Raindance

WARNING: Do not play this deck for tournaments, unless your strategy is to pray for the Corp to top-deck all their agendas every single time.

This monstrosity is a result of the Malaysian meta voting between which was the better card: Push Your Luck, or Windfall. As of this moment of writing, the votes are 13 - 5 in favour of PYL.

So that got me thinking: is Windfall really that bad? Even worse than PYL?

Obviously. I have too much time on my hands. I decided to throw together a deck and crunched some numbers to see exactly how much money Windfall can make if the whole deck was build around it.

Some assumptions i made: 1. I chose Chaos Theory in order to increase the chances of Windfalling Monolith. Shapers also tend to have a lot of expensive cards to install. 2. The deck is legal for play, in case you're crazy enough to try it. (it's even MWL-legal!) 3. Spoiled cards were not used. (Cards legal up to Kala Ghoda at this time of writing) 4. For each round of testing, the first 3 cards drawn are always Windfalls. I then drew 2 more to round out the starting hard of 5 cards. 5. I drew another 3 cards, and assumed that each of these were used by a Windfall.

I did 100 rounds just to get some quick results:

After 3 Windfalls, you have a 19% chance of getting 7.666667 credits from each Windfall, another 34% chance of getting anywhere between 8 to 12 credits per Windfall, and 47% chance of getting 5 to 7 credits per Windfall.

The most profitable round was no. 11, when I drew 2 Monoliths and a Femme for a total of 45 creds. It happened only once out of 100 times.

As For Push Your Luck? Assuming the Runner starts with 9 creds (2 for playing the event, and 7 as a bet since that is the median for the Windfall tests):

After the 1st PYL, there's a 50% - 50% split you'll be at 14 creds or 0 creds. After the 2nd PYL, 25% you'll be at 21 creds, 25% you'll be at 5 creds. After the 3rd PYL, 12.5% you'll be at 26 creds, 12.5% you'll be at 12 creds.

That's a 75% chance that you won't even make it to the 3rd round of PYL.

So even when looking at just playing one event, Windfall is better than Push Your Luck. You either get the same amount or if you're unlucky, you still get at least 5 creds as opposed to losing your money.

But then, you're probably saying that all the assumptions I made were complete shit. Maybe my assumptions are completely wrong. Maybe you'll bet 10 creds because you know the Corp is a shitty guesser. Or Maybe you really do plan on Troping back 3 Monoliths before playing your Windfalls.

Maybe I'm just a sore loser at seeing Windfall lose to Push Your Luck, and trying to make a point that doesn't matter.

Maybe I just need more coffee. Or sleep. Or both.