And welcome back! As I was saying in my last blog post, my regionals were this past weekend and I had a great time playing the game and hanging out with some friends that I hadn't seen in quite some time. Overall, the tournament ran very smooth despite FFG not having an official program to use for their tournaments (please, hire someone to make this). For those wondering, we used the Challonge system and edited the number of points game wins and match wins are worth. The program worked great for the most part but you need to hand edit tie breakers or else it's not accurate at all.
Anyway, we had 22 players for the event and the meta was more diverse than I had originally thought it would be. As I said in my last post, I went with Weyland and Noise and I'm not sure that was entirely the best deck choices and I'll explain why I think that way.
Noise has been talked about so much as the "deck to beat" that players are altering their decks to deal with it. I noticed it quite a bit when I sat down first round and saw tons and tons of NBN players in the room. Now, I don't think NBN is particularly bad, I just don't think that it's the best choice. As it turns out I was wrong and the NBN decks were crushing all day. The only time I ever saw NBN struggle was when they were matched up against a heavy link Shaper deck, but that's to be expected when most of your ICE has Trace sub routines, including splashing out of faction Vipers and playing with Dracos. I will say that I'll now look a little more closely at NBN and am pretty excited to get access to Project Beale here in May. I don't think the new ID will be as good as the old one with all the Trace cards in faction (and out of faction) but we'll see when it's finally spoiled.
On the other side, we have Weyland. While I wasn't entirely disappointed with Weyland, I was far more reliant on Scorched Earth wins than I had previously thought I would be. Maybe this was a result of me adding 3 Snares to the deck in the final days of testing, maybe it was a result of the way the faction works, maybe it was just the ways the draws were working out. All that said, I didn't win a single game by agendas and all the Weyland players I played against never beat me by Agendas. I think something that pigeon holed is easily countered and playing copies of Plascrete Carapace as well as link cards to counter Sea Source go a long way. Even NBN was Scorching people all day so your cards are never wasted. HB Fast Advance did well all day as well and I honestly didn't see a single Jinteki of any kind among the 22 people.
The top 4 if I recall was 3 people from Pittsburgh and myself to defend the home turf. The decks were:
HB Fast Advance // Kate heavy link
NBN // Criminals
<Unknown> // Criminals
Weyland Tag n Bag // Noiseshop
If I had to choose again, I'd play NBN heavy trace splashing 2x Scorches and 3x Viper among my influence and for runner I'd either stick with Noise or play Shaper heavy link. Despite my thoughts on Shaper just not being in a good place, I saw it doing well all day in the hands of a very solid player. Just some quick asides on the tournament format:
1.)You need to play two decks that compliment each other. I don't think Weyland + Noise was a good combo to play because you give up a lot of points as Weyland on your way to Scorching them and that puts a lot of pressure on Noise to win quickly (which is hard to do). I only got 2 "full" wins (6 points) in the event and my corp had a lot to do with that.
2.)Fast Advance decks are very, very good in tournaments because you can score several points quickly and take a lot of pressure off your runner deck. Even if they make cards that make fast advance strategies less good, it will still be a good choice for the 4-6 points that you'll undoubtedly score.
3.)Playing as the Corp first, in my opinion, is the correct decision. Knowing how aggressive you need to be to win the match as the runner is very important. If I win as Corp and only give up 3 points to the runner, I'm not going to risk running into my opponents June Bug with 2 counters on it. Little things like that go a long way in winning and losing. If you lose as the runner and only score 1-2 Agendas, then you basically have to run at every face down card with advancement counters on it and are more likely to get caught by a June Bug. I hope this makes sense to people because I learned a lot this past weekend.
In the end, I lost in the top 4 to Pat who was playing HB fast advance and Kate link. We both mulliganed into the worst Corp hands imaginable and he was able to draw out of his where as I couldn't draw out of mine.
So anyway, that's my regionals experience. Again, I had a great time and hope to at least hit up one more regionals before they end; most likely the DC one in May. Thanks for reading!
"Decks that complement each other" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If the Weyland scorch deck give sup too many points, it doesn't matter what you pair it with, it's going to be suboptimal.
ReplyDeleteAnd there's evidence that runner going first is a big advantage, like 60-40 or so for matches. Check Hollis's blog posts.
What I meant to imply is that if you play Weylend, who gives up more points than other factions in my testing, you need to pair it with a pretty aggressive Runner like Gabe. This makes sense to me and I apologize if I'm not conveying it in a way that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteMy testing has shown that the corp going first has an advantage but your miles may vary, as Hollis' has. I think the corp just overall has the advantage in the current meta, if ever so slightly. This obviously changes as the data packs come out monthly. In the 6 rounds that I played (5 swiss, 1 top 4) I went 3-3 with Noise and 4-2 with Weyland.