I think you have to make sure you use laundry well to make it good. If you can’t see your desperado/sec test coming soon, burn it now to fuel aggression. Mid-to-late game, make sure to use it on a run you were going to make anyway so you’re not either wasting the click efficiency or holding it too long.
I still run laundry because it synergizes so well with medium, which i also run. being able to sec test rnd and dirty laundry it and gain a counter means that I’ve gained a future rnd access and probably made money in the process. Casts can’t pack its power in quite as efficiently.
My belife is that Criminal has to go in a whole new direction from a design perspective. There is so much synergy between the currant Crim cards so when they introduce a new archatype for the faction, it has to be equal in power to the old Andy Sucker or Stealth Andy. They made a meager attempt in H&P with Ian or Silhouette, and failed. What I am looking for from FFG in the future is a new trademark theme that is specific to Crim, but still playable at the compatative level.
Architect is definitely a huge pain. The best ice scout is still fairie though, and that can absolutely be played (also great in Leela). Maybe now is the time to actually try some of thier other scout cards.
I also second the point about non conditional economy, I’ve always prefered it, and Hostage lets you do it better than anyone else (IMHO).
The difficult environment for run economy is a little sad to me. Dirty Laundry, Desperado, and their ilk encourage runners to do their jobs, whereas heavy resource economy means lots of setup and a little more parallel solitaire. It’s similar to how Cortex Lock makes early facechecking much scarier. I feel like the current state demands much more carefully placed runs thanks to the corps providing the runners with a lot of hard decisions upfront, and I kind of miss how frequently and recklessly you could run a few cycles ago. (On the other hand, I prayed for a time where siphon spam would be less of a thing, and I got it!)
Program trashing is also a much bigger danger now, thanks to Grails. When Andy was strong, she could run with no recursion at all. Save for an occasional left-field Secretary, her programs weren’t going anywhere, mostly thanks to Faerie.
Now a singleton breaker plan (e.g. corroder) with no clone chips etc. is super risky. Any recursion once again cuts into influence, which already got reduced thanks to not having a strong in-faction breaker suite.
Faerie will take care of Architect, Gutenberg, Cortex Lock, Komainu, and Tsurugi—once. Grails and Crick are both pretty to really painful to hit and it can’t deal with them. It’d be nice to have a way to tutor a Snitch in faction!
Those saying Desperado/Siphon are good are right. I’d add Andromeda’s ID ability and Security Testing in there as well. It’s not terribly different from saying SMC/Astrolabe make Shaper good, in addition to Diesel and say, Lady.
edit:
I’d say Andromeda is still by far the strongest Criminal ID and that presents a problem for blue card design.
I personally didn’t play much lately, but they feel a tad behind Shapers, and maybe even Anarchs. A new card to freshen them up can easily bring them up to snuff.
True, but another issue is that Criminal’s power cards are the most powerful on a card by card basis; And, unfortunately, they’re sort of in the “universally” good spot or were until recently. Any future criminal cards that are good have to be looked at with those “good-stuff” criminal cards to see if a monster gets created… A lot of the new criminal cards that we’ve been seeing are non-interactive with the “good-stuff” cards, but that ultimately means that they are niche and so far have not gotten to a “OP” level. Oh, there’s interesting stuff there with the connections/resource mechanic, I just don’t think its up to snuff yet for the competitive level. Its getting closer. Off campus apartment+supplier is really interesting. I think its worth examining what exactly the criminal archetypes are:
Siphon Spam (not the thing anymore)
Andy Sucker (hated out a bit by high strength ice & cvs to force ice fires; 1x atman improves the game though)
Gabe-Door (Harder to do now that face checking hurts and crick)
Daily Quester (Would be amazing if not for crisium grid. It’s actually exactly what the RP doctor ordered)
All in Connections/Resources
Stealth-Andy
That’s at least 6 archetypes. They aren’t all playable, but at one point almost all of them have been top tier decks. Are we missing something? I’ve tried out some Au Revoir lately. There have also been a few blackmail and Overmind builds in the past. Having played snitch, it definately brings some game. I think the lack of “expose” criminal may be a mistake. There is no greater money saver than not running when you don’t have to, or not dealing with a big piece of ice you’re not yet ready for. Breakers can be a problem, yes; but, … its not that bad when you have special order and there’s enough cheap and useful hardware…
Very good analysis. Something else I’m trying currently is Andy with London Library, femme and overmind (yes it’s also got autoscripter and doppleganger). The deck practically builds itself, and seems to have a very good games vs glacier, with the possibility of adding in tricks to deal with faster decks. A while ago I also built a sterling deck with central only breakers and blackmail that seemed pretty good to. I think there’s more depth in thier card pool than is commonly acknowledged, but a lot of it is around tier 1.5 at the moment or has been overlooked.
Played against Nords running this the other night. It’s intriguing. He’s not running Auto or Dopple, or even Siphon, AFAIK. Once set, it can pounce servers at will. With Medium and HQIs, there’s pressure. HQ becomes a breeding ground for deth if you’re too slow.
It’s a nice alternative. Not sure on its tourney viability, but, it’s something.
True, but you don’t need more than econ, library, breaker to block most rushes. With Andy you’ve got a good chance, but if it’s not in your opening hand it might take 3-4 turns. I was thinking of jamming in inside job.
My 2 cents on crim: I feel like people get too caught up with tweaking current lists and running a bunch of one ofs out of andy, when really, 2-3 IJ, 2-3 shutdown is extremely powerful and should probably be played more. Andi needs a different econ package, but you can probably still make a good deck. The major issue I see for crim right now is they can’t spam parasites, so eli/pup/pop up/enigma get really annoying really fast.