New Cards are a Bourgeoisie Plot(3-1@Summer Showdown)

There were some reports of Crim being dead in the current meta, and I wanted to stress test this hypothesis. In the end, good stuff sable played just fine, helped by a somewhat favorable meta, though unfortunately not by any new cards. The end result was it going 3-1, loosing to silly soon-to-be banned card Bellona (out of Prototype R+), taking down Epiphany, AgInfusion and Issuaq. Replays at the end of the writeup.

On new Cards

To be fair to the new set, it wasnt a complete drought for Crim, Window of Opportunity and Physarum Entangler are very good cards that help some styles of Crim, and imports of Arruaceiras Crew are an enticing prospect. Dee's Fite Club list with Saci combos I found to be quite strong and was great fun.

But in a world of R+ dominance, the traits of Sable were more attractive. So those fancy new cards had to stay on the backburner, since none of them obviously fit the Sable playstyle. Physerum could fit in Sable, but I was concerned about slots and MU issues, I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to confirm whether those concerns are justified.

On the Meta

Given that we don't play any new cards, some ironclad arguments about meta changes are necessary to justify it over decks that did get powerful new toys.

The main draw of playing Crim is that their tech cards are in very high demand, a lot of decks are currently importing Pinholes for the Holo Man menace, and Bones for R+. As Crim, we get all of these for free, even managing to fit 3 pinholes, which decks have a harder time justifying when it costs an influence.

Crim's other strongpoint is handling rush decks, with quick econ like clickless Laundries and strong pressure from Doof. In particular Asa Group got a lot of fun new toys and Crim has a lot of good tools to pressure Asa's tempo. Ob and PD are still around, in less numbers but still decks that we should have quite decent game into.

There is, of course, the crim bogeyman, glacier decks, to content with, which is the one aspect of the meta that is less than ideal...

On the Bogeyman

One development from the new set that Crim has not liked at all is the resurgence of glacier decks, specially out of Jinteki. These decks are traditionally a foil to Crim strategies that lack the money to consistently break their big ice.

But all is not despair, this new development in Jinteki glacier has happened largely because of new busted econ card Charlotte Caçador (and somewhat because of Tributary, but in my experience Charlotte is a much bigger upgrade to the style). Charlotte may give ridiculous amounts of money, but she is quite fragile and telegraphed. Unless an AgInf player slows the deployment of their economy a lot to ice all of their centrals, their lynchpin econ card is at the mercy of our plentiful Pinholes.

This doesn't at all make the matchup good for us at all, even after denying the Charlotte value, we have to make good use of our Twinning and go fast enough to stop the still inevitable accumulation of taxing ice. I wouldn't have brought Crim if I had anticipated facing 2 Jinteki glacier decks. Both matches required some luck to win, but the matchup is not so bad that you cant endure one occurrence as long as its rare enough.

On the Future

Where this deck goes after the bans become effective is not entirely clear. I look forward to seeing other takes on the Criminal faction, as I don't currently have a strong picture of what the good direction for this deck is.

The Bellona ban makes the Bankroll, Miss Bones angle less necessary, so its not unlikely that other IDs and archetypes get better. But the raw value of Sable is not to be underestimated even if bankroll is less necessary.

On the other hand, plenty of things in the banlist make Crim in general more appealing. The Knobkierie and Tributary bans are likely to make Jinteki glacier less popular (Knob because mulch was a deck that got preyed upon by Ag, Trib because it is a direct deck ban).

Replays

R1 vs AgInf

R2 vs R+

R3 vs Epiphany

R4 vs Issuaq