When I play a strategic game, I’m not a fan of relying on my opponent screwing up to have a decent chance at winning.
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A lot of the anti-CI arguments sound like they’re applicable to fast advance generally I.e. “My opponent scored all his points from hand/deck and didn’t give me a chance to get at them. I have to play specific hate cards to prevent this, which is bad. Otherwise I have to run centrals and hope to get 7 before they win.” As argument that the deck shouldn’t exist, I at least don’t find that particularly compelling.
An argument on the grounds that “Violet level clearance lets them score out too fast and with too little effort,” is much more convincing. Not sure if that’s true, but the position is much more reasonable IMO.
I’m more in the VLC makes it too fast that it’s not a reasonable match-up anymore without specific counters (40-45% chance of winning) camp.
But, I don’t think it’s a great comparison with general FA, even at the height of NEH AstroBiotics. Against generic FA, you can keep running and try to set up a remote lock. Against CI7, the best move after they get to 11 credits and drawn 20-25 cards is: don’t run, try to set up for a one final turn of getting accesses. Now, with VLC released that no-run point comes a lot sooner. It goes from RNG, to no interaction, to one last turn of RNG. At least against general FA, it’s RNG the whole way through and fairly decent strategy (R&D lock).
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Yeah, that’s why I mentioned the other Corp I disliked playing against… It’s almost like I dislike the same strategy across multiple decks. (24/7 Shutdown decks also fall into this category, and 24/7 Boom! to a lesser extent, but there’s more widely played counters to those besides ‘Hope to get 7 points before the combo’) Also, I’ll point out that I only particularly disliked NEH Fastro before Clot was released. (Although, amusingly, that deck already ran Cyberdex Virus Suite because the best answer to it was a Medium dig, so Clot happened to not really help a whole bunch…)
The reason I singled out CI7 as my most-hated deck is because there’s only one legitimate counter-strategy that doesn’t involve playing specific tech: Get 7 points before they can combo. Against Fastro, there were a couple, R&D Lock and Medium Dig primarily, with Remote Lock a tenuous possibility, and even caused Turntable to see extended play.
Basically, if the only valid strategy is ‘Run centrals and get 7 points before they win’, then the deck shouldn’t exist. Because that strategy (theoretically) works against every Corp. (And by ‘valid strategy’, I mean you can get a 50% or better win rate.)
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I’m not sure if you’ve been playing or seeing some of the more recent CI7 decks. I wouldn’t call Paperwall/Quandry/Turing/Vanilla/(2-3x) Mother Goddess particularly porous. They are small gear-check. And a lot of decks don’t really have a sustainable solution against 1+ Mother Goddess. Disregarding MoGo, the rest of the ice forces some kind of solution which takes takes draw and credits, taking away clicks from the runner getting accesses.
With 3x VLC CI7, you have what - 5-7 turns before they get to 11 credits and draw 20ish cards? I don’t think that enough to get close to ~21 access to have a 50% chance to steal 7, specifically because unless you have some kind of deep R&D dig (i.e. Medium/Keyhole/TTW), your likely not seeing anything new. You have to fight through the HQ to really get accesses, which is prioritized for better and more ice. You do have the last glory turn, where you can maybe get 4-8 more accesses (depending on if you see something like Legwork).
I’m not saying that there’s a ton of ways for the CI player to screw up, I’m saying there’s a ton of cards in the game that will beat CI unless the CI player is really good.
Most shapers have clot.
Most anarchs have medium, some have siphon.
Most criminals have siphon.
Everyone has employee strike.
CI isn’t something you have to heavily tech against to have a chance against like IG 54 last year. It’s a deck that almost every deck naturally has counters too, and only gets played because there aren’t a lot of good corp options right now.
I’ve played 20 games with CI 7 and won 3 of them. Is it really an issue if people who play CI 7 hundreds of times are able to get a 50%+ winning percentage? Shouldn’t good, experienced players be rewarded for practicing with a deck? We’ve still never seen a single major tournament dominated by CI 7 the way we’ve seen with foodcoats and CtM, so clearly good CI7 players aren’t able to get to a 90%+ winning percentage.
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Maybe my reputation doesn’t precede me as much as I thought, but yes I know the vlc + Mogo suite and yes I think it is good and yes I still stand by everything I said. If ci7 is scouring up your meta then maybe you want to dedicate something in your deck to helping it, but if I was playing regass Andy the only card I’d slot to help me is vamadeva. Every anarch deck ever has parasite and a way to kill the mogo, and can apply medium pressure, and many have an AI breaker. Shaper doesn’t have a great time unless it is like kit or dyper but that’s true against most decks nit just ci7, and they usually have clot to at least give themselves more time to make accesses with.
If you’re constantly accessing cards after 5-7 turns you have a decent chance of taking away key pieces for the combo like Jackson Howard or efficiency committee too.
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You literally wrote the (cook)book on CI7, so I don’t mean to question your knowledge. I was just confused by the choice to call the ice “porous” when almost all the ice they use is a ETR gearcheck. They’re not Pop-ups or Ichi’s that you can just run through without installing or dealing with them.
What would you say CI7’s winrate against Andy (Strikes, Vama, and Siphon, but no other hate) using your suggested strategy? What about Temujin Whizzard?
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In my experience, Gabe is favored against CI7 with no combo-hate at all.
Sneakdoor, Indexing, and “Freedom” are power cards, and Femme fills in the MoGo gap if you can’t draw into Sneakdoor for whatever reason.
Wouldn’t the Corp just install over the MoGo with another? How many Sneakdoors do you run? I can see that your Gabe deck probably has better tools for the match-up than the other popular runners. It’s geared for the early game advantage to max.
The correct number: 3.
If I femme it, yes. However, CI basically has to rez two pieces of ice if they don’t want to concede a ton of accesses to early Sneakdoor, so MoGo is pretty meh in the matchup.
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Fair point, they can’t block off HQ permanently against 3 Sneakdoors. And that’s where to get the accesses you need to win.
That, and quick stuff like Indexing and Keyhole is better than more ponderous stuff like Medium and RDI.
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Yeah sneakdoor is amazing against it. Indexing + freedom too IMO.
In the above Andromeda example with the Vamadeva, I would think that the matchup is probably 35-40% CI7 and 60-65% Andromeda. Without the Vamadeva its probably more like 40-50% CI7 and 50-60% Andromeda. Temuwhizz is probably closer to 50-50 too, which is one reason why CI7 was considered good for a while since every other corp is doing so poorly against it, but while it has decent matchups against these decks, it absolutely falls apart to a whole bunch of other stuff, such as anything sneakdoor, Omar, Siphon spam anarch, keyhole heavy decks. I’ve even lost to Apex with it thanks to freedom + spycam and endless hunger being good against hard ETR ice.
I probably used the wrong term when I said “porous” ice, but my point is that CI7’s ice is only gear-check, and as soon as you have the right breaker its incredibly easy to get in. Compare this to FC3.0 commonly used in Hasty CI where it legitimately causes the runner grief in trying to get into the server even if they have the breaker.
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