Where is the MWL? - As of August 20th, 2018 - MWL 2.2 is here (effective 2018.09.06)

Netrunner General
262

In my experience, Dumble usually wins long before the levy. I went undefeated with it at 2 SCs last year and can’t remember actually using the levy in any of my games. Of course knowing you don’t have levy would make you have to play more aggressively. You could put in a paperclip and black orchestra just to still have some juice when you run out of cards in the stack (or trope for one last gasp of aggression).

I’m unaware of any Dumblefork lists ever using temujin, and I don’t think any of them have used clone chip since the last MWL update. I consider thebigboy to be the Dumblefork king. His latest version has 3x employee strike and levy as the only out-of-faction influence spent.

Anyway, the change clearly makes it worse, but I bet it still wins some regionals.

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263

Agree. Levy is nice to have but I usually win before using it. If they keep the “can’t be reduced below 1” rule I think it stays very strong until whiz and lib accounts rotate.

264

Honestly though, looking at “-3 influence for a copy” of course whomever designed this is going to think about the professor rule and realise it needs a change. Its obvious that some sort of change is going to be a part of it, and “SpoilerKen” probably just heard this all second hand and doesn’t have the full details.

265

I am not denying that Dumblefork will still be strong and may still win some regionals. However, the changes to the Corps card pool in the last six months could cause the deck some issues. Friends In High Places allows the Corp to recur their ICE easily. Multi-sub ICE (DNA Tracker, Fairchild 3.0 and Macrophage) become harder to destroy. PU and RP prison using Friends can cause issues without a Levy. Also the resurgence of some Midseasons decks.

In saying this, I thought the first two iterations of the MWL would topple Anarch from the top but new Anarch decks just emerged that were even stronger. So we will have to see what decks the meta produces with these changes.

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266

Anything that will make glacier viable will make my day and bring me back with trumpets blaring. I’m not even asking for T1 or some gross world where Sandburg and Ash rule from the darkness. I just want some good ol’ T1.5 glacier where the runner thinks, “That’s a brutally taxing server with a mysterious upgrade and this is a thing that I find concerning. Can I get in?” You know, the kind of Netrunner where the glacier corp loses (because come on, it’s glacier corp), but it was close and the runner cheerily says, “Great game! That was real Netrunner!”

And all I think it will take is a savage kicking to Rumor Mill and SIFR.

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267

LOL. You might read my response a few lines above.

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yeah I was agreeing with you entirely but putting it in more absolute terms. Anyone who thinks we’re stuck with professor rule is a fool.

269

Gotcha. Agreed.

270

Seems like they could just revise the professor.

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271

I’ve been playing glaciery decks for a couple months now and it’s been fine. It’s mostly a question on what ice you include + where to play them + when to rez + econ + a couple of friends. I don’t see myself losing to ice destruction much at all currently and much less when this MWL update comes out.

As for Dumble and Levy, agree completely with BobAloVskI.

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In addition to a change in the runner playstyle, there will be a change in the Corp’s style. Good players knew that Dumble had a strong late game with Levy, so they just went for strong early plays and good ice placement and rez decisions to fend off Medium. Without Levy, they have the option to play for the late game when Dumble has to consider how to use limited resources to get in a few more times.

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273

After thinking about this MWL-suggestion a bit more i do have some comments on it i think. Two cards that are not on the list in its spoiled form are powercards that will define a lot of decks in the future meta if they are not dealt with.

Caprice Nisei
This card is overbearingly good as a defensive upgrade, and if it is not on the MWL there is very little counterbalance to it dominating all glacier archetypes until it rotates. Especially with all the recursion (like FiHP) that is available to the corp. I have been running her as a 2-of in my ‘ban-list meta’ testing sessions together with a single FiHP and she still closes out games even with more councilman and PLOP in the meta. Seeing as 1 influence is a fair price to pay i hope they reconsider and give her a slight nerf. Otherwsie we will see a large part of the glacier meta (again) dominated by this tactic.

Desperado
There are decent consoles in crim now. This one not on the MWL will cause every criminal-deck to be locked into the powerful synergy of Desp, Temujin, Sectesting and Dirty Laundry without exception. Breaking up this massive combo of effectiveness is not a bad thing. Seeing as crim has been seen as ‘bad’ for a long time i don’t think the opinions from many players about this card being ‘needed’ is representative of the truth. It reflects their emotions about their history with the game. If on the MWL you can still play the full supercombo at the cost of 6 influence. This is not a lot, in truth, especially with crims getting better breakers in TD. I fully expect crim to bounce to the top after this MWL and TD hits, and it will likely be there (only with more diversity) if decks are forced to consider slightly more diverse strategies than the obvious best one.
Playing 3 out of 4 parts of the ‘supercombo’ in crim is still a very good combo. And paying 6 for running it in full is a fair price.

Now neither of these are gamebreaking, but if enacted would prod the game in an even better direction. Tier 1 obviously, not Tier 3.

I think it is dangerous to listen too much to people who have not spent time exploring alternate strategies than these two staples for the last 2 years. This is often the case with people who are ‘pure Spikes’ in mentality and play the best-deck strategies exclusively. They tend to have very correct opinions on what is good, but not so accurate opinions on what is slightly too good, or what ‘bad’ thing is actually decent.

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274

I disagree with you on both counts and think people make way too big of a deal about caprice.

  1. Caprice. It’s a very strong card, but no corp is scoring agendas left in a server mid-to-late game without a strong defensive upgrade like caprice. It also can be excellent on a central, such as HQ, to punish decks that go all-in on a strategy like siphon spam. It might have been better-designed if it had a limited number of uses (like say it’s trashed after three psi game wins), but there are so many options to play against it.

First off, most psi games aren’t random. You can use information about the board state that dictates what the corp might do. You can manipulate the board state with cards such as account siphon, ice destruction or pressure on other servers that forces the corp to redirect resources to influence or restrict what the corp might bid.

You can ignore the scoring remote and attack other servers if getting in is too-low-percentage of a play. Cards like medium, indexing, turning wheel, equivocation, legwork, wanton destruction, the interfaces to name a few.

Without any hate cards, at KoS – where rumor mill was banned – I saw three decks with caprice nisei while playing smoke, and lost zero games to them. Two wins were shutouts because the corp couldn’t rez enough ice to actually tax me and still have money left over to win psi games, then score agendas. The corp would have had a zero percent chance of winning those games without caprice.

You can use hate cards. Pol-op, interdiction, councilman. The current that restricts psi games to 50-50. I once won a small tournament when older-style foodcoats was popular with unregistered S&W '35 in my deck. Friends in high places can bring stuff back, but interns and archived memories have existed all along.

  1. Desperado. First off, have you played against horizontal decks as criminal without desperado? It’s miserable.

Secondly, I disagree with you that criminals have other competitively-viable consoles. We just got gauntlet, and that’s pretty good (albeit expensive), but outside of that, the faction easily has the weakest set of consoles. Logos is a fit in some decks, but in my experience it’s pretty weak outside of very specific builds. Doppleganger is thoroughly ‘meh’ in my experience, shining in some games but not doing much of anything most of the time. Forger is pretty good in Geist, and that’s it. If criminals got other consoles of comparable power level to astrolabe and turntable and maya and grimoire and obelus, it would be nice.

Third, if you go back to the beginning of the game, a good portion of the criminal economy suite is designed with desperado in mind. The run economy can be very strong against decks that don’t protect their servers, but it’s balanced by the fact that in-faction criminal breakers are relatively inefficient, and the faction’s economy can really struggle to get off the ground against glacier decks that don’t leave open servers. Criminals are also going to get a lot slower after Andy rotates.

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275

I disagree on both counts.

  1. Caprice has plenty of counter-play available in Interdiction, Political Operative, Councilman, and to a certain degree Drive By. Also it is possible to win psi games. Without Caprice, glacier match ups become a pure-math affair that tends to favor runners, who can come up with credits faster then ever with Temujin.

  2. Desperado: I don’t know what to say here. What are these decent criminal consoles? Gauntlet is fine in shaper. Logos and Reflection can work in some specific builds. Forger works fine in Geist. Box-E, Blackguard, and Dopple are all very poor choices. Are there consoles that I am forgetting?

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276

You are forgetting Polyhistor, that card is an absolute gamechanger.

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Rather than putting Caprice on the MWL, shouldn’t FFG just print other good glacier cards? Off the Grid is a neat idea, the 6 rez cost / 0 trash cost if found in R&D is just brutal. More cards like that, but efficient like Caprice, would probably cause most non-Jinteki glacier decks to stop playing Caprice, as her influence is appropriately high.

I do think either desperado or Aaron should have been put on the MWL - Crim is going to be really, really good after this MWL change.

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278

I couldn’t agree with this more. I think Bio-ethics is a fine card in PE or Bio-tech to punish not running facedown remotes and enable some cool kill shots. It’s only really toxic in prison archetypes when backed up by HI, which doesn’t really see play in non-degenerate decks anyways. Putting the influence hit there seems like it would do the same thing to prison decks without harming Ronin or Brewery flip kill decks as much.

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You know, at first, I thought you may be engaging in an April Fools joke. You may yet still be, but Polyhistor isn’t bad. It has things going for it. Behold:

  1. Has Link + MU. The extra link isn’t useful all the time, but is basically a cred vs CtM and/or HHN. Plus, B&E suite in Andy/Geist.

  2. Criminal card draw. Though it is the first time, you often don’t want to run HQ multiple times in a turn anyway. Plus, synergistic with Sneakdoor and Gabe. Semi-synergistic with TTW and SecTes HQ.

  3. You get to trigger the draw before a Legwork. So, if they’re less than 2 cards, or you want to include the top card because you know it is an agenda (Polyhistor Cams Geist?), you can.

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280

I was, but Polyhistor might actually have a place I agree. Especially if flooding the corp becomes a thing.

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Polyhistor doesn’t work with Sneakdoor since it’s dependant on passing all of the ice on HQ, rather than just making a successful run in HQ. If you use Sneakdoor then you have passed all the ice on Archives, not HQ. Unless you are referring to spreading out pressure so that there’s less I’ve on HQ, in which case that’s a little too incidental for me to agree!