Replicating Pain

migælius 2

homemade

2 comments
12 Jun 2015 xxKuroMeista

Warning: The following may sound critical, but I am just giving constructive criticism. Also this comment is very long....

TL;DR: What is your strategy? Are you normal RP ELP splashing flatline or or you Flatline Splashing RP ELP?

This deck have a hard time making that decision. If you are running Flatline splashing Meta RP, there is no reason to run NAPD and Nisei. If you are running Meta RP splashing Flatline you do not need to run Philotic Entanglement or House of Knives. Honestly I don't even know why Genetic Resequencing is there, because when used correctly you really don't need the extra counters for House of Knives or Nisei MK II (its nice to have but not necessary.

For agendas, if you are running a bunch of quick scoring or low value agendas, it is much more efficient to run PE for it, because you are actually doing net damage by doing so.

Why run Mental Health Clinic if you want to flatline someone? Increasing the runner's maximum hand size is counter intuitive to flatlining. Running PAD Campaigns will make much more sense, yes it costs more to Rez, but your Sundew can usually take care of that problem.

Shock is not necessary if you are only running 2. The main purpose of shock is to punish Noise or Eater Keyhole decks for milling you and running your archives, since its the only trap that still works in archives, but the fact that it only does 1 net damage, having less than 2 in your archive makes the whole thing quite useless.

Caprice is something you only run once you decide do you want to splash flatline or splash RP ELP. If you are splashing RP mainly to confuse people and abuse the fact that you are forcing your opponent to have to waste 2 clicks to even run against you, your deck needs to reflect that. One way to do that is run and slowly advance traps such as project junebug along side 4/2, 5/2, 5/3 agendas and having them all be protected by at least 1 end the run ice, while having ice with multiple subroutines protecting your main servers. This way you don't need a caprice, since you are making the runner make the decision of going for a remote that could be an agenda (which might be a NAPD contract where they can't even steal if they don't have enough money, or a Fetal AI that can do Net Damage to them) or a horrible trap.

Beanstalk royalties isn't good, there are much better cards you can run than wasting your influence points on it. Celebrity Gift is good even in a flatline deck, because by allowing your opponent to see those traps will make your opponent play slower and more cautiously, which could be advantageous to you.

Cerebral Cast is another one of those, do you want to keep opponents out of your servers, or you don't mind having them run your servers. Most of the time you will realize against RP, the run on centrals can be unsuccessful and they will successfully run remotes. However you are not playing anything to make them run remotes worthwhile except when they know you have an agenda. Also under most circumstances people will just take the tag instead of brain damage, since if the problem they will have with you is the Scorched Earth, the runner usually will have carapace ready. Plus since you are running Mental Health Clinic, Brain damage isn't the worst thing in the world. If you are using tags to trash resources.... well you are jinteki, your econ is pretty bad for you to keep on trashing resources especially since many runners can just recur them.

Cerebral Static is most effective against Noise and Whizzard, since most other IDs really don't get effected by it much or their ID effects never was what they use to beat you. With that said, if people are running Noise Mill, than they probably have Hacktivist, and if they are running Whizzard, its most likely an Eater Keyhole Deck, so Cerebral Static does nothing against them since they can trash for free with Keyhole. Cerebral Static isn't bad, I have seen games where they just rocked the game, but since jinteki isn't the best at preventing people from stealing an agenda, I won't be surprised Cerebral Static just ended up doing nothing for the deck,

as for the Ice...

IF you want to run flatline 16 ice is fine, but even then the ice you are running doesn't help you flatline anyone or tax people in anyway, other than your sentry ices. Why bother running Changeling? That 2 influence point can be better used elsewhere. If you run it cause it can be advanced, then why not run Trick of Light, so you can actually move advancement counters around? Yagura is good if you run a typical flatline deck, but is it neccsarry to run 2? Even in a normal PE flatline, they only run one, because now you have things such as Daily business show + Jackson Howard, which does a much better job of manipulating your deck's Agenda density since Yagura is such a weak Ice.

14 Jun 2015 migælius

Thanks @xxKuroMeista for your thorough rundown! I am just starting to learn the game, so I'm not surprised that some of these are suboptimal.