What's up with Criminal?

Netrunner General
102

Yeah, to echo what @Cerberus and @spags have said: Leela and Andy still have good builds, but they’re not as broadly good against the field as they used to be and—depending on your build—have matchup weaknesses and greater fragility than they used to. Andy, in good hands, used to blow corps out regularly. Leela still can, but it’s draw-dependent. Both IDs can still win more than they lose, though.

It’s a comparative thing. Andy ruled the roost for a long time because her opening start was very consistent and she had few—if any!—difficult matchups, which made her very robust against the field. Now there are more robust economic packages in the other factions, and those other factions build in better breakers and recursion, making them less fragile to pilot error. So you have to be good at a specific criminal gameplan that works right now, which means they’re less popular than IDs with broadly good gameplans against a larger portion of the field (PPvP Kate, Noise, PickAnAnarch, etc.)

In a cyclic metagame, it’s really not a problem for the factions to cycle through the “power rankings”, and if the designers have done their jobs right, there will still be viable tournament-worthy builds out of the faction currently sitting lowest on the totem pole, but they’ll have some of the above problems. Which is exactly where we find criminals right now :). Ideally, given a couple cycles, we’ll see them return to popularity, ideally behind a new play-style or, like Anarchs now, a new economic package.

I… don’t think that’s Geist or Fisk, though ;). Some of their utility cards might be enough, but I think we’ll need another box or cycle with some blue gamechangers in.

As a guy who’s spent a ton of time on Iain, 10 influence was definitely an un-necessary nerf to that poor bastard :sadpanda:

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103

Yeah, I think having 12 would do him a world of good. 10 inf is punishing enough to Kit but in Crim you need so many essentials and can’t even get away as easily with importing 1-of programs.

104

The ‘staleness’ of criminal and the ‘have to spend all their influence on breakers and R&D pressure’ seem linked to me - the lack of spare influence means you can’t experiment with novel card combinations without giving up core competencies.

Cards that alleviate either problem would both give the existing criminal builds a shot in the arm and allow a lot of experimentation. I’d think you’d only want to solve one though as otherwise you’re boosting the existing criminal archetype tremendously.

You don’t even need to put the solutions in faction, just have have the effects in a subtype for which criminals have tutoring cards. A Shaper R&D pressure card could be great for criminals if it was tied to a connection.

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105

This would be some great design space to explore!

Agreed. I see no reason not to give him the full 15, but even 12 would be a huge help.

106

I’m going to go against the general consensus here and say this: I actually think Criminal is pretty weak and I don’t think it’s just due to flavor of the month tendencies.

If you remember worlds, lots of people were playing Andy, but were just not winning that much. Ever since Andy has had to deal with the dual threat of RP and NEH, she couldn’t hope to win more than half of the time against both of them.

Flash forward to now; Shaper got a huge boost in Lady, which freed up influence as well as gave them great game against the most common barrier, Eli, and Clot to deal with Fast Advance. Anarch got a whole damn box. Criminal got Hotels and Visage, but that’s about it. Leela came out, and was a reasonable weapon against NBN, but is probably the single worst playable runner against RP, and doesn’t even have as good of an NBN matchup as Kate anymore because of Clot. Her ability can throw off a less experienced Corp who isn’t comfortable playing around her, and rarely gets you some free wins when you get an early agenda from R&D, but there is functionally no good reason to play her if you’re looking to win in elimination rounds.

Andy is still fine, but that’s all she is: fine. She still suffers from the same issues as she did at worlds, where corps were winning an overwhelming percentage of the time against a field of Andys. It’s also much more difficult to sustain her economy compared to the old days if you don’t get Testing-Desperado very early. ICE is always getting better and more dangerous to face check, and things like Gutenberg, Crick, and Grails make the probing econ-war testing runs a lot less palatable. Blue Sun makes Testing look like a joke, as you don’t really deny them anything by forcing rezzes and a lot of their ICE is a pain to hit without the right breaker.

I put Andy at somewhere around 4th to 6th best runner, after Maxx, Kate, Noise, and about on par with Whizzard and Val, and Leela totally off the map assuming there are a sizable amount of good RP players. If anything, Leelas win rate is inflated by decent players playing her when they shouldn’t, not the other way around.

It’s possible that Andy is actually better than this and we are just stuck playing the old list that has yet to be adapted to the new environment. Obviously Switchblade is a thing now, but the ICE field doesn’t really justify it these days, especially when you can get so far riding Faeries. The most depressing thing to me about modern Criminal is how much worse Security Testing is. If she doesn’t set it up super quickly with Desperado, she’s either going to be suffering for speed against NBN or struggling to get in for a profit against everything else. The other Crims have basically no hope of setting up Desperado-Testing quickly with any amount of consistency.

Perhaps it’s just the time to move away from Testing as a Criminal economy engine and see if they can’t do better leaning on Kati.

In my opinion, the only thing that’s keeping Andy on the map is her great HB matchup. Being able to Inside Job to deny them protected Campaigns and getting your credit back when you check their face-downs is still great, and the ability to quickly set up your breaker suite alongside R&D multiaccess puts them in a pretty awkward position, especially as they have to overdefend HQ against Siphon when they would normally like to just put one minor-annoyance type ICE there in other matchups. The fact that they can’t effectively dictate the tempo of the game with their remote installs is really bad news for them, and Andy remains their worst matchup.

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107

Of ANY kind? Criminals can tutor events, programs, resources. They have Andromeda in faction. They have Mr. Li. I don’t think card draw is the problem.

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108

Tutoring for shit is not card draw, though. Diesel is not SMC, for example.

Andi amounts to a free, one-shot Quality Time, and that’s good… but then her ability does nothing for the rest of the game.

Mr. Li is terrible because most of the time, you would rather have the two cards in hand than put one on the bottom of the deck.

Sure, they have Special Order, and it’s a good card. I can’t recall the last time I saw a Planned Assault or a Hostage played, though, mostly because for the card slot it uses you could have simply put in another copy of whatever Connection or Event you wanted in the first place.

But, you’re right… it’s not the card draw that’s the primary problem. It’s their breakers.

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109

I felt the same way for the longest time. However, playing him in stealth andy is HUGE. You need those stealth credits.

110

I’m not even sure about the HB match up anymore. If people aren’t playing NEXT ICE because they don’t like how weak it is to Parasite, then sure, Andy is their weakest match up. But if they are playing the NEXT suite, which a lot of people do, Andy really suffers if she isn’t packing parasite, which I think is pretty hard to justify right now. NEXT Silver is just an enormous beating.

Overall, I think Andy’s best match ups are the different NBN decks running around. At least those decks are still susceptible to Siphon and Sec testing. But it’s not a great match up or anything, just good.

Otherwise I completely agree. This isn’t a flavor of the week thing. I think a lot of the regionals wins we’ve seen with Crim have been great players getting some good rolls playing decks they were comfortable with rather then the best deck for the room. You can definitely pull that off still: Andy only has 1 really bad match up in Blue Sun while all it’s other bad match ups sit around the 39%- 49% win rate mark. And I’m not knocking their wins either. It’s pretty much what I did at Worlds last year and getting through a hostile field with a runner like that is hard to do. But it’s even harder to do now than it was then. Personally I’m not really keen to take the “good vs 1 thing, terrible against another, okayish vs everything else” odds when there are decks like Maxx around that are just better on almost all fronts.

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111

Meh, if all of the cards in your deck are good then you shouldn’t need better card draw. But comparing Mr. Li to some non-existant card doesn’t make a ton of sense either. If you’re looking for something specific, digging deeper is better 100% of the time than just drawing a card. Mr. Li may not be some amazing star; but being able to see 2x’s as many cards is not bad since you don’t get 2x’s as many cards as you normally do. Its better than the base case, which is what you ought to be comparing it to.

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112

The base case of what, clicking for a card draw? Yeah, Li is better than that, but at this point in the game you could just slot in Symmetrical Visage instead of Li and get a card draw AND a credit, and then maybe draw again if you aren’t wowed by what you got, and you’re really no worse off on clicks.

When’s the last time anyone saw Mr. Li in a tourney-winning deck? I haven’t seen his face in quite some time.

I tend to see Mr. Li as a sort of “click trap.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played against a Criminal and seen their tempo take a massive hit because they spend entire turns diddling Mr. Li instead of doing anything else, leaving me free to do whatever I wish on my side.

You still need a more efficient method of getting those cards than clicking for one at a time, though.

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113

@mediohxcore respectfully, I don’t really agree with this. A lot of the attention Leela has gotten may be from good players winning with her, but that will always be the case, as good players win due to the skill level of Netrunner. I think there is a solid argument that MaxX (especially reg-ass) wouldn’t be as popular if it wasn’t you playing it.

I don’t believe that Leela’s match ups against some RP or glacier decks are as bad as you believe, and I’ve been playing her for a long time, and so have a lot of data / evidence of this.
I’m sure you’ve got your own evidence that is backing up your view, but to me it seems that you are being overly critical of a runner that I think is very strong. Just felt I should say as much.

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114

It’s called Earthrise Hotel and it’s fucking awesome.

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115

This is certainly the case, but it’s not just because I’m playing her, it’s because a solid deck was built. I think the big difference between Maxx and Leela is that the reason to play Leela, (she has a better matchup against NEH than Kate), has become not true since people spent time winning with Leela at store champs. This is why I believe Leela to be overrepresented now: there used to be a good reason to play her, and now there isn’t.

You’re just about the only strong player who thinks Leela has a reasonable chance against RP. I think there’s really only two ways to win the matchup: your opponent is a less-than-great RP player, or you luck into a quick Siphon. I put her matchup at about 20% if both players are playing well. Look at the finals match of the SSCI for an illustrative example: Leela won, but it was only because @AceJack forget her ability existed.

I have lost somewhere between zero and one game against Leela playing RP in at least 30 games.

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116

I feel like criminal would be a lot better if they had good in faction breakers and such. Why? Because then you wouldn’t spend x influence on corroder, yog, mimic, datasuckers, NRE or w/e + RnD multi access. . And then you can play some number of parasite / clone chip :D. These are the things shaper/anarch are getting easier access too. Parasite is just far ahead of Crescentus imo, especially when it comes to huge problems for Criminal like Next Silver or forbid… even a freaking quicksand. Every deck I want to play has access to parasite, and yes… you can play parasite in criminal builds but it’s usually just not the same.

I’d love to see more breakers that do something additional to breaking. Still stand by a criminal fracter or decoder that has slightly weaker stats but scry 1(look at top card, place on top or bottom of stack) after successfully using it during a run the 1st time per turn… and then maybe one that has some additional built in ability. Just want to see more non ai breakers that do interesting criminally stuff like femme does. I think that the factions could really be pushed breaker wise and that would help flesh them out.

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117

I’ve been really impressed with the valencia wyldcakes desperado deck. It plays like stealth andy in a lot of ways. Blackmail does double duty as a super-inside-job and also mitigating the lack of 9 card hand, suckers and bad pub serve as legwork, and parasite recursion is better than siphon. It feels like what andy wants to be. It makes me think what crims need is a new high-impact “trick” card, since siphon, IJ, sneakdoor, and emergency have all gotten way worse for various reasons.

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118

FFG is trying, at least. The new Criminal ID gets a buff for using the Breaking and Entering breakers–you can run 1 x Breach, 1 x Passport, and the B&Es, and also your ID ability will help with a Criminal problem of draw and consistency.

It also rewards you for playing Clone Chip, so there is reason to slot a Parasite now. Plus the CCs support your trashable breakers.

You can play the econ denial game with Crescentus (drawing you a card, or two, if you break the ice with your B&Es) and Siphon. You can protect yourself from dying with Forger and things like Fall Guy that give you cards and money for no clicks.

The two-click requirement of Same Old Thing is now mitigated by the fact that you get to draw a card, so you can borrow a bit of PPVP Kate’s thing and run 2 x Legwork and 2 x Maker’s Eye.

I have a hunch this dude will catch on a little.

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119

Exaggerate much?

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120

He’s pretty serious about this one. Makes us chant it during warm-ups at weekly meetup.

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121

He always bids 1 with Psi’s…

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