Having won multiple tournaments with both jank and standard decks, andy and toolbox shaper lists are the second and third most complex decks to play behind aggressive noise shop. most jank decks are fairly linear in comparison
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Damn, this is one of those times where I wish I could âlikeâ a post more than once.
And when you win, donât bask in how awesome you were, look at the game as objectively as you can and try to figure out what you could have done better. What were the moves that were actually stupid, and just didnât kill you (or blind luck ended up rewarding you for)? What were the moves you didnât take, that could have nipped something in the bud? etc
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This is how one can do well, IMHO, by subverting expectations. Iâve hit Gabe (and others) on OCTGN with my RP deck, because when one sees RP, they expect standard Glacier. For the most part, it is. Except for that Shinobi. Dat Grim, though. Those Shocks and Fetal AIs.
I know, itâs hard to do, but playing counter to the meta, or playing upon the perceived meta, can yield fun, and sometimes fruitful, results. Successful generals have been conducting similar moves in war for millennium now.
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I think this is a good point, and that thereâs a difference between âplaying something to subvert metaâ or to âbreakâ the meta, and playing something because itâs unexpected. If youâve got a strategy that is, all in all, about as good as the standard one (doesnât always suffer major losses just because someone expects it being a good first check on that), it ends up being even better than usual.
My roommateâs line about it: âScorched is at its best when itâs at its worst. If no one takes it seriously as a threat from me, itâs more likely theyâll make my job of scorching them much simpler.â
There are other, similar examples. If Lotus Field does shift the meta away from Yog (which Iâm doubting, at least to the degree people were first claiming it would), Yog will actually get better so long as you have a way through LF, because people will start to run more things that Yog can, well⌠Yog. The less warped around the Anarch Breakers the meta becomes, the more useful those breakers will end up being. Not that they will be less warped, because even if they fell out of fashion theyâd still be good and peopleâd return to 'em quick enough.
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I donât think Lotus Field will move the meta at all. At most, it requires Andi to change one card. Low strength code gates (other than Quandary and Popup) are weak sauce in Parasite/Datasucker-land anyway. Maybe, just maybe, it makes Inazuma and Vik 2 slightly better, but these were already really good pieces of ICE to begin with and the strategies against them are mostly unchanged by Lotus Field.
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It also means Anarchs now have to play at least 2 Knights, whether they really wanted to or not. This has further influence on the number of multi-access viruses they can run (and reasonably expect to actually have out), the viability of the different consoles, and a bunch of other related things.
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Arenât you forgetting⌠Force of Nature!?
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Very actively trying to, in fact. Isnât everone?
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In all seriousness, I donât know that Lotus Field absolutely necessitates playing multiples of Knight in Anarch. Beyond the obvious solution of splashing Zu.13 or Gordian, there are also the possibilities of recurring a single copy of Knight and/or using Crypsis/Overmind/(Darwin?).
Regardless, I agree that Anarch (with their lack of a remotely decent pumpable decoder) are probably most affected by Lotus Field. I doubt, however, that the degree of effect rises to the level of âmeta-shifting.â Andi will not be abandoned because of Lotus Field. People will not play Anarch less because of Lotus Field.
Surely we are far off-topic now⌠Unless we consider âForce of Nature is actually not goodâ to meet minimal criteria of on-topic-ness.
Itâs not as simple as splashing one copy of Xu or Gordian because that one copy is going to cost you eight or nine influence (with the Special Orders/SMCs you need to ever see the drated thing). Ditto Knight.
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In Anarch Iâm either running Siphon, in which case Iâm using multiples of breakers and especially Knight/Overmind, or Iâm using my influence for the exact cards you mentioned.
My current favorite Anarch deck is a Whizzard control deck that runs 3 SMC and 3 Clone Chip. Itâs pretty solid but feels a bit too slow to succeed against the Astro Train, especially TWIY Biotic version. I run two each of Knight, Corroder, Yog, and Mimic.
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This is for all of you.Youâre all the best. The very best around.
Though to be slightly more serious, since FFG doesnât see fit at this time to have any official league, Elo ranking or anything to track competitive play, and since a noticeable amount of big tournament/championship winners opt not to play online or have any real internet presence regarding the game, it seems like quite a bit of this will come down to folks that can tout themselves the loudest or have the greatest presence in the online community. Though to be fair, odds are people devoting the time to add substantially to that community are probably good.
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I think itâs relevant to this topic to point out that German Nationals was won by Noise/Jinteki:PE
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Thatâs great to hear really⌠Any write ups or decklists available?
Not only were the german nationals won by Noise and PE, we also had 4 Noise in the top 16 (6 Anarchs in total, with 1 Whizzard and 1 Reina Roja). Even Weyland was showing up in the Double Eliminations! NEH by far not as dominant as anticipated before. It was the most played Corp-Deck but didnt even make it to the finals (Noise/PE vs. Andy/RP).
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@Nordrunner: Decklists you can find here: http://forum.hds-fantasy.de/viewtopic.php?f=300&t=18181
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Also writeup, in german sadly.
Also pointing out that top Swiss player was Kate/HB:EtF
The stats are interesting too. In Swiss Kate was biggest, a clear top three with Andy and Noise.
NEH, EtF and RP were big on the corp side.
At least one bit of the stats is wrong. I played Andromeda and not Kate. (5th place after swiss)