by Corbeau
slacks wrote:
This is very similar to my Criminal deck, but I'm splashing:
2x Djinn ****
3x Datasucker ***
3x Parasite ******
2x Stimhack **
Djinn is a rather nice splash since it gives you MU for Sneakdoor and Datasucker and lets you search for Crypsis and Datasucker. Looking at your deck, I would guess you don't have too much trouble with MU but the search can help stop bad draws.
2x Djinn ****
3x Datasucker ***
3x Parasite ******
2x Stimhack **
Djinn is a rather nice splash since it gives you MU for Sneakdoor and Datasucker and lets you search for Crypsis and Datasucker. Looking at your deck, I would guess you don't have too much trouble with MU but the search can help stop bad draws.
This is exactly what stopped me from running Djinn. If this deck runs Djinn, the extra MU goes handily to waste. To put that to use means adding Parasites, and the only thing available to pull is The Personal Touch. Which guts the deck's midgame economy. Seriously, you do not want to be paying full pump price for every single ice. Ice Carver is still worth it's influence price just to be a fourth Personal Touch (that happens to help Femme Fatal on the side). That's just because of how ridiculously efficient Ice Carver is in general when playing with low-base-strength breakers.
I'd rather play 2x Special Order in place of the Armitages than convert the deck to use Djinn. It's far less good with a mono-breaker deck, but it's true that it would help mitigate bad draws. And more Femme Fatal is never, ever a bad thing. Heck, Femme Fatal is also an answer to huge forts - they'll have a big piece of ice or two in the concoction that you'll want to target anyway.
Don't mistake me though - for all the economy, this deck is never going to be Shaper. You don't have Magnum Opus and you don't have Shaper sustained-strength breakers. This is still a blitz deck, and it still loses if you get to the real late-game. The difference here is that you can keep going longer, and keep the corp down more effectively, than you can with Anarch.
Pyjam wrote:
Corbeau wrote:
Criminal not only crushes Weyland by default (because Decoy exists in-faction, relegating Weyland to a weaker version of other identities)
Shapers and Anarchs need to import Decoy and Crash Space, but Criminals need to import a pair of Corroders and some decoders.
I would agree with you if Decoy cost 1 influence, but every other Runner identity starts a whopping 6 influence down (if you want consistency), and that doesn't even make a start on addressing the factions' own breaker or economy problems. Thanks to Special Order existing, Criminal doesn't have to spend that much to remedy, at a basic level, their main flaw (terrible breakers).
Crash Space is outright terrible outside of Criminal. Traces just aren't strong enough to make the free tag shaking worthwhile for the influence cost, and the meat damage clause won't stop a good tag-n-bag from spending an extra click to trash it before the murder. Obvious exception if your local meta is NBN dominated or something, but even then it's not crazy good like Decoy.
Really, Decoy is on the short list of three cards that I think the design team outright screwed up by printing with in the current card pool. It's so strong of a meta card that it makes Weyland shift between dominating if the runner doesn't have Decoy and being seriously lackluster if the runner does have Decoy. Though one could consider it more the fault of Weyland's design than Decoy itself. Spoiler: the second of the three design mistakes is Scorched Earth.