AdVantage Point

New set impressions.

Alright, the full spoiler for Vantage Point is up. Worth keeping in mind that we are going into a world without Hoshiko and Sable, without Luminal Transubstantiation and with Deep Dive. That is the context.

I have it on good authority that there’s an office in Langley dedicated to Wojak engineering.

I’m not going to cover every card, just the ones that I think you have to keep in mind if you’re trying to be competitive. And also, they are in no particular logical order. First of all, we finally have our new anti-Fast Advance tech.

This is… fine? It’s not as swingy as Clot (where gamestates that devolved into “did you Slot the Clot?” were often entirely determinative of the winner) but instead greatly lowers the payout of attempting a fast advance play. It’s not completely dead in matchups where the corp is not fast advancing, so even if you whiff on the meta call and nobody’s on Nebula, you can still install this thing without a giant dunce hat on your head. If you do it with a Seb or Baz trigger, even better. The influence cost though… why? This is a marginal tech include. It should just be free, putting in your 45 is cost enough- adding 3 to the deck (which, honestly seems kinda mandatory if you’re going to play it at all) leaves you with only 12 influence. It’s not like Shaper is going to recur it with Simulchip. It’s also unique, which is just… ugh. The more I look at this card, the less it looks like a Clot and more like a Whistleblower. Someone prove me wrong.

The neutral corp card, on the other hand, is pretty real. 4/2s have to be pretty good to see play and this one is excellent, effectively reducing the Corp’s agenda point density. It also lets you put a 5/3 on the bottom, which can be extremely important to reduce the chances of the runner getting lucky if you’re doing glacier-y things. This card plays best in a deck with Seamless or other tools that help Never Advance, because unlike Offworld it is tempo negative and that’s a significant tradeoff.

Remember that context from above? The existence of this card is one of the safety valves against the meta devolving into endless scuba adventures. It’s also an effect that’s good for the game… although I’m wondering if having access to 6 copies of this effect is exploitable in Eternal? Probably not, but something to keep in mind.

As much I like Deep Dive, I equally hated Apocalypse. Board resets are often NPE events if you don’t plan for them, and sometimes even if you see them coming¹. This feels like a significantly less NPE version as it doesn’t completely hose a giant glacier setup or a very wide board, and the Corp can somewhat mitigate the impact depending on which ice were trashed by potentially nuking a specific icebreaker. You still need to play around this as Corp though, because if they land the first one, it can make the second and third (and fourth and fifth) easier to land. There’s a lot of big, expensive ice out there, and new ways to ‘cheat it out’, so its good we have a card that deals with that. In a pinch, this can also ‘solve’ an Anoetic/Skunkworks remote so it’s certainly not a narrow use-case card.

Speaking of cheating things out, in theory this is an 8-credit swing for 1 click. In reality, the downside of Bad Publicity is very real. Using this to rez a Trebuchet or Piranhas is significantly less exciting (thanks for the conditional Beanstalk Royalties I guess?). I think this card will nonetheless see some marginal Standard play, because Tyr, Seraph, Cloud Eater, Ansel 2.0 and Mycoweb are all reasonable targets. The two core enablers for a bad publicity strategy are Scapegoat and Luana. I think they are both worth experimenting with, and not necessarily just in the new NBN ID Ad Nihilum.

I love the flavor of this card, and I hope it ends up being good or least playable². In theory, you can use this to get rid of bad pub permanently by rezzing it on the runner’s turn and then overwriting it. Of course, if you’ve done all that just to cheat out a giant piece of ice, you’ve erased the efficiency gains of cheating the ice out in the first place, so I don’t think this belongs in the same deck as Reanimation Protocol.

This one I’m pretty sure will see ample play in NBN decks. It’s non-trivial to trash, and both sides of the effect are very, very strong. Scoring an Artificial Cryptocrash with this also on the board is the meaning of life. Pull the rug.

This is the real way to cheat giant ice. Not only does it give Jinteki decks influence-free potential kill lines, it’s extremely versatile because it acts effectively as a super modal card. Wanna give them more tags? Wanna trash their best program? Wanna deal incidental damage? Wanna shuffle some cards? This card effectively reads: gain 8-10 credits and do something nasty to the runner. The easiest way to land the tag in a Jinteki shell will remain to hit them with an Oppo Research when they are tempo-strapped.

This is my favorite card in the set, not close. The name, flavor text, art, and effect all land perfectly. Sometimes you need credits. Sometimes you want to threaten to fire Ping/Anemone/Cloud Eater again. Doing this for one click off of a cyclosynchrowhatever is gravy. I’m not sure how good it will actually be, but it looks promising.

I’ll be back with some first-pass decklists in the near future. First, I gotta shake the rust and get 20 games in.

1. An unplanned-for Deep Dive often ends the game on the spot unambiguously. An Apocalypse put you into the attrition grinder of “finding the 2% outer” which is often annoying/unpleasant in an unranked/non-tournament game.

2. The monkey’s paw curls. Someone will probably figure out a way to make this into part of a lethal End of the Line strategy in AU Co.