Station One has come out and that means it’s time for, you guessed it – a Meta Snapshot about Daedalus Complex!

To be fair, Station One only just came out and there’s not heaps in it so it’s fine. We’re fine. You over there, you’re mighty fine ;).

The real question is, where’s the game at after Quorum? Mars is nice and all but after Quorum hit us with the rough equivalent of a tactical nuke it’s kind of hard to follow up its impact on the meta. Anyway, let’s have a look!

RUNNER

We’re currently at a period of Runner dominance unmatched for quite some time so your options are pretty wide. Sitting pretty at the top of the heap are Dumblefork, Temujin Whizzard and Andromeda, but there are other decks making a showing too.

Siphon Anarch is currently around, both in Whizzard and MaxX. The Whizzard deck is basically the classic Eater/Siphon/Keyhole shell operating out of the best ID in the game (and brought to a Worlds top 8 finish by Dave Hoyland), while the MaxX is the DLR that has been essentially unchanged from Worlds 2014. Of note in the Whiz deck is the addition of Parasite and Sifr to the original shell, as Parasifr is just a teensy bit more efficient than our old friend Femme Fatale. Noise has also been making some…noise…lately, as Parasifr is a huge boost to something you want to be doing anyway.

Good stuff Andromeda and DLR Power Tap continue to be popular. We’ve also seen a resurgence in Leela lately, which tends to happen when Criminal is in a strong position and doesn’t necessarily need that Andromeda speed boost. Apart from a reg-ass list, there’s a trend towards hand-floody decks such as this interesting list featuring Equivocation. It’s probably worth keeping an eye on this style as it will gain a lot of power when our savior Jackson Howard rotates out.

Shaper is still not fantastic and most lists are either building around Smoke or Congress shells. Silver Bullet may see some play but is still slow to set up. Shaper’s issue is still dealing with an early Sensie and asset spam in general, as they don’t have Whizzard’s inbuilt econ or Andy’s high likelihood to draw strong econ early. Mad Dash has strong synergy with Indexing and tends to be a functionally better Freedom Through Equality.

CORPORATION

Controlling the Message, despite all the hate against it, remains extremely powerful and probably the best Corp deck. Combo decks like Railgun and CI7 also remain extremely popular due to Runner good stuff decks being so strong. We also see a strong trend towards asset spam, particularly out of NBN.

Apart from CTM, there are a few distinct flavors of NBN kicking around right now. The most prevalent seems to be the Team Turtles variety, which combos Jeeves and Friends in High Places to push out up to 5 assets a turn. As it turns out, that’s pretty hard to deal with. A couple of Midseasons decks designed to counter Aaron Marron have popped up – check out this interesting new Butchershop variant using Mumbad Virtual Tour. Finally, the most innovative NBN deck to appear this month is this Stinson/Midseasons/Boom deck that’s been around a few places. We’re at a point where NEH can be representing some significantly different attack vectors and you’ll need to prioritise figuring out which kind you’re up against very quickly if you want to avoid a violent death.

Jinteki is mostly represented by Potential Unleashed and Replicating Perfection prison decks, either of the grindy or trap-ridden variety. Rushy Palana might be reasonable at the moment too but it’s not really around. Until Rumor Mill and Sifr is addressed, don’t expect this to change.

Ben Ni brought Jammy HB back to win London BABW with a Sifr-proof ICE suite and the spicy addition of 3 Violet Level Clearances. This very cool Off the Grid list has been around a bit too. CI has diversified into a few major archetypes. Apart from CI7, the Hasty Relocation version is very popular. Lakshmi CI is also extremely interesting and makes use of an underappreciated Mumbad card.

Finally, Jemison is very popular but the consensus seems to be that it’s not quite there yet. People seem to be leaning towards either a FA/kill hybrid or using the ID ability to get some serious scoring combos off. Both routes make full use of “ramping” your small agendas into larger ones and hopefully making use of that sweet High Risk Investment moolah.

Weyland is getting some sweet new toys soon so hopefully they’ll see a change in fortunes. Stay tuned and I hope to bring you the MWL + Terminal Directive Snapshot soon!