Why to play criminal

Netrunner General
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I believe under the new designer there might be an intended shift in the “colour pies” on the runner side, through rotation and ban list, but also recent cards. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the strongest AI (something crims NEVER got their hands on) is suddenly blue. And it’s not alone. They always had to gate potent cards through facechecking with Faerie. So I suspect that’ll be retooled. Crim was too hit or miss in the meta, they ran over things or they got hurt too badly.

This leaves me with a problem though. Netrunner tends to signal pretty strongly what strategies are possible: the design uses broken cards to diversify. By any metric, net mercur is broken, but otoh, it makes a fun strategy work and isn’t general purpose: you play stealth to get to play with mercur. Before it was printed stealth was cumbersome. SMC shapes shaper as a whole. Ice destruction very efficient, trashing off centrals is potent.

But with crim, perhaps you and me have to rethink why to play crim. It’s no longer siphon, desperado, etc. I don’t want that back! I believe ffg knows what they are doing. And kind of love this puzzle of making unloved cards practical: What are the cards we are going to play around?

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And by now I think most of us have figured out gang sign plays nice with aumakua, maw, aeneas etc. What more fun is there to be had?

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I’ve had some success with Apocalypse in Criminal, specifically Ken and Steve. Having access to 3x Inside Job and 3x Spear Phishing makes it pretty easy to land and a lot of corps moved off of Crisium.

Obviously, Hostile Infrastructure in a prison deck still wrecks it, but it’s a blast to play!

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I will point out that Core 2, TD (Mammon), and Red Sands (Aumakua) are all designed by Damon. Any shift from the Core/early cycles color pies for Criminal are because of him. We’ll have to see the Kitara cycle as a whole and judge by the power levels of different type of Criminal cards. Although Kitara was also designed by Damon, at least it was Developed (final say on balance/tweaks) by Boggs. And even then it’s not super clear if he wants to take it into a different direction or learning on the job.

Criminal is still the run-based faction. And the resource/connection faction. So I’ve been looking there, since there’s more than enough people on gang sign track.

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