more Runner advantage than I’d expected.
Slaghund data indicates Corp win rates peaked at 56.63% in June and have been slightly falling ever since, to a current rate of 56.08%.
Oooo. Good link, was not aware of that site.
I kicked out all players who have less than 20 games played, which would account for the 0.5% discrepancy in results. Even still, 56%~57% is way above 50%. A 12%-14% difference between Corp and Runners is substantial, and statistically significant.
The caveat being that trend is only true for Andromeda and Gabe, for players >= Sigma1. Every other runner ID is below par. Meanwhile, there are 7 corp identities performing above the 50% line in the Sigma >=1 range. NEH is dominating at the top of the pack with 68% win rate.
I can’t say for the Canadian and USA nationals but i’ve got the feeling that most players have a tunnel-vision when they play against NEH and think they HAVE to keep the corp poor and/or trash their assets. Most of the time, I just completely ignore their remote and just wreck their centrals with parasite/efficient run and digging hard with indexing, medium, nerve agent or legwork.
TWIY was insanely weak against this kind of strats and NEH got exactly the same issue.
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I completely agree. I think multi-access on R&D is still the most efficient way to beat every Corp out there. I can’t speak for the US and Canadian Nationals players either, but there were some very good players there and I would expect that one or two of them know a thing or two about running.
I think El-Ad’s andy list is actually close to the best you can get out of that ID, and the old Parasite Gabe deck also puts up a pretty good record against it. The trouble is, you’re sacrificing a lot in other matchups by playing either of those two decks, most notably against RP, I think, where you give up Kati Jones and Parasite out of Andy, (which were hugely important cards in what was a close matchup before), or play the Gabe deck that always had a sort of shitty RP matchup.
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[quote=“mediohxcore, post:97, topic:1734”]
The trouble is, you’re sacrificing a lot in other matchups[/quote]
And then you still have to face Jinteki Flatline and Weyland Scorch 
But if most people are running NEH FA, sacrificing percentage against RP is the correct play to make. Once a format gets diverse enough, it’s just impossible to have a winning/even record against everything, even with decks typically considered to “go 50/50 with the format” like Delver decks in Legacy MTG.
To be fair to Andy, all you really need against Jinteki is very careful play, a little bit of good luck and maybe an infiltration or two, which is fittable. After that, it’s a very good matchup, (though hard enough to play that the vast majority of players manage to screw it up). My strategy is generally to run remotes with no advancement counters, which means that they’re pretty much relying on Mushins to win.
Weyland was pretty much your best matchup before at nearly 100%, but giving up Kati could be a pretty big deal. I fail to see how El-Ad made such good use of Security Testing in all of his matchups without having any Parasites to keep servers cheap to access. The Weyland MU probably gets worse, but not a whole lot worse.
I know. I’m just used to winning 80-90% of games with Andy vs everything. Perhaps those days are over 
God, I hope so. More diversity can only be better for the game. Here’s hoping some OP identity abilities start coming down the pipe!
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I honestly wonder, though, whether this is going to make Andy that much worse or whether it will just change the Andy decks composition without really taking her out of the top spot. I think it should shake up the runner metagame some, if not just because people will want to try other things before simply rehashing Andy, but if we see things settle and the only things that have changed are that Andy decks become more aggressive to compensate for AstroBiotics’ speed, I’ll count it as a net negative, just because AstroBiotics is such a variance-ridden deck to play with/against.
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