HB Glacier

siowy · December 19, 2013, 11:11pm

NOTE: This is an outdated list. Improvements include -3 bioroid efficiency, +1 interns, +1 janus, -3 green level, -1 snare, +3 private contracts, -1 ash, +1 viktor 2.0, +1 heimdall 2.0, +1 levy university

###[HB True Glacier][1] (49 cards)

[Haas-Bioroid: Engineering the Future][2]

Agenda (7)

1 [Accelerated Beta Test][3]
3 [Priority Requisition][4]
3 [Project Wotan][5]

Asset (4)

2 [Jackson Howard][6] ••
2 [Snare!][7] ••••

Upgrade (4)

3 [Ash 2X3ZB9CY][8]
1 [Off the Grid][9] •••

Operation (18)

3 [Archived Memories][10]
3 [Bioroid Efficiency Research][11]
3 [Green Level Clearance][12]
3 [Hedge Fund][13]
3 [Restructure][14]
3 [Successful Demonstration][15]

Barrier (6)

3 [Bastion][16]
2 [Heimdall 2.0][17]
1 [Wotan][18]

Code Gate (5)

3 [Tollbooth][19] ••••• •
2 [Viktor 2.0][20]

Sentry (5)

3 [Ichi 2.0][21]
2 [Janus 1.0][22]

Note: This is my version of the deck I saw. Forgot to ask for a decklist so I recreated what I saw and filled in the rest myself. The concept is the same.

Just faced a crazy deck on octgn with my version of scumbag gabriel and got crushed twice without either of us scoring any points( i conceded)

It plays ichi 2.0(which i thought was crap but is actually great)
Viktor 2.0, 1 wotan, multiple janus, heimdall 2.0, i think 3 tollbooth, off the grid, snare, operation economy including successful demonstration and archived memories, only 7 agendas, and ash. I think theres bioroid efficiency in there.
The playstyle involves creating no remote server until all centrals are very unprofitable, blanking out all central run events, making datasuckers and desperado very weak. It does this by just clicking for creds all game long and never drawing cards for it’s actions. I don’t think jackson is in the deck. Wipe viruses manually and stock agendas in hq until in the endgame, you ash or off the grid, throw another 2 big ice on a remote and advance honestly to score.

I recreated the deck from what i saw and played just one game where i won. The guy i stole the deck from said it was popular in his meta.

Anyway i think it’s worth trying cause it’s so incredibly different, but yet effective against the run based gameplay of runners now. Magnum opus is key for beating the deck, was what the guy told me.

I’ll post my decklist after work.

Alexfrog · December 19, 2013, 11:23pm

Crushing this type of HB deck is supposed to be the thing that Gabe excels at the most.

siowy · December 20, 2013, 12:23am

I want running forged activation orders, but even that probably isn’t devastating against it unless you manage to chain into multiple siphons.

I’m no newbie with gabe, and my winrate is high. Maybe the sample of games was too small, but it managed to stabilise and lock out my gabe in both games

siowy · December 20, 2013, 12:26am

I wasnt running forged i mean. Forum posting is hard on my phone. I also wasnt running indexing, which would have helped.

It’s so bizarre to me that it worked that i had to share it here. I’m fully aware of the top corp decks and standard corp theory

Alexfrog · December 20, 2013, 12:40am

Well, low sample size events do occur.

Gabe does lose these games if the ice manages to get built up and rezzed. Playing this deck type and simply not drawing early agendas was always a way to beat Gabe.

Alternately, maybe Corp economy has gotten good enough now with things like Restructure, that it can better handle the Gabe tricks and denial?

siowy · December 20, 2013, 12:56am

The combination of the 7 agenda composition(needing 3 of 7 agendas is much harder than 4 of 11 agendas since its like needing 9 agenda points to win), restructure and some of the new hb big ice that make the deck. Etr becomes a punishment when corp goes demonstration archived demonstration. Oh yea 3 bastions in the deck too as the weakest ice.

It seems key to me that you NEVER draw when playing this deck. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to play 1-2 jacksons in the deck, at all. It may be. By never drawing cards, you ‘expose’ extremely few cards and thus, agendas to being stolen/scored. We can expect 3/7 agendas to be ‘exposed’(ie. at the top of R&D, or in HQ, or in the board, or stolen/scored) when 3/7 of the deck has been ‘exposed’. That’s 21(3/7 * 49) cards on average. If you NEVER draw, and we take the top 3 cards of R&D as being ‘exposed’, then 3/7 of the deck is exposed only on turn 13! (this doesn’t take into account trashing of the 3 ashes from R&D, or more ‘exposes’ after scoring from R&D) That means on average, the earliest the runner can win is turn 13. I didn’t see my opponent even playing green level clearance, though i’m not sure if it’s supposed to be THAT extreme. My test deck did play green level.

CodeWolf · December 20, 2013, 6:23am

If you never draw cards and mostly build up, i.e. stall, then you basically should play Jackson because otherwise noise will ruin your day.

siowy · December 20, 2013, 7:23am

True, jackson is extra important vs noise when playing this type of corp deck. Maybe I just didn’t see it from my opponent’s game. He’s not really useful against other factions though, because you’ll be icing archives heavily(1-2 big ice) anyway to make runs unprofitable through suckers/desperado.

Arkhon · December 20, 2013, 12:29pm

And herein lies the crux of meta-gaming… Noise is unpopular at the moment because he sucks vs. Jackson, which enables slower decks to enjoy a bit of a respite. He’ll bounce back though - he’s a hard counter to self-mill Accelerated Diagnostics combos and as the card pool grows there will be competition for deck space - we won’t see quite so much of Jackson across the board. Even now he’s not quite ubiquitous, but still the most splashed card.

to return to the deck under discussion… I don’t quite see what Snare adds to the mix here. It’s not going for the kill or using the tags, so why not spend the influence elsewhere? Which ID is it using, ETF?

Operational economy is strong, of course, but surely it must be slow to get started? You can’t have pots of money and install tonnes of ICE for the first few goes, so the runner should be battering the centrals at that point. I would think cards like Inside Job and Maker’s Eye are good in the early going.

siowy · December 20, 2013, 12:30pm

Posted my decklist for glacier-style HB in the op. Give it a try! Remember not to draw with jackson without shuffling in agendas. And don’t draw with jackson too much.

Arkhon · December 20, 2013, 12:35pm

Forgot to mention, the new Reina Roja decks will probably ruin this archetype. It’ll be insanely expensive to ever rez anything.

Nightmare588 · December 20, 2013, 3:38pm

I think my copies of Emergency Shutdown just tried to jump out of my deck box and adhear to the screen. In my meta, Big Ice is a death-wish for corps right now. As everyone seems to be running FAO and Shutdowns (for good reason).

siowy · December 20, 2013, 6:07pm

@Arkhon: I have no idea what snare adds to the mix, but I saw that my opponent had snare, so I didn’t want to change that, since I’m a beginner at this deck. After playing ~5 games with the deck on octgn myself(no losses), I think the biggest thing that snare does is confuse the runner as to what’s going on if they have never seen your deck before. Having the knowledge that you are playing against glacier helps significantly since you know what are the key resources in the game, which are different from the key resources in a traditional game vs corp. In a local store where people are familiar with your deck, I might want to replace snare with something else, but even then I’m not sure what I’d want. This deck hurts for economy, but it wants big economy effects per card. Having no remote early means that melange is out of the question. Celebrity gift is the obvious answer, BUT the deck benefits quite a bit from not letting the runner know how many agendas are in HQ, since it will be trying its best to make it expensive for them to to get in. ETF is KEY to this deck. I initially thought it would work better with weyland core, but weyland core only gives you ~12 creds over the game’s length, and only when you play transactions. This deck gets to turn 9 and the board looks like it’s turn 3. You can expect to gain at minimum 20 creds with ETF ability over the course of the game.

Runner batters centrals at the start yes, but because you don’t draw, and only have 7 agendas, it’s hard for them to be able to actually score enough to win. It’s very likely you will leak 3 or 6 agenda points in the first 10 turns. That’s one weakness of the deck, it doesn’t lock out the runner from the start, and leaks points easily, which can be a factor in tournaments at the placing matches. But it appears to be good at winning, which is not something every corp deck can boast. Needs more testing to be sure.

Won 2/2 vs reina roja today, leaking 3 and 6 agenda points. It’s not insanely much more expensive. One of them had xanadu out. 2 extra creds to rez isn’t that much when you are honestly paying 15 creds to rez janus to brain them.

@Nightmare588: Yup I thought emergency shutdown kills this deck too. But actually, as a runner you need a specific combination of cards to do it.

Against criminal the first priority is to put a firm stopper on HQ, e.g. tollbooth, bastion+1 other ice. The deck is super weird, because often its first turn play is ice, cred, cred. This makes it seem like the corp is just a bad player, or has a hand lacking ice or flooded with agendas. But actually it just wants to slowly ice up wherever it’s most important to ice up at the time. If corp can rez tollbooth on HQ on turn 1-2, the runner needs sneakdoor/inside job + emergency shutdown in hand in order to derez the tollbooth. If the runner doesn’t have BOTH parts, he can’t even derez the tollbooth. And then derezzing the tollbooth is only a delaying tactic. Because the deck, on average, doesn’t expose enough AP for the runner to win early on, glacier will just slowly cred cred cred back up until it can rez again or play hedge funds/restructures. On the best case scenario that you manage to derez the tollbooth, the ideal way to punish is to siphon, right? It would just generate a big economic swing for you to rig up quickly and set up for the later game, and slow down the corp significantly. However, the corp can just play viktor 2.0 or bastion in front of tollbooth, and basically never allow you to siphon the full 5 creds by rezzing when you run. Eventually the story seems to go that the corp will get 3 heavy ice on HQ, and all account siphon/emergency shutdown and other HQ run cards are being discarded.

FAO can be good against HB glacier, depending on how many ICE it plays. It’s possible to play 3-5 more ice than in my list, which would make FAO not great.

FAO is good when it’s painful for the corp to trash the ice. If glacier is running extra ICE, it already never has enough cash to rez all the ICE, so losing a few ICE(which it couldn’t rez anyway) isn’t a big deal. The ideal situation is to FAO to clear the way to HQ and then siphon, which would be a good play, but again due to the nature of the deck going through it’s deck so slowly, means that you can’t convert that into a win quickly and the corp can still recover no problem.

I have played big ice before. It sucks, I know. But glacier is a new concept, I believe. The problem with big ice before, was that you were drawing cards to try to cheat them out, or drawing cards to get quick economy to rez them. Drawing cards means that the corp is letting loose those agendas into the realm of cards which can(and often will) get eventually stolen. Even playing jackson to draw draw draw and shuffle back agendas doesn’t really help the situation that much, because while it delays the number of AP immediately exposed, it concentrates the R&D to the point that R&D interface runs just kill you too often. The MAGIC of glacier is in its SLOWNESS. You should try it out if you don’t believe

siowy · December 30, 2013, 5:42am

I played HB glacier with a few changes(no wotan, no bioroid efficiency, maybe a few others) at my local tournament. It was 10 people in the tourney. I went 2-1 with the deck in 3 corp games, losing in a game where I made a play mistake, installing tollbooth in the wrong server, which bit me back much later. Unfortunately, the deck is a bad choice for normally-timed tournaments, as the games tend to take too long. I was not able to even start two of the runner games because the corp games took so long.

I kept a log of it and I’m 9-2 on octgn and at the local tourney since I started the log. My conclusion is that it’s a consistent and strong deck, but completely unsuitable for timed play.