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