Clot (now 2 inf)

LOL @ the NBN hate. Whatever.

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Great article. Last paragraph sums it up nicely. Stealth Andy is already the new Andysucker and this will only be exacerbated by Clot; just my hypothesis.

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If we’re not going to threaten runners with a race, Stealth’s efficiency in the long game is definitely going to propel that archetype into the limelight.

Why do people assume that if you can’t score from hand, Astro tokens are worthless?

They’re still useful even if Clot is on the table - suddenly, I can conceivably do a straight NAPD from a never-advanced state, possibly even a 3-point Beale. That means the pressure is still on, from 4 points onwards.

Sure, you might want Tollbooths instead of Quandaries for your scoring server, but that’s probably a good thing (and runners will probably end up hating it even more). Corps now have the econ to support it.

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I totally agree that they’re not worthless, but as valuable as before Clot? Nope. Oldskool NBN NA threatens a full-on Astrotrain if you let a single Astro slip by, which is how you get the runner to eat an Edge of World.

Nisei MkII is just as dangerous as it was.

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Well, duh. If they were, Clot would be worthless.

Are you proposing that NBN in its mid-Lunar incarnation (after Architect) is totally fine and needs no reining in?

Except not really. If you read up on @Lluluien’s original write-up, you’ll see that the threat of letting an Astro slip by comes from being able to never-advance a PSF (which turns on both Raven and Snares). The EoW is there mostly just to upgrade PSF lock from “annoyance” to “lethal”.

I’ve been playing NBN since the ancient times, and the full-on Astrotrain bullshit is a relatively new thing, mostly originating here (or thereabouts, chronologically). Remember what Lukas said in an interview at Worlds 2013? He was surprised not to see NBN players playing Biotic Labor… so it quite obviously wasn’t a thing yet.

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I’ve heard all kinds of stories of NEH players losing games because they can’t get the second Astro. They’ll sit with an NAPD in hand against a runner with 0 credits, or hold their Beale, because scoring one of those will stop the Astrotrain. That’s how calcified the NBN headspace is (them’s buzzwords!). The fact that Clot is making people shake their heads and wake up a bit (note that I’m totes a “I’m taking Astrobiotics because I want to win” tourney player) is great.

To the argument that “If there were good NBN decks, wouldn’t we have found them” is missing a piece - there weren’t NBN decks safer and faster than NEH Astro. If NEH Astro becomes less perfect, it’s possible there are a ton of NBN decks out there that are 55-60% win rate decks that were just discarded, because they weren’t the 68%+ win of NEH.

And I want Plan B to work so so so bad. I keep trying to make decks that use it. I try to shoe horn it in Jinteki traps. I add it to Weyland aggressive decks. I put it everywhere, but it never stays.

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It’s definitely a cool idea, the issue is that you could be advancing an agenda instead of Plan B.

No; I don’t think anyone is proposing that. I am proposing that Clot is an overly powerful, overly broad way of reining one NEH/TWIY build in. There are plenty of other ways to have done this, but instead we have a situation where we have a war against an entire archetype, which is, in my opinion, bad for the game.

There are a handful of lighter-weight interventions that could have been employed that we could review off the top of my head if we wanted to :).

NBN has been my favorite faction since core, and FA has always been the engine that makes the corp work, whether you’re all-in FA (which should be an aggressive, zerg strat), threatening damage, punishing tags, etc. It’s the threat that you might be all-in zerg FA that has made NBN’s other game strong :).

On a lighter note, Lukas also said he was surprised to see nobody playing 7pt CI at worlds 2013 :).

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It’s definitely a cool idea, the issue is that you could be advancing an agenda instead of Plan B.

The other issues are that:

  • At 2 counters it’s never going to score an agenda for you
    A) This means adding in support cards like mushin-no-shin, matrix analyzer, or something else. You need to essentially guarantee that it’ll be at 3 counters for it to do damage.

B) If you can advance it past 2 counters, why didn’t you just score an agenda

C) If the runner suspects plan b, they should be playing legwork because that’s likely to defuse the plan b anyways.

D) A fizzled plan B doesn’t do anything to the board state.


This actually suggests some ways to play around it.

  1. Use Mushin/Matrix Analyzer
  2. Use cards like atlas/vitruvius to retrieve the agenda you want to score after access has been comitted to.
  3. Install upgrades on failed plan bs that the runner wants to trash. Shell Corp, SanSan, Cyberdex Virus Suite
  4. Use TOL to retrieve counters and FA when B fails

Almost all of these strategies don’t work with FA decks as we know them and insinuate there’s something else out there (that likely isn’t very competitive). But now that I’ve looked at this I’m wondering if TOL-Titan wants Mushin-No-Shin/Matrix Analyzer and Plan B… ? WTF?

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I don’t think Diagnostics was out then. I think he just said he was surprised not to see CI in general.

To be completely honest, I think old-school HB FA is just as much bullshit as NEH is, even more so - they have an identity that is just as ridiculous, better ICE and a shit-ton of really strong cards in-faction (effectively giving them like +20 influence or so). Clot hits this one as well, although arguably less so because they’re better equipped for remote-based play (because purple ICE and Adonis, respectively).

I do like the existence of counter-play to FA that isn’t faction-specific and dependent on accessing the combo pieces (Imp, Demo Run), overly complicated to set up and fragile (Chakana) or hamstringing the Runner’s ability to race the Corp for points (The Source). At 1 inf and 1 install, I agree that Clot would have been overkill, at 2 and 2 I no longer think this is the case.

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That could be, but Lukas’ Mental Meta is like… far ahead :). BLC wasn’t out then either, which is IMO key to any reasonable CI deck :).

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I was actually winning a good amount back then with a CI deck back then that was just Gifts, Restructures, taxing ICE, and Biotic Fast Advance. I think until BLC came out, CI was basically married to Gifts, which kept the Scorch plan from working terribly well. EffCom/Sfss was out but I wasn’t playing it.

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Restructure wasn’t even out for worlds 2013. CI was totally unplayable against parasite Andy for a long time, although you could win some fun games with shipment from kaguya/efficiency at smaller tournaments

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Nice!

DAN CEREBRAL IMAGING #1 :slight_smile:

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I know. :(. It’s never worth it unless you have a 2/1, a 3/*, and a bigger agenda on hand. Then you could double, see if they run, triple, see if they run, then… Cry.

Without being broad and powerful, this card sees no play, and has no effect on the meta. See also: chakana, the source (though ofc now chakana has that silly noise hivemind build :smiley: )

NEH is simply the strongest and most frustrating example, but the heart of the matter is that scoring out of hand is very, very hard to combat right now, assuming that you even know what’s going on. God forbid you’re a newer or more casual player and just lose without even knowing what happened.

imho, NBN has way, way too many great cards in faction to be without recourse here, and other FA archetypes already have other great lines of play (HB has ICE and $$, tennin has… jinteki cards). It’s just that NBN’s FA decks are so strong right now that there’s never been a reason to develop alternate lines of play.

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woo! i was playing astrobiotics before it was cool!

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Some of us were playing the original 7-point CI to top five finishes at Plugged-In events before Celebrity Gift, Blue Level Clearance, Restructure, Accelerated Diagnostics, and Power Shutdown were even in the card pool. :wink:

If anyone needs a demonstration of how it worked, albeit an updated version months later with Restructure and Blue Level, this is still one of my favorite YouTube videos. Thanks Dan. :stuck_out_tongue:

I would’ve been playing CI at Worlds 2013 if Second Thoughts was available and legal. Unfortunately, it was available but not legal to play until the second chance tournament after Worlds.

Ah well, it was fun. An archaic archetype that Clot will render obsolete and probably unplayable.

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