@mendax’s Geist was an extreme example, but Glaciers generally struggle if they have to Rez their Tollbooth 3 times. Criminal derez all the things is pretty good vs Glacier.
Crescentus is a good card.
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Is Crescentus one of the few actually good Criminal programs inside of Criminal?
Side note: I’m looking at Copycat thinking “hey, maybe this is good?”, but then I feel like I might be on crazy pills…
I wonder how many people bashing the Faust Gabe vs. Foodcoats match-up have played it a significant amount…
The Gabe wins are UGLY, but in my experience are more than 50%.
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I always feel like I am driving a jalopy when I play Gabe but I usually just barely squeeze out a win.
that’s the way he has always been in the mid and late game.
I wish it were easier to jam Clone Chip into criminal. Would make Cresentus more playable, and of course your precious Faeries. With Drug Dealer you can toss overdrawn Cresentuses into the bin for Clone Chipping later. Ain’t no room though I don’t think.
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Not that I don’t believe you, but these kinds of anecdotal quotes are very hard to evaluate. My winrate with Foodcoats is over 50% against Criminal of all sorts of varieties; and if I play Gabe against EtF specifically, I win mostly because of luck of the draw on my part or mistakes my opponent made. What does that say about my or your skill level / playstyle / … ?
The idea with Gabe - and correct me if I’m wrong here - is to force the Corp in a boardstate where all centrals are pressured heavily. You get free accesses hopefully, but the most important gains here are your ID and Desperado credits, or Sucker counters. You are not running to hit agendas, they follow automatically once you get the Corp in a semi-headlock.
Thing is, priority for HB is to lock down centrals, mainly HQ, and it can do this with as little as one of its highly taxing pieces of ICE and an upgrade (be it Crisium of Caprice - 4 total). By not building remotes in the meantime, they can deny you your Bank Jobs which are a huge chunk of your income. Furthermore, Archives is of higher priority than R&D to defend early. Gabe (my list at least) typically runs the 1 RDI. And your agenda density is typically low enough to not sweat too much about the single accesses. Is he trashing your Assets, great he’s digging himself further in the hole. Once centrals are ok, 1 purge makes it practically game over.
Yes I am aware this is all generally speaking and you have to adapt in-game of course.
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You are absolutely right, and this is why until now Gabe has been lackluster. The difference is that the late-game random access plan is WAY better now with Faust, FIS, and HQI. If you have 4 points going into late game you have a very serious chance of winning almost regardless of what the glacier player does. All of their agendas are 2-turn affairs and you can access half of their hand each turn while flooding it with cards as they try to score.
The trick is to hold your FIS as much as possible so you can fire all of them off in 3 critical consecutive turns.
The wins are ‘ugly’ in that a lot of your wins finish with you on 0 credits and the HB player on 20+. They lost because of the click-compression you create with FIS.
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I think with two players of equal skill and equal practice with both decks (both players know both decks inside out) the matchup slightly favors HB Foodcoats.
That being said, Gabe will blow Foodcoats out of the water if the Corp even slips up a little. All it takes is one successful Bank Job or Siphon to start snowballing hard.
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I think I’ll find space for 1 Passport to help with Turing on centrals
Do you not find Turing obnoxious on remotes, too? Peacock worth considering?
You’ll win on centrals anyway. If they put the Turing on remote (which I feel is the correct move) you can just keep hitting centrals until they lose. They will typically take 2 turns to score each agenda, during that time you’ll probably find an answer via Account Siphon, Inside Job, Emergency Shutdown, etc.
The important thing is to not get shut out of centrals, and I think Passport goes a long way in helping against that, especially against HB Foodcoats, AND it only costs 1 credit to install.
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We’ve been through this about 300 replies up or something. Alternatively, I may have brought it up in the Geist thread. I’m pretty sure I got accosted for that suggestion.
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I used Peacock in Eater Geist but I wasn’t happy about it.
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If you’re packing a Turing solution, paying 4 to break Turing on a central with Peacock each time instead of 3 (even ignoring the install cost difference, which is significant!) sounds like a nightmare. If I saw a Crim slam down peacock and Faust I’d start throwing Turings over centrals as fast as I could. Passport means you need shenanagins (Inside Job for the econ remote, try Siphon denial to prevent the rez on a scoring remote?) which is tough, but I think since the idea is piling on centrals pressure putting a card in your deck that makes that 4 times more expensive for the ICE you’re trying to solve is a bad idea. The two or three times you break Turing over a remote in the game will definitely not pay you back for the dozen or so times you might run through it on a central, paying through the nose.
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As mediocre as Peacock is, it’s not quite that bad. It actually only pays 2 credits to break central Turings, as it sits at 2 base strength. It breaks remote Turings for 4. Really, it’s halfway decent against anything that’s just one subroutine - it’s the multisubs like Enigma that defecate all over it.
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Cerb’s foodcoats list has been tough for me to beat with DLR or crims - I feel it would be similar with Faust Gabe (haven’t played it). What ETF have y’all been playing? In particular the 2 crisiums and 6 3/2s seem important.
Passport sounds good for central turing. That was what hosed me the most as DLR.
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The central breakers are more and more important. Breach for multi-sub barriers, Passport for the big code gates. With everyone teching against Mimic, Alias is actually not bad at dealing with Ichi or News Hound if Datasuckers are too risky or unreliable with CVS or lockouts common.
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I keep a 1x Alias because of Jinteki PE. Faust loses hard to Komainu + House of Knives. Sometimes it’s nice versus News Hound or Architect or whatever if the money is really snowballing (which it does in this deck).
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I’ve found it useful against Cortex Lock, speaking of the Jinteki matchup.
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Testing a Drug Dealer Leela build.
Breakers are 2 Faerie, 1 Faust, Breach and Passport. (2 Special Order to find the breakers)
I’m really missing the Sentry breaker, though Faerie is nice against the random Weyland who hits you with an Archer.
Currently I’ve managed to draw things in the wrong order in most, if not all, of my games. (Breakers before Special Order; Desperado or SecTest only shows up halfway through the deck, Levy’s nearly always the first draw, never had Datasuckers before halfway through the deck… Etc.) That said, the deck’s still extremely powerful. Leela’s ability helps to make sure the Corp slows down, which the normal Aggressive Criminal cards like to see. I’m currently using Crescentus not Shutdown to de-rez, frontloading the click and not needing the HQ run first. (Most games I run HQ 3 times; Twice with Siphon and once if I have a remote lock in place for a while and suspect they’re sitting on Agendas.)
I’m running Crash Space instead of Plascrete because I’m mostly seeing kill decks being SEA-Scorch or 24/7 Scorch, not that many Midseasons kill decks. It’s a little weaker against the kill decks, but it’s stronger against all the Glacier because it gives me more money back from a Siphon if I’m still trying to shake tags.
Conclusion: It’s hard being a Criminal… I sorta want to try an Iain Logos Data Dealer+Fan Site deck and see if it runs interestingly.