True Colors Set Review - Corp Cards

One of the great joys of writing a blog for Netrunner is that the sets come along so frequently that you're rarely short of something to write about.  Hurrah, therefore, for the arrival of True Colors spoilers at the weekend.  The fourth data pack in Spin Cycle brings us some very good cards, particularly for the Corporation, and for that reason I'm going to break with tradition and start with the Corp.

For once there are a bunch of cards I actually like in this review so I'm going to replace the much-loved Kermit scale for something more suitable - The Evil Pinky Scale!

1 Pinky - Fun?  Thematic?  Cool?  Maybe.  Good?  No.

2 Pinkies - Rarely played but will have its moments

3 Pinkies - Solid card - you'll definitely see this around

4 Pinkies - A great card - a faction staple

5 Pinkies - Knockout.  You'll see this used across all factions

Got that?  Good.  Let's get started...

Veteran’s Program

I can see that some decks may want this – I’ve never seen a deck that aggressively tries to remove Bad Publicity rather than live with it, but it’s possible it would exist.  There are some good 3/1 Agendas already and it’s not immediately easy to judge the relative benefit of removing 2 Bad Publicity compared to, say, generating extra credits with Gila Hands Arcology or rezzing huge ice with Profiteering, but the more I think about it the more I convince myself that Veteran’s Program is a legitimate option.  Midgame I can see that you may add more to your defences by removing 2 Bad Publicity credits from each run the Runner makes than you would by gaining cash and rezzing another piece of Ice.  It’s still niche, but I’m prepared to accept that it will see play at some point.

Rex Campaign

Paying 1 for 5 credits is a good result.  Paying 1 to remove a Bad Publicity is a good result.  Paying 1 to make the Runner waste a click and 3 credits is a good result.  But somewhere between waiting 3 turns to generate the effect and giving the Runner the option of whether their economy is strong enough they can afford to trash Rex Campaign I begin to lose interest.  I think it’s fine, but with Haas-Bioroid decks already overflowing with good economy options I’m not sure this justifies a place in the starting team.

Fenris

I think a lot of players overvalue Brain damage, and that’s why I’m not going to score Fenris too highly – I basically feel like this card would be fine without the Bad Publicity and the Bad Pub brings it down quite a lot.  Brain damage is a lovely splashy effect that has been hard to produce, I mean you permanently fry your opponent’s brain – how cool is that?!? – but dealing a single point of damage doesn’t usually contribute a whole lot towards you winning the game.  As the Runner side I’ve won plenty of games when my ID has been reduced to a dribbling vegetable by a Cerebral Overwriter or two, and that’s why I would usually prefer to rez a Rototurret and trash a program with my 4 credits than deal 1 Brain damage.  Fenris is the most reliable way of dealing Brain damage, and it will see play – it may well see more play as a splash into Jinteki or Weyland decks hoping for some help in flatlining the Runner – but if it’s only coming in at Strength 2 (bad vs Mimic/Femme/Garotte) I simply don’t think it needs the Bad Publicity and to my mind that knocks a couple of stars off.

Panic Button

This card is very niche – installed only as a HQ upgrade it serves to really only do a few things:

1) It’s a cash sink vs Account Siphon.  Quite how much cash you’re prepared to sink into it without winding up with a hand of 4 Agendas and having to pitch some of them to Archives, I’m not sure, but it definitely helps.  The trouble is that the Runner plays Account Siphon to take away your credits, and if they go into Panic Button rather than Siphon they’ve still got a partial success from that run.  The best case is that you Panic Button into Operation economy to then rebuild your credits, which isn’t too unlikely but probably means you lose a turn rebuilding back to the point you were at.

2) It’s a mild deterrent to running HQ for accesses – the Runner will have to be careful about when they time that run to minimise the Corp’s advantage and to ensure trashing Panic Button once they’ve got in.  Runners don’t currently focus much on HQ accesses so that shouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience.

3) It helps set up combos, so it plays a role in Custom Biotics and Accelerated Diagnostics decks.

I’m not sure if 1) alone is enough to justify a starting place in your deck, and I’m not sure 2) matters that much against most Runners.  That leaves 3) as the main reason to play Panic Button, in my eyes.  If you’re the sort of deck where money isn’t really an object and you want to pull as many cards as possible then Panic Button comes in and helps a lot.  If the Runner decides to let it help by running HQ.  Which if they've any common sense they won't.

Shock!

I’ve been waiting for this card ever since it was first spoiled.  Adding another access trap to your deck approaches a tipping point where accessing R&D and HQ becomes extremely painful.  The word I use to describe these sorts of decks is that they’re ‘spiky’, like your deck is a cactus that it’s painful to get too near.  With Snare!, Shock!, Fetal AI and the identity power of Personal Evolution you can have a deck with 20+ cards hurt the Runner simply for accessing them.

Dealing 1 net damage isn’t a lot, possibly not enough to justify taking up a slot in your deck.  In some ways it’s similar to Data Mine, which is a card some Jinteki decks packed and others would ignore.  But that’s not quite all the story and Shock! has two advantages over Data Mine – the first is that it costs the Runner 2 credits to trash, which is a little economic drain that isn’t an obvious element in a net damage ambush.  The Runner could hit Shock! in your R&D and not have the credits to trash it, leaving it there as a further deterrent in R&D and your HQ.  The second part, perhaps the key part, is that Shock! deals damage from Archives as well, which Snare! doesn’t do.  Shock! will naturally gravitate to the Archives through the game as it gets trashed or discarded, and it becomes a defense on that server which is particularly good against Datasucker decks.  Spiky archives is something that both Personal Evolution and Replicating Perfection are interested in.

Shock! is a key part in upgrading the Jinteki net damage decks, and close to an auto-include.  How good that emerging net damage deck will be is going to be something I’ll talk about another time.

Tsurugi

“End the Run unless the Corp pays 1”

That’s an odd subroutine. The Corp pays NOT to stop the run?  Why would they do that?

“Do 1 net damage.  Do 1 net damage.  Do 1 net damage”

Ah, that’s why.  Subroutines on Ice fire in order and it’s important to know that for Tsurugi – if the Corp doesn’t pay 1 then the Runner gets kicked out before they take damage, but if the Corp DOES pay 1 then the Runner takes 3 net damage but the run continues.  The Corp can’t have its cake and eat it, though – Tsurugi can’t deal damage AND end runs (unless you’ve got Sensei ahead of it).

Tsurugi begs to be compared to Neural Katana so let’s do that.  Both cards deal 3 net damage but while Neural Katana does so in a single routine (which is very vulnerable to Mimic) Tsurugi’s multiple subroutines make it a more effective late game tax on the Runner.  The price of that added tax is an additional two credits to rez the Ice and one less strength.  The Strength doesn’t matter too much except against Parasite (the -1STR makes no difference to Ninja, and while Femme can break Tsurugi for 4 credits it had to spend 3 to break Katana anyway) but the added rez cost is pretty awkward and makes the card an attractive target for Parasite/Emergency Shutdown/Forged Activation Orders.

I think one factor really determines the use of Tsurugi or not – Bad Publicity.  If you’re not running much Bad Publicity then Tsurugi is a very effective upgrade on Neural Katana, but Bad Publicity rapidly undermines the taxation from the multiple subroutines making the added cost unnecessary.

TGTBT

TGTBT is not TGTBT (Too Good To Be True).  NBN has perhaps got the strongest Agendas of any Corporation so TGTBT is up against strong competition to justify a slot in the deck and it simply comes up short in my view, particularly when you consider how many Runner decks are happy to simple ignore tags anyway.  Pro-active tagging decks probably want the more controllable temporary tag from Breaking News, while decks where tagging isn’t a centrepiece will find more value from other neutral 3/1 Agendas with stronger economy boosts.

Sweeps Week

Probably the best card in the set, we’re very fortunate that Sweeps Week costs 2 influence or it would be joining Jackson Howard as another NBN auto-include in every Corp deck.  Let’s assume that we live in a world where the Runner pretty much always keeps a hand of 4 of 5 cards, which they have to do against NBN for fear of being levelled by SEA Source/Scorched Earth.  That makes Sweeps Week and in-faction Beanstalk Royalties (with 4 cards) or a Hedge Fund (with 5 cards).  The faction with Jackson Howard has been the faction that gained least benefit from drawing all those cards as it had no economy Operations, so it’s a huge boost to NBN’s that they can call on Sweeps Week and finally leave behind the bad old days of Pad Campaigns and Private Contracts.

The second half of this card is that it subtly punishes players of the most successful Runner ID, Andromeda.  If you have Sweeps Week in your opening hand against Andromeda’s 9 cards you can cash it in for +8 credits.  +8!!!  That makes Celebrity Gift look like clicking for credits.  It’s a huge boost, and arguably gives you the credits that you might lose to Account Siphon if the Runner comes knocking.  Sweeps Week does NOT ‘kill’ Andromeda - Andromeda may look nice in her fancy red dress but she’s a streetfighting badass and can certainly handle the Corp having a few more credits – but NBN was already the hardest matchup for her and Sweeps Week helps to cement NBN as the faction that handles Criminals the best.

BTW, the odds of drawing Sweeps Week in your opening hand vs Andromeda: 28% at 49 cards in Making News, 33% at 40 cards in The World Is Yours.  More if you mulligan for it, but I don’t think it’s worth mulliganing for if your opening hand is otherwise ok.

RSVP

“The NBN Chum”, RSVP is similar to the Jinteki version in that it’s a Strength 4 Code Gate that makes it hard to pass the next piece of Ice.  RSVP costs 2 additional credits over Chum but offers significantly more for your money, making it one of the strongest Code Gates currently printed.  The main advantages of RSVP over Chum are:

1) If positioned in front of Ice, RSVP means the runner is helpless vs the next Ice they meet.  Chum makes the next Ice tougher (and punishes failure) but the Runner can choose if the run continues and if they’re confident they have the right breaker for the next Ice at +2 Strength then Chum has done nothing.  RSVP pretty much forces the Runner to jack out after the encounter, regardless of what other icebreakers they have installed.

2) RSVP doesn’t just stop the Runner from breaking Ice it also stops the Runner from paying to trash assets, beat traces or steal Agendas like Fetal AI or the upcoming NAPD – cards like Red Herrings or Ash are excellent behind RSVP.  Where Chum is helpless at the base of a server RSVP can still be extremely frustrating for the Runner.

3) I believe (but don’t hold me to this) that paying 0 credits still constitutes paying credits, and RSVP says the Runner can’t pay credits.  So RSVP blocks Yog.0 from breaking subroutines, blocks Faerie, blocks trashing Snare! or Off The Grid.  Niche applications, but important.

Edit: This has sparked a bit of a rules debate but more people seem to think RSVP doesn't stop Yog.0 than think it does, so maybe don't go building your red hot RSVP/Off The Grid deck just yet :-).  

The world is crying out for Code Gates above Strength 3 that matter and RSVP is one of those.  Yog.0 and Datasucker will bust through but Yog.0 alone won’t and that’s enough to mean RSVP will start sneaking into decks, particularly in NBN, while the interaction with the traps and ambushes in Jinteki could see it bleed over into that faction as well.

Curtain Wall

Best (and most misleading) use of flavour text in the game?  Almost certainly.  Most overkill in stopping a run in the game?  Almost certainly.  14 is a mammoth amount of credits – not even Weyland can pay 14 without wincing – but you don’t get much for that extra money, particularly compared to Hadrian’s Wall.  Hadrian’s is rarely played and I doubt we’ll see much more of SuperHadrians. 

Punitive Counterstrike

Like Shock!, Punitive Counterstrike is a card I’ve been waiting for since the spoilers first hit.  Combining SEA Source and Scorched Earth into a single card is very attractive, although the fact that it deals less damage (in most situations) is very important.  While I don’t think this will see much play in Weyland or NBN who can call on the original Tag n Bag combo Punitive Counterstrike finally brings Meat damage threat to Haas Bioroid and Jinteki and that is important.  Until now Jinteki has had to rely on Neural EMP or Ronin for dealing damage on its own turn, both with their weaknesses, but Punitive Counterstrike now offers Ronin levels of damage with EMP ease of use.  Punitive Counterstrike works best with 5/3 Agendas (obviously) but where players only previously had to play around 2 copies of Neural EMP it’s much harder to play around two Punitive Counterstrikes and a potential 6 meat damage.  Similarly if there is a Haas Bioroid brain damage deck then it has been desperate for a finisher once the Runner’s hand size has been whittled down by the likes of Fenris, and Punitive Counterstrike offers that.

I think Punitive Counterstrike opens up a couple of new deck archetypes, and for that reason I’m going to hand it a decent score.




All in all I think True Colors is an excellent pack for the Corp, with something for everybody and pretty much no card you won't ever think about playing.  Almost certainly the best Corp pack ever.

What did the Runners get?  That's going to be up next...

Worlds 2013 - Ice, Ice, Baby - Part II

In this blog I’m going to pick up where I left off in the first part of my analysis of the Ice played by the mostsuccessful decks at the World Championships 2013 and look at what that mix of Ice means for Runner decisions about what Icebreakers to run, and why.

The way I’m going to do this is by looking at how much it costs each Icebreaker to break all the subroutines on the Ice played in the Top 32.  You may have seen tables like this before, as they’re quite common, but what the Worlds decklists allow me to do is calculate an average cost for each Icebreaker based on the relative popularity of the Ice at Worlds.  Quite simply, it matters a lot more how efficient an Icebreaker is at breaking Ice Wall than it is at breaking Wall of Thorns because Ice Wall is over a third of all the Barriers being played!

On top of this I’m going to factor in the cost to install the Icebreaker in the first place, and also look at the strength of the Fixed Strength Icebreakers (eg. Yog.0, Mimic, Morning Star) to see how much you can rely on them to handle the most commonly played Ice.

For clarity many Ice and Icebreakers have special abilities that will affect these tables and frequently make it impossible to produce a definitive cost to break (eg. advanceable Ice can gain Strength, Snowball gains strength as it hits multiple Barriers).  In most cases I have ignored these abilities – I tell you the cost to break a Strength 7 Hadrian’s Wall, not a Strength 14 one.  Please bear that in mind for all these tables.

Barriers vs Fracters

The efficiency of Fracters really depends hugely on how cheap they are to break the four main Barriers (Ice Wall, Wall of Static, Bastion and Eli v1.0) as they made up nearly 90% of ALL Barriers played in the Top 32 decks at Worlds.  That Corroder is the champion Fracter should surprise almost nobody – Corroder has set the standard that other Fracters have failed to meet since the Core set – but I was personally surprised to find that Battering Ram was only slightly less efficient.  Comparing the two; the Battering Ram costs slightly more to use against Ice Wall (and the forthcoming Paper Wall and Wraparound) but is better against the medium-large Barriers and with Eli v1.0 quite common at Worlds it worked in Battering Ram’s favor. 

 The other Fracters all lag well behind Corroder and Battering Ram, with Snowball pretty much doomed to having to pay 1 more than Corroder to break any piece of Ice after costing more to install and Aurora and Inti considerably worse across the board.  I also included the spoiled Fracter Breach (due in Honor & Profit) and although it’s a better in-faction option for Criminals than Aurora, particularly at breaking the bigger obstacles, Breach is overkill on the more common smaller Barriers.  That doesn’t bode well if you expect to see Paper Wall, Ice Wall and Himitsu-Bako a lot in the future and that, combined with the Centrals-only limitation, makes Breach pretty unattractive while Corroder is still available.

The next table looks at the total cost of installing your chosen breaker and then breaking through X pieces of Ice, assuming the average break cost I worked out above.

When you factor in the cheap install cost of Corroder it’s clear why it’s by far the most common Fracter played – nothing comes close, regardless of how many times you have to break through Ice.  I was interested to see Battering Ram come so close – pretty much the only difference is the install cost (assuming the 2MU isn’t a problem).  However I think that it may be just a moment in time and if we see players using more Paper Wall, Wraparound and Himitsu-Bako (based on Jinteki decks getting stronger) in future tournaments the field will warp even more heavily towards Corroder being the #1 choice by a large margin.

Ok, it’s the elephant in the room.  Let’s talk about Knight.  In my set review of Mala Tempora I was relatively unkind towards Knight as I felt that you didn’t get enough of a discount for the restriction that it could only break one Ice at a time.  I still stand by that point but this analysis has made me upgrade my evaluation of the card because, as you’ll see shortly, Knight is competitive with the best breakers in each class.  Comparing Knight and Crypsis side-by-side like this really highlights how much more efficient it is for a breaker that can smash any type of Ice and I don’t think I really appreciated that fully at the time I wrote my initial review.  I know that some players are working hard to bring us a Reina Roja deck built around the Caissa and this makes me a little more confident that they’ll find a working deck down that design path.  Knight is a very effective breaker against virtually all Ice and particularly supports aggressive decks that want to be able to apply pressure while they wait to find their other breakers. 

I don’t think you can rely on Knight alone – at some point there has to be more than 3 Ice rezzed for your 3 Knights to break, and  Str>7 Ice like Janus v1.0 or Hadrian’s Wall just stops you dead – but Knight definitely has a role to play.

The fixed strength Fracter is the large and powerful Morning Star.  For 8 credits and 2 MU you would hope to get a pretty great Barrier breaker, and that’s exactly what you get.  Morning Star basically breaks through everything but Hadrian’s Wall - of the Ice in the Top 32 the Morning Star broke 94% of them for a single credit and if you include clicking past Heimdal v1.0 that rises to 96%.  Hadrian’s Wall is the Morning Star’s Kryptonite, though, and in case you’re wondering the reason I gave the Morning Star/Dinosaurus a fail vs Hadrian’s Wall is that a single advancement counter on Hadrian’s Wall will push it out of range of even a Strength 7 Morning Star.  Bottom Line on Morning Star: if you can afford it (both the credits and the MU) then you get a truly fearsome breaker and probably the only current Fracter that can persuade you to throw Corroder away.

Code Gates vs Decoders

The Fracter story was really just a demonstration of why nothing was as good as Corroder, but when you look at Decoders there is bit more to it than that.  Firstly, a good Decoder is a lot less than the important of a good Fracter because, as I discussed last week, there were far fewer Code Gates played than there were Barriers (if you exclude Pop-Up Window and Chum there were roughly half as many Code Gates).  Secondly the most commonly-played Decoder is Yog.0, which breaks all Str 3 or less Code Gates for 0 credits.  It’s pretty hard for any other Icebreaker to compete with “free”.

The Code Gate story is then a question of how often you can rely on Yog.0 to work for you, and if you can’t rely on it then a question how often are you actually going to hit a Code Gate that HAS to be broken anyway?  Let’s tackle those two questions in order…

 First of all, Yog.0 straight-up breaks 80% of all the Code Gates that were played in the Worlds Top 32 decks – there simply aren’t enough decent choices with Strength higher than 3 and that makes easy picking for Yog.0.  Worse yet is that you can click past Viktor 2.0 and potentially ignore Chum completely if you’ve got a breaker for the Ice behind it, meaning Yog.0 may only actually get stopped by Tollbooth, just 10% of Code Gates.  That puts Yog.0 in a similar position to Morning Star vs Barriers only it costs less to install and only takes up 1MU, which explains why we see Yog.0 much more frequently than we do it’s Barrier-busting brother.  Code Gates have it rough and until we see some decent ETR Code Gates at Strength 4+ (I'm looking at you, Inazuma) a lot of players will continue to both avoid playing Code Gates as Corps and put their faith in Yog.0 as Runners.

But let’s say you don’t want to run Yog.0 – either you know you will face a lot of Tollbooths in your local metagame or simply can’t fund the Influence cost, what are your options?  Well, interestingly, the answer is: it depends.

Three Shaper Decoders share the spoils as the most efficient answer to Code Gates, depending on how many times you think you’re going to have to break Ice with them.  At the top end of the price range is new arrival Torch, which costs a whopping 9 credits but then stomps all over virtually every Code Gate it meets.  If you’re going to be running past Code Gates frequently then your added investment in Torch will pay off – by the time you’re passing your tenth Code Gate you should be level with the cheaper Gordian Blade, which has been commonly considered the go-to Decoder alongside Yog.0.  Torch vs Gordian Blade is probably a straight question of how much Tollbooth you will meet – if the answer is “a lot” then Torch is worthwhile, but if you’re simply paying your way past Enigma and Pop-Up Window you’ll never recoup the added install cost.

In the budget aisle is Zu.13, who works out slightly cheaper than Gordian Blade if there are only a few Code Gates around but then always costs 1 more than the Blade to break pretty much anything but NEXT Bronze, and that extra credit adds up over time.  Because there are fewer Code Gates you need to break than there are any other type of Ice I think there’s a real case to be made for Zu.13 being desirable ahead of Gordian Blade, particularly for Anarchs and Criminals because Zu.13 costs 1 less influence.  Is Gordian Blade better than Zu in the Shaper versions of Andromeda we saw at Worlds?  Yes, probably.  Is it better than Zu and a Quality Time?  Maybe not.

The other three Decoders are all queuing up for the chance to look terrible, with none of them really looking better than the Shaper options at any point – they cost more and do less.  Peacock can at least break a few Code Gates and not feel entirely terrible, though it gets expensive quickly

Sentries vs Killers

The first thing that struck me about the Killers, compared to Decoders and Fracters, is that even the good ones aren’t that good – Femme Fatale and Ninja averaged about 5 credits per piece of Ice, compared to around half that much for Gordian Blade and Corroder.  The one-shot Faerie aside it seems like it’s simply not possible to bust through Sentries without spending a decent amount of cash.

Part of the reason for that is Archer, which is a monster.  If you can break all the subroutines on Archer without spending double digits then you’re doing very well.  The Corp had to sacrifice a precious Agenda to rez Archer so it’s only fair that they get something good, but still… it’s a horrible piece of Ice to have to get past.  It’s important to note that in this analysis I’ve ignored Femme Fatale’s ability to bypass Ice, which is probably the best answer to Archer.  If you weren’t fortunate enough to have Archer in the sights of your Femme then you’ll pay handsomely to get past, whatever your Killer of choice.

If you ignore the Archer question there are three Criminal Killers that head the list of efficient breakers, each of them very different.  Femme Fatale cost a lot to install but it breaks through smaller Ice like Shadow or Draco very quickly and easily, although larger Ice gets expensive.  One way to think of Femme is that she’s almost binary – you either pass something very cheaply or very expensively – while Ninja is more consistent and breaks pretty much any Ice for 4 or 5 credits, but only rarely for less than that.  One wrinkle in the comparison table – I assumed Draco was Strength 0 most of the time, but that Corps playing against Ninja would spend 1 credit to give it +1 Strength, forcing the Runner to spend 3 more to break it.  The spoiled Alias is the Killer equivalent of Breach but is actually much more attractive – where Breach is only as good as other options it looks as though Alias has a significant edge on the competition – breaking the cheap Sentries like Femme Fatale then pumping up for the big ones like Ninja.  Like Breach it can only be used on Central servers, but the numbers are solid and I think we’ll see Alias a lot more often.

Beyond the Criminal Killers it was interesting that Creeper wasn’t hugely worse than Ninja, though it’s an expensive way to break Rototurrets and Shadows.  There isn’t really a compelling reason to run Creeper over Ninja, and given the higher cost involved in breaking all the most common Ice I think Ninja is influence worth spending.

The analysis over time really serves to highlight the efficiency of Alias, once it arrives.  It also shows that the only reason to play Femme Fatale is her bypass ability – you have to break A LOT of Ice to make the added install cost pay off.  It’s impossible to evaluate Femme’s bypass ability in analysis like this, unfortunately – it’s going to have to remain a judgement call for yourself just how much Femme will save you.  If she’s going onto Archers then she’s an excellent choice.

So far we’ve seen two fixed strength breakers that beat the vast majority of Ice, but Mimic is a different story.  First of all, the good news – Mimic breaks most of the most common Sentries, and it breaks them much more efficiently than a Ninja would.  Now for the bad news – most of the Ice that Mimic DOESN’T break will trash programs, meaning that the gaps Mimic leaves won’t just see you failing to complete runs, but also putting valuable Icebreakers into the Heap.  More than either Yog.0 or Morning Star, Mimic really NEEDS the support of Datasucker to make it a viable choice and running naked with Mimic alone is risky.

BUT

Because there aren't any other particularly cheap Killers the efficiency rewards from Mimic over Ninja or Femme Fatale are huge, if you can only find some way to harness them.  We've seen that Mimic alone is very vulnerable because it doesn't help against program destruction but Mimic alongside a second Killer can become a potent combination.  The current Andromeda decks tend to play multiple Faeries, which are emergency escape chutes against Archers and Grims, and once you know the big Sentry is there you can go away and build Datasucker counters to go past them.  Along with Datasucker you can also pair Mimic with another Icebreaker…

I’ve left Ninja in as a comparison, but you can see immediately how combining Mimic’s efficient answer to the most popular Ice can combine profitably with another Icebreaker to fill in the gaps.

The Mimic & Faerie combination is clearly the most efficient, though unless you’ve got a ready supply of Clone Chips and Sacrificial Constructs you can’t rely on Faerie for more than one nasty piece of Ice.  The Mimic and Knight combination is surprisingly effective, and if you used a click or two on the two Ichi Sentries it would be even better.  As an in-faction solution for Anarchs I think this is a powerful combination that we’ll see frequently, with Mimic breaking the bulk of Sentries to share the load with Knight, and Knight taking out the occasional big hitter than Mimic can’t deal with.  The combination of Mimic and Femme Fatale makes sense if you assume that Femme will bypass Archer, but without that help the synergy between Mimic and Ninja is much better - Mimic breaks everything Strength 3 or less, and Ninja is efficient at getting up to Strength 5 for the bigger Ice.

With no single Killer proving an efficient answer to Sentries it looks as though “Mimic & ???” is the most attractive rig available for runners who are looking to settle in for a long game.

Conclusions

So, what did I learn from all this?  Well I can probably sum it up as:

•      Knight is a lot better than I thought it was.
•      Corroder is the best Fracter.  By far.
•      Yog.0 is detrimental to Ice diversity.  Inazuma will be very important.
•      Zu.13 is actually a decent option to Gordian Blade.
•      Sentries are hard to break.  Period.
•      Alias is going to be strong when it arrives.
•      Mimic needs backup.

I hope you’ve all found my Ice/Icebreaker analysis as useful to read as it was for me to write, and may it bring you look in the upcoming Store Championships!

Until next time… adieu!

Edit:
Garotte has been spoiled in True Colors.  He trumps all current Sentry Breakers...