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Root Cause - The Hole and the Key
Feb 07 2014 06:10 PM |
Hraklea
in Android: Netrunner
Android: Netrunner Root Cause Hraklea
Root Cause is a series of bi-weekly Android: Netrunner articles about deck building, strategy and tactical decision, for new and mid-level Anarch players. It was named in honor of Sam "Root" Groves, the character from CBS' show Person of Interest.If memory serves me right, I said in a previous article that Medium was the main reason why I played Anarch. Now we have another good reason. Wherever I go, there are always people debating about Keyhole. "Should I use it?"; "Should I use R&D Interface instead?"; "Should I use Medium?"; etc. Considering that this is the most controversial Anarch card in the Spin Cycle so far, I couldn't not to talk about it, right?
Before talking about the card itself, I must say that this is a good time for you to practice your shuffling if you're new to card games. I have seen some people concerned about matches taking too long because the Corp player must reshuffle his or her deck after every Keyhole trigger, and it might be a problem if you don't have the necessary skills to make it fast. What I usually do is: riffle twice, strip once, riffle once, offer to cut. You can create your own method, but it should take no more than 10 seconds for you to do it. Good practice.
Ok, back to Keyhole. Our new card have two big advantages that we can explore.
The first important thing about it is that it allows you to trash any card you find, doing what we were trying to do with Medium + Demolition Run since the Core Set days. Keyhole doesn't trash as many cards as this crappy combo, but it requires only one card rather than two, and it finds the right cards faster. Whether you intend to use to trash pieces of ICE as a Parasite partner or use it to deny operation based economies, Keyhole is an excellent program to consider if your main strategy involves trashing cards from R&D.
The second great thing about it is that it adds pressure in Archives, which is great if you're neither using Noise, Hacker Extraordinaire or Data Leak Reversal. Now that Shock! has made the Datasucker + Desperado run in the Archives more dangerous, having a "1-run win" program that pressures that same server is very welcome.
This card is so strong that we already have a tournament champion deck using Keyhole. In one hand, Keyhole + Parasite + Reina Roja, Freedom Figter + Vamp kept the Corp without the proper protection. In the other hand, Keyhole + Hostage + The Source preventing the Corp from scoring agendas from hand. You can find the full deck list here (sadly, I don't know the name of the champion; if you do, please let us know).
Closing the Door Behind you
You might be wondering... "if Keyhole is that good, why are people debating about it?". The truth is that Keyhole is not flawless. When you look at the card, the first problem quickly stands out. Some decks can't afford 2 MU for a program like that. Spinal Modem gives you only 1 extra MU and Deep Red only works for Caissa programs. If you're not running Djinn, memory will certainly be an issue for you.
The second problem is that Keyhole cannot R&D lock. In my opinion, that's big, and often a deal breaker. If you're playing an aggressive deck, R&D locking is one of the best strategies to use, and - as I already said - Medium is the R&D lock god. There will be situation where even purging the virus tokens won't save the Corp, and that's something that Keyhole will never be able to do.
In my experience, the decks that already can pressure the Archives are the same ones that won't want Keyhole due their aggressiveness, and often the same ones that will have memory issues. We're heading to a metagame where will have two very defined Anarch archetypes - one Medium based, and one Keyhole based - and that simply changing one for the other won't work. Will both archetypes be equally dangerous? I like to think they will, but only time can tell for sure.
New Holes for a New Key
It is not news that Shock!, Sundew and the Honor and Profit hype is making Jinteki a more popular faction in these last weeks. It is also not news that a lot of Scorched Earth based Weyland decks are running Snare! as a way to deal damage through Plascrete Carapace. This trend is perfect to increase the popularity of Keyhole. There are even people trying to play Keyhole with Andromeda, Dispossessed Ristie, the faction with the least memory in the game.
You must know your environment to choose which deck you're going to play. Right now, while we still don't know for sure how much strong Keyhole actually is and how much of its popularity is pure hype, I would say that deciding between Keyhole and Medium is pretty much a meta decision - is everybody you know using Snare!? No need to think twice.
New Moon
While Keyhole added a lot for us, Activist Support clearly came one pack sooner than it should. Without Blackmail, giving the Corp a single Bad Publicty - because the card doesn't stack... - is not worth the spot yet. Considering that Tallie Perrault is the #83 card, there still is a chance that either the #81 or #82 card will be another source of bad publicity, creating another new archetype for us to play. Three archetypes in the same cycle? I can't complain about it.
At last, I must say that Fantasy Flight Games really surprised me announcing the Lunar Cycle this soon. I was expecting it to be announced at the end of the month, but it is great to see that they were ready to show us some new things. Nasir Meidan is a very fun card, I can't wait to see our new Anarch identity! ...And as we're talking about spoilers, what about some new things from Honor and Profit, hã?
See you guys in two weeks. Hope you get your Fear and Loathing until there!
João "Hraklea" Almeida is a brazilian amateur card game player, and the responsible for the Android: Netrunner league, in partnership with Lojas Jambô, in Porto Alegre - RS. He still is developing his Keyhole based deck.
- MrLordcaptain and kurthl33t like this
26 Comments
Definitely gave me food for thought Hraklea, thanks for the article
They're not strict alternatives, they complement each other perfectly. You use the Keyhole to build Medium counters, to trash something particular in the top 3 cards you've seen, or to reshuffle if you're going for a deep dig.
(if you're wondering about deck slots, I think Keyhole should be slotted instead of Imp rather than instead of Medium. If you ran more than one Medium, use those slots as well, either to keep some Imps for trashing nasty stuff that did make it into the corp's hand, or to nuke SanSans and such)
He's already got a nice 40 deck minimum, plus the +1MU to offset the cost of keyhole. R&D interface is built into shaper, plus you have all the good card draws like Diesel.
Way ahead of ya
I'm inclined to believe that, in a case of "having two cards to dig through R&D", I rather have two Mediums instead. That said, it wasn't my point to suggest that using Medium and Keyhole together was a stupid idea of something like that.
I'm sorry my article wasn't clear about that. You're 100% right, it is perfectly viable to use Keyhole as a "trasher" and Medium to keep the R&D lock at the same time.
I'm still not convinced that two Mediums are better than a Keyhole. Medium "snowballs" in the sense that if you find agendas, you'll be seeing even more cards than normal on your subsequent runs - but if you do not find any agendas, you (surprisingly often, in my experience!) end up just seeing a solid block of non-trashable, boring stuff. Making two more Medium-runs will only let you see a few new cards; making a Keyhole-run then a Medium-run will give you a huge number of fresh cards to wade through.
I'd point out though, that this idea becomes stronger when you have a breaker suite that can get in multiple times for cheap - which is why I like this sort of rig much more for Anarch than other factions. Yog, Morning Star and Mimic are the masters of multiple cheap runs (and Parasite deals with whatever problems arise).
That looks inredible strong on paper - the only concernt I'd have would be the Corp going all-out on defending R&D. Even the efficient Anarch breakers will end up being expensive if you're wading through layer after layer of ICE, and you really do need to be able to make 3 or 4 R&D runs a turn for best effect.
I'm no expert on the game, but the way I run Anarch, I run a big-rig, super program-heavy (twentyfour programs at last count) Noise with triple Sahasrara for economy and double SMC for flexibility - not a mill-deck, mind; I'm only running Noise rather than Whizzard since my local meta has almost no asset-economy. The SMCs, Parasites and Datasuckers give me reasonable early pressure, one Nerve Agent gives great HQ pressure (combined with Grimoire I've had several sudden wins with this bad boy!), and just being Anarch (as well as Keyhole) gives me good Archives pressure - so if they can't win by fast rushing, defense becomes a huge problem.
This way, it becomes very hard for the Corp to put all their heavy ICE on R&D - and even then, there's not a lot that can stop me. Code Gates (save Tollbooth) are ignored by Yog, Barriers are almost trivialized by Morning Star except in huge numbers (I love people playing Heimdalls against me), which means only Sentries are a problem - and if problem ICE is low in numbers, there's always Parasite. Since my programs are mostly free(ish), I can devote most of my economy to making some runs - and thanks to Keyhole, I won't get caught in the "I run for a turn, waste some money, the Corp purges and I have to start from scratch"-trap.
Although seen another way, decks that rush can be exploited early and if they don't win fast I'll just deadlock them since they have too light ICE to keep me out, while heavy ICE decks hit lategame roughly when I do, and then the Anarch suite gives me the edge. That's the idea, anyways.
Mind sharing the list? I'd be interested in seeing some of the choices you made for this to work.
Also, would Reina possibly be a better ID for it?
http://www.cardgamed...equencies-r6595
Due to a little miss on my end, the deck strategy is in the comments section.
Your comment about Reina actually made me think. Originally, this was a Whizzard deck, with the influence spent on Account Siphon and other Criminal cards, with the idea being to 1) never run on R&D before I'm ready (no rezzed ice there), and 2) find a good moment to set up double/triple Medium + Joshua B., empty the Corp's cred pool and then go on a R&D rampage.
However, not only was this strategy sorta tricky against some players (my most hated card was Geothermal Fracking - Weyland was already super hard to bankrupt, and then they could just get back to 14 creds the turn after I emptied them) - but I also discovered that due to the strengths of the Anarch rig, it didn't really matter whether they had a few pieces of ice on R&D or not. I shifted over to my current deck, swapping in Noise mainly as Whizzard did little for me in my meta.
So I'm not really keen on going back to the "economy denial"-playstyle - but I can still see why Reina would be really good. Noise's ID is sort of a "lategame" ID in that it grows stronger the more viruses you've played - but by the time I've installed enough viruses for his ID to really shine, I should probably be in a position to just outright win the game anyways. And with the brutality of Keyhole/Medium, it wouldn't be unheard of to "overkill" when winning and finding more agendas than necessary - thus making milling one or two earlier less necessary. Not only that, but with the Corp gaining more and more ways to recur cards, I've occasionally had the problem that by milling multiple cards in a turn, I've given the Corp a card they needed a round earlier.
Reina would be useful in another way; since the deck -does- want to get to late game as fast as possible, it's susceptible to rushing. The extra costs from rezzing could very well be enough to keep the Corp at least one turn slower in rushing agendas, giving valuable time to set up, and the ID fits well with my "install-install-run"-plan for each turn. Even the link sounds useful, since my deck usually doesn't have a lot of creds lying around. I'll try just swapping Noise out for Reina and see what I think after some playtesting. Thanks for the idea!
I should point out that I do indeed have a way of installing things midrun, in the form of two SMCs (which is also a reason why I so far only have one Keyhole). Thus I can run fairly aggressively despite stacking so many programs on a single Djinn (sometimes, nine!) . I previously used Crypsis as an "emergency button", but Sharpshooter fills that role much better, I feel.
Running both Morningstar and Mimic without backup pumpables (like the afforementioned Crypsis) would make me nervous, personally - so very easy to get shut out of centrals, especially against a Weyland (and even HB) deck. Did you run into this problem at all?
You need around seven riffle shuffles for a 49 card deck.
http://www.mtgsalvat...nd-maths-primer
I can't riffle shuffle
I try to mash in a way that emulates a riffle and try to do it nine or ten times.
Keyhole is... a big deal.
You don't need to shuffle perfectly because Keyhole only looks 3 cards, all the other cards are already randomized. All you need to do is to randomize the 2 cards your opponent didn't trashed, and you don't need 7 shuffles to randomize 2 cards.
So from an algorithmic perspective, you're right -- looking at the rest of a deck as an already-randomized and unknown array, it's fine to just insert the two new cards at two random positions. But it's hard to do that without knowing where they ended up.
It is indeed partly true that I can sometimes rely on SMC to find me my breakers, but I don't do that as often as it may seem. For early game and most of midgame, Parasites will do a quasi-breaker job, at least as far as putting pressure - and the plan for that phase is, after all, just to put pressure on the Corp so they can't rush a win (this being why I think Reina might be quite good). Snagging some agendas is secondary, since so many can be found reliably later. Due to this, I can to some extent afford to wait for my breakers to get Wyldside'd to me (although if needed, I can go the other route and Deja Vu my SMCs to get my entire suite up in a hurry).
As for getting shut out, it's actually a lot harder than one would expect. Any rezzed piece of ice (BER/Oversight or just plain hard rezzed earlier) can be Parasited; any significant ice that gets hard rezzed in your face is a huge cost to the Corp and is either mostly harmless (say, a barrier) or a Destroyer, for which I have Sharpshooter; after this I can Parasite + Ice Carver etc. Of course situations may arise where I may be temporarily shut out of one or two servers (typically R&D and HQ), but even the iciest corps will have a hard time putting a perfect lock on all three. This especially applies to HB, where you can more or less skip one problem ice anyways, at least provided you're not that scared of brain damage (you usually shouldn't be).
As a side note, the combination of Grimoire and freshly played Parasites/Datasuckers (with or without SMC) is very strong for being able to get in somewhere you shouldn't be able to get in, and is one of my main reasons for using that console over Spinal Modem (the other being the extra memory).
All this being said, the release of Curtain Wall does increase the amount of high-problem ice, so I'll have to keep playtesting and see if it becomes a significant concern. Even so though, I'm not that keen on getting those pumpables; they're cheap to play, but far from cheap to pump, and as said, it's not a very rich deck.
Realistic speaking, it is impossible to shuffle perfectly. Even if you riffle 7 times, there's no guarantee that one's hands will behave like the Bayer model describes. It is just naive to expect such thing.
If you can track the cards positions, you can cut the deck and replace them where you want. But I highly doubt you would be able track the cards while I shuffle my deck.
Here you are talking about the situation where you are corp and I am Keyhole player. But my lament is when the roles are reversed. As corp, I want a fair chance (i.e. a randomized deck) of seeing the same cards again on my next draw. As corp, I'm not satisified with doing a few riffles and a strip.