On the contrary, I think Fisk and his great operation will allow HQ lock to be a good idea, finally.
Corps can control their HQ, pitching bad cards and keeping/playing the good ones. Fisk and Seminar take away that control, very cheaply as well. It’s one of the reasons people are so enamored with trying Woman in the Red Dress, it messes with the Corp’s HQ control and forces them to hold cards they don’t want, sometimes. However, those two cards can completely and easily take away that control.
I think Fisk and his set will bring back true HQ pressure. Recently Criminals have been running what, 3 Siphons and 2 Legwork? Maybe a couple Shutdown? And zero Sneakdoors in anyone but Gabe? Hopefully HQI will resurface as early as next pack with SanSan #67, and competitive resurgence in World Expo.
bblum is right, HQ access is more valuable in the early game, but often it falls away completely once the Corp gains control of their board.
Actually I’m mistaken, the last pack I purchased was the one that included NEH and I haven’t bought any since. So no, my deck is fine, everything you need to run fastrobiotic was in core and the first two cycles.
We spent the entire car ride to Philly discussing a bagbiter jank deck that someones working on. The challenge we ended up coming down to was:
Congrats, you just drew your entire deck, and you don’t have to discard it ever - after spending all of the influence to enable this combo - what do you have left in your deck that you wanted to draw? Having your entire deck in your hand isn’t a win condition as it is for some corps.
But…but…Daily Business Show, Architect, and Cyberdex Virus Suite make that deck so much better.
You’re also missing Switchblade, Rex, and Earthrise Hotel which are all good in Criminal. Not to mention Leela Patel who’s proven to be a strong Criminal ID.
I’m thinking even fringe cases like Expert Schedule Analyzer and Pheremones need some sort of activation or support, and all those nifty ‘play if you made a successful run on HQ cards’ too. Enhanced Vision. Crap like that. I mean those cards suck, but maybe Fisk and his stuff can find a way to pull em together somehow.
I do have some borrowed daily business shows, great card by the way. However I’m not impressed by Leela at all, I’ve beaten every Pateel deck I’ve faced and they were all easy wins. You just gotta slow down, take your time and make sure you have enough ICE installed before you start scoring. That’s my personal experience anyway.
Honestly criminals are in a really bad spot right now and nothing I’ve seen this cycle is going to help much. I’ve been play testing drive by extensively, especially against RP and it’s too easily countered by simply rezzing. The new breakers are terrible aswell, even with Giest. I’m just not seeing a lot on the horizon that gives me hope for criminals, in fact in my local meta I’m the last person playing criminals. Everyone else switched to shaper and anarch. Oh well maybe the next cycle will be better for criminals.
To me part of the problem is that criminal has become the dumping ground for bad ideas or cards designed for the other factions that would be too good without an influence cost. Like I said maybe next cycle they will get better.
Have you tried playing her? It’s crazy how effective the ability can be, and if you have something to do while the corp is slowing down and firming things up, that effect is a gain as well.
Thinking more about Fisk specifically, it seems like decking the corp could be a real threat finally. Someone already mentioned Data Leak Reversal–you have in-house denial plus self-tagging with Siphon, John Masanori is always good, you have up to 9 forced card draws with Investment Seminar, and Fisk Power will probably fire 5-10 times at least. You have Eden Shard and Woman in the Red Dress… new pet deck acquired.
Like I said I don’t find her ability compelling or effective, every time I’ve played against Leela it’s been a simple matter of icing up and locking out then simply powering through the last couple of points. Maybe if she gets more card support in the future I’ll give her a try as it is I’ll just stick with my current criminal build.
Interesting analyse, but I would disagree on shaper having the worst, criminals easily have the worst central pressure in the game. Shapers have R&D interface, indexing, makers eyes, and recursion in faction so they can make effective use of things like parasite. Anarch have eater, keyhole, medium, nerve agent, cutlery, parasite, amped up and wanton destruction, which gives them a huge selection of choices for central pressure. Criminals have legwork, sneak door, HQ interface and account siphon. Criminals also lack any in faction recursion to make effective use of parasite and have to spend all their influence on breakers and support cards meaning they can’t import any of the other factions tricks. Also every single bit of criminal pressure is shut down by crisium grid, which has contributed hugely to the down fall of criminal.
Criminals in general, have too small a slice of the color pie so to speak.
Things criminals need to be a threat, in my opinion:
-better breakers
-better economy that doesn’t rely on runs
-some kind of R&D pressure
-better filtering of redundant cards
-a new gimmick other than being the big money runners
-in faction recursion
I think what we’re seeing here is a potential overreaction to the original strength of Weyland and Criminal… they’ve been overly cautious about giving them more good cards, and of course not giving them a way to deal with the yellow menace hurts.
I would argue that with the supplier and career fair, Criminals are now the faction for long term drip econ set up. The problem they have is that this doesn’t work with siphon and they lack the breakers to play a money + breakers style without going centrals only.
If you can deny remote plays and the corp is developing its econ, HQ is by far the better central to pressure in terms of access quality, since the ice and economy operations get thinned out as the corp plays them (until Jackson).
Right now, corps just play around Siphon, durdle through 3 Jacksons until they install every piece of ice in their deck, and then start scoring when Gabe and Leela aren’t scary anymore. I think Anarchs are punishing them for this because longer corp setup times smooth out that orange variance a little bit. If corps change their playstyle to really take advantage of #anarchproblems (and a dominant Kate build that’s sort of toothless on centrals if she doesn’t find Indexing), you might start to see Gabe again.
Sadly supplier and career fair are both cards that are better out of faction in a Hayley or Mac deck. That’s the problem with criminals, a lot of their cards lately are just flat better out of faction. Criminals of late of become a place to dump cards that would be too good for the factions they were intended for.
There are some big problems with the idea of “HQ Lock” or even HQ pressure as a primary strategy.
First is that Account Siphon dictates that any corp playing against a criminal is going to over-defend HQ because of the Siphon threat, so any attempt to repeatedly access HQ is going to take a lot of collateral damage. Really, only Gabe and Sneakdoor Beta do much to assuage this.
Second, almost all the best Runner decks manage to apply a reasonable amount of pressure to as many of the Corp’s servers as possible. It’s just better to force the Corp to spread their defenses thin in pretty much any case than focus on one server. It’s why Kit still isn’t tier one.
Third, and maybe most importantly, HQ tends to be worth hitting for accesses only at specific, opportune times in the game. Sometimes it’s once, sometimes it’s twice, but it’s rarely very good on more than 3 turns of the game total. Even if you manage to force the Corp to draw a ton of extra cards, on average, all you’re doing is bringing the agenda density of HQ closer to that of R&D. Unless you see every card a la Nerve Agent, you can’t really lock HQ, and even if you manage that Corp can still play off the top of their deck, protecting R&D and a remote and shoveling any agenda they draw into play before the Runner can get to it in HQ.
I agree that HQ lock isn’t great right now, but I think that is mostly because the corp almost exclusively controls HQ. In general, they only got more control with Jackson. I think it is going to be a lot better with Fisk and Fisk Investment Seminar because it takes some of that control away from the corp. I am hoping for another card or two we don’t know about to help out with it a little more.
Once you hit mid-game, you generally start having the corp get decent control of HQ. Probably one Jackson has passed, and you basically want exactly 1 agenda in hand. You draw until you find one, and try to draw less until you can open a scoring window somehow. If the runner can now force draws, especially over multiple turns where the corp filters the cards out with discards or has to spend clicks they don’t want to spend installing a 2nd / 3rd Jackson to get things out of archives, the runner can make HQ accesses better than they are now. I think FIS and Fisk will actively make HQ accesses better to the point where HQ random accesses through Legwork and Sneakdoor will be better than R&D random accesses for a lot more of the game. It also might force an awkward Jackson use to make a well timed 1-of Maker’s Eye almost enough R&D pressure, which can free up 2-4 influence.
I could be completely wrong and maybe none of this will work in practice, but it is at least an interesting enough idea that I would like to try it. I think it ends with way more interesting decisions for both sides to now open the possibility of ‘milling’ cards through HQ when you throw it into the faction with all the in-faction ways to pressure HQ.
I’d say it’s striking how little central pressure Shapers have outside of R&D. They must splash for Archives pressure (Parasucker) and HQ (Legwork or Vamp).
Against Crims, however, you want to ice archives. They also make up for HQ pressure’s mediocrity by having spectacularly powerful HQ pressure cards.
I don’t think giving them R&D pressure is the path to balance. The most obvious way to help them is breakers. Centrals-only breakers were an excellent idea, but they dropped the ball on Alias (Passport and Breach are okay). IMO Alias should be so good that it makes Crims not want to splash for Mimic. Just Alias centrals and Faerie/Femme remotes.
I suppose this could open up a discussion of the Ice hierarchy (Sentries > Code Gates > Barriers), and I agree it’s dangerous to make Killers too good, but Garrote could cost 5 or 6 and be okay, and Alias could be redesigned so it breaks Caduceus for 2 and Ichi for 3