There is no such thing as Reg Anarch

No influence Esa deck and it work just as well! It is known that Anarch has the best card pool. The Anarch card pool is also the most thematic and with the highest amount of well defined archetypes. Here is one such archetype : the sabotage engine with Esa.

Game plan : Sabotage sabotage and later check archive for the win.

Mulligan plan : Marrow, Ghosttongue or Mystic Maemi. Once you have those, the game almost play itself.

No influence and the deck build itself with no big weakness. And that is the point.

Now, the rant : Depending on your ID, it will build itself differently.

Choose Freedom Khumalo: Crypto-Anarchist and you'll go for viruses, Solidarity Badge. Each of your run will have value because you can either steal something or trash something.

Choose René “Loup” Arcemont: Party Animal, and you'll go for Imp and other card that enhance your trashing ability, to get more draw and value from your ID.

Choose Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist and then choose your favorite win condition. Will it be The Twinning? Or Stargate? Every run allow you to keep you ID active, giving you a free draw every turn. Making for a much faster runner.

Choose Sebastião Souza Pessoa: Activist Organizer and go for self tag cards. Giving you multiaccess, ice trashing and cheap install for connections.

Choose Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist and go for full sabotage.

Every ID in Anarch comes with its archetypes. Hoshiko and Loup will share more cards together, but their archetype is very different. Loup is like an hybrid between Hoshiko and Khumalo.

This is unlike the shaper card pool, which will share between themselve many more cards. You can take the shell of a Kit deck and put it in Lat with an extra breaker. Arissana has the most defined archetype. Tao or Ayla could be played as a (probably weaker) variant of Lat. This shows that reg shaper is a thing.

Same in Criminals. Take the shell of 419, put it in Los or Steve and it will work just fine. Hence, reg criminal is also a thing. Mercury is more defined (like Arissana).

But Anarch are so much more defined. In my opinion, this is a good thing. It makes playing anarch a more varied experience. Kudos to the Anarch designers for achieving this.

If the latest ID are showing the way (Mercury, Arissana, Sebastiao), then the trend of more defined play pattern related to the ID should grow more, and that is a good thing. Building decks by taking well defined card out of their "normal ID" is a fun building exercise.

Cheers!