ive tried a few variations along this line but you will still feel like you need 25 more influence. strange times for anarch. awesome new ID against barriers and D4vid but all the old tricks parasite/knight get wrecked by blue sun.
Iād like to mention that āthe cleanersā is probably a better 3 pointer than prireq in this deck if you arenāt struggling for credit superiority mid game. The reason being that double scorch with a cleaners scored still kills versus a single plascrete.
Iād say this is significant due to the easy of rushing that first agenda in blue sun.
TBH, I think Blue Sun killing Knight is slightly over blown. Just keep a click to move it off to another unrezzed Ice and they canāt kill it any more efficiently than any other ID. Rook is actually pretty good since they pay more then they get back if you move it, which is pretty painful when they are setting up. Also Knight killing a OAI Hadrianās is pretty awesome.
Parasite isnāt great, but D4V1D makes up for it. Itās okay for Hive if you have datasuckers though. Stimhack, I feel, is a must run card now for Anarchs.
Noise, I think, is fine. The mill strat forces them to protect archives which can stretch them poor enough to work with. If I was super worried about Blue Sun, Iād run Magnum instead of Clone Chip, and make sure I keep corroders in the deck. Katie is an option as well. Being able to keep up with money is key.
Siphon builds, I think, will need to incorporate Keyhole (over medium) to force the same situation. Reina imo is the best for the credit drain. Quetzal idk since every Weyland barrier you encounter should be multi-sub (Hadrianās, Curtain, Hive) and personally Iām not big on running E3. Whizzard is a meta call as always, and tbh I think Kim will be (almost) strictly better when he comes out. You canāt fit Magnum or Katie in these builds, so itās tougher.
Thatās still more efficiently than most IDs get to kill knight. Against anybody but blue sun, you try to end the turn with knight on an expensive rezzed ice to discourage them from replacing it with new ice.
Sure. So? Thatās what Blue Sun does. You have to consider their efficiency, their costs, not yours or another corps.
Their typical turn is Blue Sun trigger, return to hand, Click 1 re-install. Their turn to get rid of Knight is, Blue Sun trigger, Click 1 re-install, Click 2 install over Knight.
Thatās one click to install over, same as every other corporation. The fact that they, basically, can rez a single ice for free is irrelevant when considering Knight, because thatās the case for all their ice against every single icebreaker there is.
I mean, Knight is ādeadā compared to what? A corroder that costs you 7 to get through a Hadrianās? That canāt break an advanced Changeling?
Itās not the greatest card for the match up, but I think itās far from an auto-replace. The bigger issue, imo, is that Knight generally isnāt that great against Weyland Ice because itās multi-subroutine (Hive, Curtain, Hadrianās).
Er⦠no, they just send the Knight-ed ice back to their hand. Click 1 put it or something else back there, Knight-free, with the money back in their pocket.
They donāt have to lose their ice, and thatās huge. In many games, Knight has been Parasite 4-6 for me. Against Blue Sun itās one expensive turn of running (that takes two clicks to set up) and then nada because itās trashed. Or I keep moving it to unrezzed ice over and over.
The issue is that Knight is the best AI breaker Anarchs have, and that their breaker suite, in general, has been so effective (for other factions) that the metagame is warping to hate it out before they get any sort of generally usable replacement.
Blue Sun has trouble with hand size in the mid game, in regards to anarch problems. Mandatory draw plus bouncing an ice is 7 cards, install 2 of them and youāre holding 5. Weyland holds and accumulates operations for their various combos as the game goes on, and that can limit them from getting fresh cards or playing too many- their economic pace limits their installs and potential plays until the mid game. My noise cache runs 2 Djinn, so I may add a single Hemmorhage for this matchup. Also, Unscheduled Maintenance can help if you are able to get pressure on the board early; like what was said earlier Weyland suffers a bit of a lull after scoring an agenda.
Has anyone used Interns to return a Snare to the table and then next turn BS it back into their hand? Definitely on my Netrunner Bucket List.
You are missing the part earlier where I said to move it to an unrezzed piece of ice. So no, they actually canāt.
As you mention later, yes, you move it to unrezzed ice. This means they either let your Knight stay in play, or they trash their ice. At the cost of a couple of clicks (and keep in mind they are spending two clicks, as I explained earlier), I see that as being far from unreasonable.
So yeah⦠my point stands.
Also you are acting as if making multiple runs is the key to beating Blue Sun. You just sit back and draw your rig and econ and hit any advanced remotes. Their is no point to pressure centrals, barring things like Siphon or whatever, because it costs them nothing. So I donāt need Knight to make a lot of runs, I just need it to work when I need it too, and given that it still breaks most of their ice, it can do its job.
I donāt want to be spending 3 clicks to get through a troublesome piece of Ice, personally. Maybe my deck isnāt the best against BS, preferring as it does multiple runs, and Iām not advancing the claim that Knight is useless.
Just that it is much less useful. As is parasite. As is Yog. As is Mimic. D4V1D helps but is slow to recur.
Losing almost an entire turn to check someoneās bluff is not appealing. Losing an entire turn to get in against a potential tag-and-bag deck seems even less so.
If their scoring server is 1 deep, theyāre prepared to accept the risk. If itās not, and their cards arenāt already rezzed, you wonāt know where Knight needs to be. Itās 4 clicks to get Knight out and keep it alive, and three each turn after, for what amounts to an inside job if youāre lucky, against a 2-4 deep scoring remote in a deck with no compunction about rezzing expensive things so long as theyāre taxing.
They lose nothing on this exchange. Nothing. Either they get to tax you massively just to let you try and access something, or they kill your knight at the smallest cost possible. Thereās no reason for them to install over anything most of the time, unless itās an Enigma or something and youāve already got your Yog. Leaving your Knight in play does very little harm to them in the long run.
I have not done this but I have a similar story ā I pitched a prireq into archives after drawing up with jackson, planning to shuffle it back. But the runner never ran archives, and a couple turns later, I had a scoring window but no agenda in HQ. So I picked jackson back up, internsed the prireq, and scored it across 3 turns.
Oh my, if only we had some way of working around this, life would be so much fairer!

Donāt get me wrong though, I completely agree on your points re: how neutered Knight really got⦠to the point where my Anarch decks dropped knights completely, replacing them with Atmen and card draw. Itās just a shame that all my Whizzard identities magically changed to a 45/9, really ![]()