Could be good. I’ve seen it in supermodernism, used as the 4th copy of hostile takeover. The extra click to fast track is real, though – it takes several turns advance planning to be ready to IAA a 5/3, and fast track for atlas + IA likewise is harder to pull off than when you have atlas in hand and that third click can be spent on ice or ash.
Not so. While other agendas may require Ash protecting them to be able to score, NAPD protects itself. I would run all 2-pointers before I cut NAPD for anything.
I’ve considered it but against noise I’d rather just have a 2nd copy of interns, or an elizabeth mills maybe…
This deck seems solid. I messed around with a similar version playing Snare!, but I think against an experienced player it’s only use is to randomly get kills against legwork/makers eye. Additionally not playing Tollbooth and/or Lotus Field seems like a mistake.
I’m probably going to test -3 Snare! for some combination of tollbooth/ash. I’d like to up the ICE count to 18-19 but I really don’t want to cut Power Shutdown.
Running reversed accounts, read some stuff on reddit, tried it, broken.
Going with archer for a bit since you can oai it and also prireq it, liking the hostile even with NAPD for over advanced atlas points.
Reversed opens really annoying windows that can’t easily be stopped mid game, it seems like the answer to the slowdown the deck suffers from after initial points are scored.
brain fart. Priority is better than Government Contacts, was thinking more NAPD when I was saying that. I agree on Cleaners though and am not looking at Gov Contracts anymore.
And I disagree with NAPD watering down a deck, this or any. It’s carries it’s own weight in a way that most agendas simply do not. The hit you take by running one more agenda is easily recovered by how hard it is to get. And while Priority is great once it scores, NAPD let’s you focus on getting your economy up aggressively which to me is more vital.
I’m liking Flare, trashes hardware and deals damage, and Private Contracts, since it’s not draw dependent.
TBH, I don’t really like Hostile Takeover in Blue Sun. It’s not as good as it is in your traditional Weyland build.
i dont know about anyone else but playing against blue sun tag and bag feels like im facing supermoderism on steroids. 2 plascretes doesnt seem like enough. if i spend too much time digging they just start scoring behind good ice and get stupid rich.
against both NEH and Blue sun it feels like im playing against HB with mandatory upgrades scored. maybe i just need to play more vs weyland but i cannot ever remember having this sort of trouble against grndl or BABW.
So what does one do as an Anarch against this deck? I haven’t played it a lot, but my first impression is that it’s a rough matchup. You can hardly Parasite anything because most ICE is high strength and gets bounced next turn anyway, you can’t keep Knights (or other Caïssa) on rezzed ICE because it gets bounced, and so on.
I feel like the only thing we’ve got going for us is D4v1d and Stimhack (which are admittedly pretty good). Still, it’s rough. Ideas?
Edit: Forgot to mention, but the Vamp-plan doesn’t work well either (at least not without Crescentus), because they’ll just rez everything on HQ and bounce it next turn. Ugh!
I agree: it’s a terrible matchup. I think it’s fair to say a huge amount of playable Anarch cards are built around Parasite (Datasucker, Deja Vu, Djinn, Cyberfeeder, even Scrubbed, Ice Carver and Grimoire) and making runs cheap (Medium). The other cards that have actually seen play are Knight and it’s decks built around that - but Blue Sun kills that, too. The silver linings are:
Much of the big ice are barriers. Quetzal can deal with that handily.
Blue Sun going broke to defend one server allows rampant access on another, building tokens on Medium or Datasucker.
It’s tough to see what happens here. Maybe we start seeing a lot of Morningstar (with Datasucker support) out of Anarch.
Problem is, while the need for MS has certainly increased in the last cycle or so, there hasn’t been any new support for it (the only things that even come close to being arguable there are Leprechaun and Inject). This means that MS remains too complicated to set up and too unreliable for Anarch as a primary breaker. It’s really sad that Shaper is much better positioned to leverage it.
One thing to remember is that Weyland is trying to set up a super server. To do that, they need time to build it, so one strategy you can use to slow them down is to heavily attack the central servers. Noise in particular is very good at attacking R&D. As previously mentioned, D4vid is your friend here, but Imp is also a miracle worker. Run R&D, then play an Imp to trash a card, then run R&D again, use the imp if you have to, then run it again. That’s basically an in-faction makers eye.
If you can get into R&D that cheaply, installing Medium and running twice is also pretty good (and there’s now a card in archives the corp might want to defend).
So yes, it’s a bad idea to let Noise into R&D - but out of every faction, Blue Sun is the one that can can defend R&D while building its scoring server. Because when it’s time to score, all that ice investment on R&D becomes money to defend the agenda. Or the centrals again, if the runner doesn’t even try. That’s the problem Anarch faces here - its usual server cracking tools are invalidated, and its ability to pressure multiple servers at once (Archives with mills/free Datasucker tokens, R&D with Medium/Keyole, HQ with Imp/Nerve Agent/Lamprey) is seriously hampered.
Yes, I find Morning Star next to unplayable in Anarch. For one, it’s more difficult to cheat out than in Shaper, two, you can’t tutor it in-faction (obviously), three, if you want to support it with Datasuckers, that’s 3-4 MU right there. And MU is a problem in Anarch.
And you really can’t run it as your only barrier breaker unless you’re Quetzal, because it’s so clunky you just lose to NBN and Wraparounds!
I think Dugger’s you can add to the list - like with Inject, if you’re running this sort of deck you’re using Retrieval Run, so you don’t mind ditching programs to the heap, which helps the big drawback of Dugger’s.
Memory is a problem, but Grimoire is the cheapest way of getting 2MU (outside Djinn to find and host your Datasuckers - which can also save your other viruses from being Injected away).
Maybe we will see some more support in faction, soon.
While I really want to like this particular line of reasoning, I think it gets completely invalidated under closer scrutiny:
If I need a Morning Star, and the corp sees me ditch it to the heap, they’d be stupid not to expect a Retrieval Run. One barrier (or other unpassable-at-the-moment) ETR on Archives and it’s all over. I’m stuck not being able to break barriers, or burning my back-up tools just getting it in play.
if you say “Knight”, we’re suddenly talking 2 cards, 5 credits, 3 actions and the cost of the run to “cheat out Morning Star”, which is actually more expensive than hard-casting it. Other methods of making RR connect make for similarly unfavorable comparisons
From my experiments with Retrieval Run, it’s been best in a deck with 3 Femmes and Doppelganger as the console, because then the opportunity cost of cheating out programs decreased somewhat (and a RRed Femme has good synergy with Doppelganger’s follow-up).
Test Run + Scavenge as all influence for Anarch. Duggars + Retrieval run for morning star as a second option. Also, can use scavenge on D4v1d to deal with those harder things?