4 replies to this topic

[Phatheadaf]

Hello!

 

I recently picked up a full collection from a friend and I have played a few games; maybe a half dozen in total, and I really am excited to start building and playing more. However, I have to admit, starting at this stage, the card pool is VERY overwhelming; are their any suggestions of how to break this down into smaller pieces that I might be able to absorb easier? I have also been skimming through some of the podcasts and they all seem to be fairly advanced reviews of the new cards/tech; does anyone have a suggestion of one (if any) that are friendlier to a newer player? 

 

Thanks in advance, and looking forward to enjoying the community! 

 

@. 

[TimTim]

My 10 sents: Play the factions you like most. Start easy: If a card seems too complicated, leave it out for now. Play more and you see how things work together and what cards do what. I myself have learned a lot when playing against more skilled/advanced players. Don't be afraid of doing some crazy or stupid choices when building decks, you learn through your mistakes.

 

And most of all: If you have fun playing, you are doing it right!

 

Also, local meta is always going to differ from place to place. Somewhere viruses are the thing, somewhere else criminals rule the runners. I would be the worst player on more competitive meta, since I'm used to really friendly and casual style of gameplay where style/theme/wackiness is much appreciated.

[Phatheadaf]

Thanks TimTim! i appreciate the feedback. I've been listening to a number of podcasts as well as trying to research some deckbuilding fundametals. I'm really not interested in purely netdecking; not because I think I'm above it, but more because I feel like when I put a deck together I know why I put a card in I know why I put that card in and when I experience using it, I know if my intended purpose for that card was founded correctly or not. As such the knowledge and experience gained from that is much more valuable than simply using someone else's creative and not understanding what the purpose was for a given card. I have been rewarded with rapid learning in other games, so hopefully that is true here. 

 

Are there any deckbuilding basics to be aware of that this point or any articles/podcasts you could point me toward that you think correclty highlight the fundamentals that are at least broadly true? To your point, I have an affiinity towards NBN, Wayland, Anarchs, and Shapers at least initially, from a fluff standpoint. I will start there and see what I enjoy about the play style. Thus far i have had a few games under my bealt with NBN and Anarchs. I like the idea of Viruses and running on R&D with Medium for Anarchs and also like the idea of building a deck of harmful tags. Not sure if that's enough fo a premise for each archtype but ti's where I've started. 

 

As before I appreciate the feedback I received and look forward to any further thoughts any one could share! 

 

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[TimTim]

I really don't know any podcasts, since I haven't listened a single one during my stay on the game (which is couple of years). Perhaps someone else may help you with this.

 

And with todays cardpool, in my opinion there really isn't any deckbuilding basics anymore, except these: Remember to pack some ICE/breakers and economy. That is basically it for me. Of course Weyland is famous for its tag'n'bag and nowadays NBN is just giving tags like they are going out of style (mostly accompanied with Scorched or Boom). Also NBN has ton of ICE taking advantage of those tags.

 

I myself don't like the NBN tag approach, so I have made several decks without any tagging. Also I have won a lucky victory against tag'n'tag NBN with over 36 tags on me! The ICE just gave me more tags, but didn't stop me on my way to the R&D. Mostly those games end up me dead or opponent scoring super-duper-advanced project Beale.

 

One more thing about deckbuilding: Know what you have! It is somewhat sad to watch a new player trying to find a certain card (lets say Levy), and rummaging through his whole deck not finding one. Also it really helps to know how many certain type ICE-breakers you have or how many ICE you have.

 

I would have a thousand examples (or 40) of different kind of decks you can build. HB Super-Heavy-ICE? Can do (and is really annoying to opponent). Jinteki Codegate only? Already in play. Anarch spamming bad publicity? That was fun to play! ICE destruction runners? Been there and done sh*tloads of damage. Traps after traps? Perhaps, wanna find out? Bad-publicity Weyland? Name tells it all. Of course not all are effective decks, but we all had fun playing them and some of them draw audience from other tables to wonder. Some things are just satisfying to achieve (scoring Government Takeover always grants high-fives in our playgroup).

 

To quote one of my opponents: "You never know what you might face when playing against you." He was trying to figure out is my unprotected Mushin-No-Sin agenda or a trap and laughing after he disarmed one of my other traps, which wasn't the trap he was thinking it was.

[Phatheadaf]

Ah! Understood... this insight is helpful. I didn't expect that I would be able to reinvent the wheel at this point; that said, I am happy to hear that my archetypes aren't completely misguided. I don't necessarily need to play the world championship deck, or the current flavor of the month but I do want to make sure that my concepts, at least originally, are viable.

 

Some of the general ideas I have gathered are that economy is key in all decks, how much to take is question. I don't have any gauge on the level of need based on my limited experience thus far, through my research seems like you need about a half dozen ways to gain credits and a half dozen ways to gain clicks. I am going to use that as a baseline. For Runners I would think that you need at least one breaker of each sub type to sustain a balanced deck, and it seems that roughly a dozen is the number that most seem to settle on; so I'm looking at about 4 breakers per sub type and maybe 2 for early game and 2 for late game as best as I can manage. On the Corp side it seems that you want a variety of of ICE to frustrate the runner with, and I've as much as half the deck be reserved for various pieces of ICE; I think i'l try to include about a half dozen pieces of ICE per use type. 

 

The last thing that feels very much different from other games that I play is that there seems to be a lot of ways to dig through your deck to obtain what you need; so the need for reliable repetition may be less than what I have experienced in other games. So I'm not sure how much search I need to include in lieu of some repetition; that will come with time I suppose. I

 

Again I appreciate your time in sharing your ideas, and I look forward to being able to share my progress, and hear more thoughts on what I come up with. 

 

Thanks again! 

 

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