Criminal blues

Last entry of the "no influence and no neutral" deck building self challenge. This one took much more time than expected. To sum it up : the criminal card pool lacks economy.

Game plan : do economy denial and leverage Cezve.

Mulligan plan : Bravado, Masterwork (v37), Zenit Chip JZ-2MJ or Cezve in your opening hand.

Some discovery :

• Concerto is underplayed and should be used way more. Getting a run with some credits and a draw, all in card that cost 0 to play, is really good. This is actually superior to Dirty Laundry.
• Carpe Diem is better than Dirty Laundry and shoud be slotted first before the other.
• Sneakdoor Beta is amazing and should be used more, but criminals really struggle for MU. If you do not rely on Cezve, it is an amazing program that combine well with all the criminal hardware (PAN-Weave, Docklands Pass, WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ).
• Zenit Chip JZ-2MJ gives a lot of tempo and should be prioritized. Getting free draw from a near untrashable hardware is well worth the Core damage.
• Bypass strategies (Inside Job, S-Dobrado, Backstitching) are fairly good, but suffer from its slowness and variance. It takes a lot of hardware to make those bypass runs truly impactful.
• Criminal suffer a lot from lack of draw power in faction and Masterwork (v37) solves that. If you use 3x Boomerang in your deck building, you should seriouly consider Masterwork (v37) instead of any other console. Getting that free draw (even on the installation) and possibly a clickless install of Boomerang is huge, all for the price of 2. This is underplayed for criminal other than Az McCaffrey and should definitively be used more.

The good things about criminal is their ability to do credit denial, thus slowing the corp while getting setup for later. This inverted prison can sometime frustrate corp that rely on a low amount of credits to function. The ability to pass any ice for really cheap, with Boomerang and bypass tools, gives the tools for those players with lots of experience/intuition.

Finally, the criminal card pool has lot of cards that have an high impact for their cost. Poison Vial cost 2 and is worth around 5 future cost avoidance. Miss Bones cost 2 and is worth 12 of cost avoidance. PAN-Weave cost 2 and will generate positive credit differential after 2 runs on HQ, Cezve cost 2 and gives you 2 of cost avoidance nearly every turn, Revolver cost 2 and will avoid you 7 of spending, and I could go on for many more cards. The issue is that you first need credits to get to install those cost effective cards, and in faction, there are too few of those. Criminal need to rely heavily on out of faction and neutral economy. This is why I had to use Az McCaffrey: Mechanical Prodigy instead of other ID, because the cost of those hardware was lowered, making it less difficult to play them.

This challenge was attempted in 2021 and 2023. Just like those past attempts, this is barely good enough. Compared to Shapers and Anarchs, it feels lackluster. But I did learn from this challenge and it changed the way I view certain cards (Masterwork (v37) and Concerto mainly). For me, this show a good amount of room for improvement of the faction by the dev team, the criminal faction is good, but its reliance on out of faction cards put it on the back foot compared to anarchs. Of note though, the flavor and niches of the criminal faction really shine here and shows the great work by the dev team to make the criminal faction its own thing.

What would be your way of making this work better?

Cheers!