Definitely agree. If every (non-criminal) runner has levy and means to trash all your stuff, Museum of History is a perfectly fair (if annoying and game-slowing card). Wish it wasn’t the case that History was needed but it is.
I disagree mightily. Piloting those decks is really, really hard. You have to know when to combo, what you need to combo through, and a million variations of the combo based on board state.
7 Likes
CI combo is the only negative aspect of the game for me. The problem is waiting 10mins for it to complete (or often not). When im playing in the pub, i just leave the table and get a pint, smoke a cigarette and ask whether he won on my return. I dont know if thats rude or not but its pretty damning on the game that i can interrupt it like that and it has no effect on the game.
CI combo is awkward. It’s really fun to play, and it’s quite neat, but as an opponent it seems a bit crap. I think 10 mins to combo is a significant exaggeration though.
Also, it’s a really good deck if the opponent doesn’t have a specific set of hate cards. I actually think now is its time. I think it loses to Councilman almost always. I don’t know if councilman will be played (enough) for that to be a problem.
2 Likes
I don’t think 10 minutes is an exaggeration.
I once saw a fellow at an SC try to start a combo, and after nearly 20 minutes he finally failed. This guy has run many combo decks in the past, so I don’t think it’s a lack of experience on his part, but rather the complexity of scoring 7 points at once on a single combo that was messing him up.
This isn’t unique to netrunner. Opponents used to complain about the Heartbeat of Spring combo in Magic: the Gathering where you would have a lot of shuffling and counting mana, but at least it was deterministic. The Second Sunrise combo was even worse because it was about drawing through your deck, you never knew if it would work until you were done.
I don’t mean that they aren’t hard to play. I just mean they aren’t fun. Kudos to those who can.
This seems like the better place to continue the discussion. 
What makes the deck unfun to play against? (Specifically in a tournament setting, where you typically play only one game vs it)
Edit: I see people saying it takes ten minutes to combo and it shouldn’t if you’ve practiced it and know when you’ve messed up. But even if it does sometimes take that long, IMHO, in a tournament that is acceptable. It still won’t take nearly half of the allotted time from the round to play the CI combo game.
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I think the reason is that it can often feel like it removes agency from the runner. If you don’t have hate cards in your deck, playing against CI strips away a lot of the mental model of how Netrunner works and instead emphasises the slot machine nature of central accesses. If you do have hate cards, it can be more interesting, but still often comes down to putting your hate cards out and hoping your opponent can’t combo through them (or that they can’t figure out how to combo through them).
We all play Netrunner over other games because it’s full of rich and interesting decisions. I can see why people get a bit ratty when facing a deck that says “Well, I get this interesting puzzle to solve, but the game for you is to just access centrals as much as possible and hope.”
15 Likes
It has been shown to me that as CI, I most hate Employee Strike being played when I have around 20 cards in hand. Makes it pretty hard to combo off as it turns out.
If they don’t also have clot you can biotic out a vitruvius and hopefully have enough credits left over to keep what’s important.
1 Like
Allow me to correct my statement. This was playing Vanity CI. I have one Vitruvius. The list is much more susceptible to ES than the traditional Efficiency Committee builds.
Is it worse than CBI raid?
Probably. Since you have to trash your combo pieces, and you generally want a bunch of them in hand to go off. If you want to combo, you’ll have to pitch agendas. If you want to keep the agendas, you have to pitch combo pieces. At least with CBI, you can draw it all back.
I, too, would like CI combo to go away forever.
3 Likes
Just wait for Councilman, your genie in a bottle!
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What do you think hits CI harder and is more generally useful; Councilman or Employee Strike? Because both seem like they do a good job hosing CI and both seem good in different match-ups.
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If you play Councilman they can’t Jackson. If you Employee Strike they just Biotic out a Vitruvius and go on with thier life.
Couldn’t they just install 2 Jackson with shipment from Mirrormorph? Stop the first with councilman and then they rez the second, go through their combos and over install the first jackson to get it into archives so it can be reinstalled and used later?
2 Likes
Just have 2 Councilman!