I’m more talking about OP identities on the runner side. The thing is, Andy will never be bad (I’ve learned this from @bluebird503) - 9 cards will never be bad. However, if there are more identities that have OP abilities (see: Noise, and Kate to a lesser extent) then there is a lot of potential for good players to choose runners other than Andy.
FFG just needs to be a bit more aggressive when printing cards so the current OP shit won’t be the only shit on the block.
Is that what they did with NEH?
I’d like them to stop doing it then. (But yeah a lot of the upcoming IDs look crazy. At least Weyland deserves some OPness)
I believe the philosophy is to bring all the lower IDs up to NEH level, rather than the other way around.
Is it though? The problem with that approach is that if you make the call to tech for NEH and you get paired with something else in round one you may never see an NEH deck all day and bomb to the bottom of the field against all of the other non-meta IDs that your deck can’t beat. The risk of thiis increases proportionally to how badly you guess the meta.
If you never see an NEH deck all day, you could have probably brought Laramy Fisk and be just fine.
Seriously though, this kind of logic seems to exist in a world where people just slam their IDs on the table and decide who won without even having to have a functional deck, a good grasp of the meta, or player skill.
But if your deck is geared for beating FA, particularly NEH, and round 1 you see RP Glacier, it doesn’t matterr i they’re the only one. Assuming they’re half-decent, you stand a much bigger chance of losing. If/when you do, you could end up in matchups your deck isn’t geared for – leveling the playing field even if you’re generally a better player.
This is really bad logic guys…
I wear a helmet at all times, because, while I’ve never been hit in the head by a meteor, what if tomorrow is the day it happens? Boy will I regret not wearing my helmet!
If the netrunner community at large agrees that NEH is the best deck by a considerable margin, and it is showing up in tournament results left and right, then your are statistically more likely to see it in any given meta than any other deck. (This is assuming that A: you don’t already have a read on its prevalence in your local meta and B: your meta isn’t skewed towards more casual players/deck choices).
Of course it isn’t a good idea to play a deck that wins vs NEH but loses vs everything else, but what the hell kind of deck is that? That’s not what anyone is talking about.
If you’re talking about how it FEELS to meta against NEH and then not face it, well that sucks. But if you’re talking about what is the SMART THING TO DO, well, you have to go by the numbers. From the data we have, NEH is the best corp ID. Therefore it is a good idea to play a deck that is prepared for it, maybe by hedging your bets against other decks. THIS WILL NOT BENEFIT YOU 100% OF THE TIME. But, statistically, it is the right thing to do!
The point isn’t to play something bad against NEH and good against everything else. It’s to play something that does well against everything. Andy isn’t the best choice against any real deck, but she’s probably third-best (at worst) against almost all of them.
And yeah, a deck that’s prepared for it but hedges its bets against other things is obviously better, but… that’s what I was saying? A deck geared to deal with FA perfectly and other things less perfectly has a bigger chance of struggling if it meets the wrong opponents early on.
Saying that other decks will fold just because you can beat NEH and are good is blatantly silly. It is the best deck, and you should be prepared/able to play against it well – but you shouldn’t make sacrifices (beyond a certain point) to deal with FA at the expense of Glacier when Glacier is still prevalent before the cut, even if not dominant.
There’s something to be said for the game being designed in such a way that Runners are encouraged to carry “Junk in the Trunk” in order to deal with specific threats.
Many corp decks don’t deal meat damage, but carrying multiple Plascretes makes sense for many runner decks.
More fundamentally, not every corp carries or needs to carry every kind of Ice but Runners tend to pack Icebreakers of every type just in case.
Every Runner faction has significant program tutoring and/or draw power, even right out of the Core set. The Runner card base is conspicuously constructed to support packing opponent specific answers along with the means to either selectively or efficiently retrieve them.
If you do 90% vs NEH and 40% vs everything else, and NEH is the majority of decks at a tournament, you’re probably doing a lot better than if you picked a deck that had more of a fair shot against everything.
I suppose. Had a friend have this bite him real hard in a tournament recently, but that might be more colouring my opinion than being a useful data point.
I’d rather do 80% vs NEH and 55% against the rest than 90/40, though, unless I was mighty certain that NEH would be that highly represented at all levels. Might not be the right choice – with the 90/40, if you get into the “winner’s circle” ripe with NEH you’ll clean up, whereas 80/55 is going to suffer some at the top tables even if it’s more likely to recover and handle offbeat decks…This might just be me, and might well be wrong, and I’d certainly not begrudge someone for doing otherwise, but it’s my sense if things. Perhaps I’m just not good enough yet for it to matter overmuch, that’s very possible.
I think we can worry about other matchups after we find out ‘What beats NBN?’
Found myself in the OCTGN data. My Scorched NEH is 52-7 (88%), 30 flatlines in there so it’s not quite Astrobiotics but I think many of the same principles apply. Looking at it by runner:
Anarch 13-1 Noise 6-1, Reina 3-0, Whizzard 4-0
This felt like one of the easier matchups to me. Only one Whizzard player managed to get to 3 points, which is better than any of the Reinas did. Against Reina I was just careful and clicked for credits so I didn’t give out any free runs, especially against Medium.
Noise is quite powerful right now, my record with him is 14-4 (78%) against the rest of the field but still only 1-3 against NEH (2 flatlines). However, I think he has the potential to be tuned for this matchup.
Criminal 16-3 Andromeda 4-1, Tenma 6-0, Gabriel 2-2, Iain 2-0, Silhouette 4-0
Lost one close game to Andromeda where we were both at 5 points looking for the agenda. @Nordrunner’s rich Andromeda is the only one I had to score out against, the rest couldn’t find the right balance and flatlined.
Gabe is when I’ve felt real pressure, he’s all over my centrals before I can defend them. Then using Account Siphon and Bankjob money he can take out the asset economy and slow my recovery to a crawl. I think it may be becoming too much of a mantra that you shouldn’t trash the asset economy. The right move is often to trash as much as you can afford to, keeping in mind that if the runner has to click for credits against NEH, they’ve probably lost.
Tenma tends to be reckless and low on cards. The 4 flatline victories against him were quick ones as I recall; in 6 games he never got more than 2 points.
Iain was a bit slow, gave me the early astro and it didn’t matter how rich he was. In the other he had central breakers and Keyhole, I iced R&D 6 deep and just scored the agendas as I drew them.
Silhouette crumpled to HQ ice. I think there’s potential here though with 2 or 3 copies of Sneakdoor Beta. She’d be one of the best at paying ‘the remote check tax’ with her expose. Some of the opponents were focused on Quest Completed/Notoriety which just doesn’t work at all against NEH. I think she stole a total of 2 agendas in 6 games.
Shaper 21-3 Chaos 7-0, Kate 6-1, Nasir 4-2, Kit 3-0, Professor 1-0
Chaos, most were slow or reckless and only managed one agenda if that.
PPvP Kate is solid but I think the deck takes a bit of skill to get the pressure right. Four flatlines as run events will drop their hands low. Parasite destruction is not a major problem unless they follow up. If I recall correctly my loss was to multiple Maker’s Eye.
Nasir, sigh I remember these losses. I got cocky and installed Astro, Bastion and Pop-up in a remote first turn. His first click was Xanadu, so a bit of a misplay from me there. The other loss I got caught with some expensive ice in hand (that I’ve since cut from the deck) and he won on turn 3 with R&D interface. I don’t think Nasir is strong in this matchup (NEH wins 79.4% vs Nasir overall on OCTGN) but there’s probably a lesson there that multi-access is. In 6 games Nasir scored as many points as Anarch did in 14.
Kit seems ok, scored 4 points twice. But I remember the two flatlines were because they were too focused on R&D.
TLDR:
Gabe was tough. Sneakdoor Beta is very strong, I’d say NEH is only comfortable defending 2.5 servers.
Desperado might be the best card against NEH, you can’t let checking remotes tax you. Doppleganger and John Masanori get honourable mentions.
Scrubbers were amazing if the Runner was ahead, meh otherwise. I think this is related to the 2.5 servers, if NEH isn’t stretched thin they can put taxing ice on the remote (in the time you were playing scrubbers) and you’re no further ahead.
R&D access is the key, if you’re paying more than 3 credits per card you’re in trouble. Also if you miss a few times while they have asset economy going, you’re letting them right back in the game.
Poor runners have almost no chance.
What’s your influence package for a Scorch NEH? Mine is 2 Scorch, 3 Snare, and change for Eli / Lotus.
3 Scorched Earth
2 Snare
1 Rototurret
Yeah I agree with that in principle if they were anything close to representative numbers, but the reality is even if you went all out to tech vs. NEH to the total exclusion of other decks you wouldn’t get even close to 90%. 65% maybe?
You could calculate what the right play is using a game theory pay-off matrix if you knew (even approximately) what your win percentage was against different decks and their relative prevalence.
That being said, it’s not quite such a problem in Netrunner compared to other LCGs / CCGs because of the two game format. You could draw a bad Corp pairing for your Runner but still salvage a draw with the other match up. In a game like MTG though you just slide and slide if you make a bad meta judgement.
What’s the deal with Nasir? Freak result due to sample size or is there some potential in him that people haven’t cottoned onto yet?
I think Lukas and FFG have generally undervalued card draw. If you look at all the cards that give more efficient card draw, the vast majority are still played in Tier 1 or Tier 2 decks.
I don’t think it’s really fair to compare the runner and corp card draw, but you could be right either way, (though I wouldnt call NEXT design anything near tier 2).
Anyway, back to the main point, I think their failure with NEH wasn’t that the ability was too powerful in general, (though it might be). Rather, it was that all it did was increase the strength an already very good, existing archetype rather than force us to create a new & interesting one. Even if they printed an ID that spawned an equally powerful new deck in some other faction, sort of along the lines of how RP or CI became viable, I think we would have all been happier than what happened with NEH superpowering one of the least interactive tier 1 decks.
I think this point is very good, and also a bit sad. You can do a lot of fun and interesting things with NEH, they just don’t seem to be quite as good as the astrobiotics nonsense you can do too. Again, I think the problem card is Astroscript, not Near-Earth Hub.
I’m not sure what the best answer is. Pure parasite recursion by Noise seems an unpleasant but not unbeatable matchup. Something similar to the German nationals winner. I think you have to be disciplined and not trash anything but biotic labour and maybe fast track with your imp. If you can even nearly afford to, pay cash to kill SanSan city grid, and be pleased that you will see fewer because Jackson is doing double duty saving agendas. Run a couple of mediums so you can R&D lock the corp despite their nonsense draw.
‘Anatomy of Anarch’ style decks might do OK too, but keeping on top of the asset economy is really hard.
I’m not typically a criminal player, but I’ve heard that Andromeda is a good ID. What’s the best way to tech using Andy?
Is it worth tearing up decklists and building a silver bullet for NEH, then drag it back a bit so it’s not terrible vs. the rest of the Corps?
I don’t think the card pool lends itself particulary to “silver bullets”. The comments of succesful players have generally suggested that teching out with stuff like The Source is actually less sucessful than just running a strong runner.
Noise has pretty much all the tools availible anyway - NEH struggles to defend all three centrals, their silly draw and high agenda density makes them vulnrable to the milling effects and Imp, Parasite and Medium are all in faction. NEH’s residual advantage is consistency as Noise will fall over from time to time due to bad draws.
My Kate is doing well in recent games against NEH since I started aggressively stimhacking my rig out. What kind of rig, it depends on the situation - might be Atman at 4, Nerver Agent, Imp or Femme. The point is to guarantee quality multiaccesses as fast as possible and Stimhack is invaluable here.