When to Rumor and when to Strike?

Assuming influence is not a concern, how would you work through the decision whether to run Rumor Mill or Employee Strike in a deck? What are the issues you would weigh in deciding which to include and which to leave out?

Currently Rumor Mill’s mere existence acts a bit like a herd-immunity thing, where if even a smidge of the runner decks have it then your entire game plan is likely to fall to pieces. As such influence is always the concern, you choose employee strike always unless you have no influence in which case a few Rumor Mills are both strong and allow you to randomly hose some guy who thought he could get lucky. Typically that means Siphon Anarch has Rumor Mill and everyone else has Employee strike, but maybe fills out 1 of their current slots with a spare Rumor Mill.

5 Likes

Employee Strike is a general-purporse card, while Rumor Mill is a metagame call, IMHO.

Rumor Mill seems like kind of a must if you’re on Keyhole. And possibly Siphon? Don’t want to lose to HQ Caprice.

3 Likes

Rumor Mill still blanks Jackson, so if you have any amount of mill pressure psk is probably better than the estrike.

When Rumor Mill first came out, lots of corps were respecting the potential of having their J-Ho blanked and pre-fired him before the runner’s first click. Now many corps are becoming lazy and complacent assuming they can leave Mr Howard on the table and not fire him preemptively.

Rumor Mill = Clot in terms of deck slots. That is, there are games where it does not matter, and games where it breaks the corp’s back. I slot 2x Rumor Mill in every deck.

I have been running a rig shooter Palana deck lately. It uses Marcus to take out their rig. Ark Lockdown to keep the rig gone. Caprice to allow you to score out or Siphon protection. Friends in High Places to recur Marcus and Caprice. As you could guess, the deck really struggles against Rumor Mill.

In saying that, you would be surprised with how many decks are not running Rumor Mill. Even the anarchs I play, most of them do not play it or do not find it. Hopefully by the time they have found it, you have rushed out a Nisei and can stop them getting into the remote twice. You can then play your own current and try to score out the next Nisei. Val with Blackmail + Rumor Mill can easily be an auto-lose.

Yes, competitively it is a gamble (but I am playing Psi games for my win condition so I’m already gambling). The way I see it, you can either play a corp deck which can get you a 50% winrate against 100% of the field or a corp deck that most people are not ready for and wins more often than not against decks that do not run Rumor Mill.

I think Interdiction is probably better than rumor mill in siphon anarch. Caprice on HQ sucks but doesn’t happen all that often, whereas Crisium on HQ or rezzing assets to duck siphon happens all the time.