The reason why you include those 4 cards is because you can. You are not dilluting your agenda density too much and aren’t making it greater as well. But what you are getting is 4 valuable cards, cards that will help you gain money, defend your servers, cripple or kill the runner and help you get your agendas without being a liability in your hand.
E.G., imagine playing RP when both sides are on 5 pts. What would you rather have in your hand (assuming you have enough upgrades and cash)? A Nisei Mk2 (or an NAPD) or a Fast Track? Imagine they Legwork you and they hit your Fast Track. That’d have been the game. Instead, you are increasing your agenda density for yourself, but not the runner. But also, you can choose when that card becomes and agenda and don’t have to worry about it clogging your hand and being vulnerable there.
As far as Glacier decks are concerned I believe they should always go for the 49. I certainly wasn’t trying to make the case that 45 is better than 49 universally, I 'm just exploring the possibility of it being favorable in some types of decks. But lets assume that fast track was in a NEH deck, of course as you say in that case it would have saved you .
Some decks wants to draw agendas fast (Astroscript) while others don’t (Glacier). What all of them want though is consistency, meaning drawing that ice you needed, or that econ you are missing at the right time.
The problem is I don’t know if you can accurately calculate this and say “okay if I go to 45 cards I will on average lose the game on X accesses instead of X+1, with the benefit of having a Y percent higher chance to draw my ice and Z percent higher chance to draw my econ (and a higher chance to see Jacksons which means higher impact than Jacksons in a 49 card deck)”, and compare those two values.
Deckbuilding in 45 (or even 40) is a decision you make, not an automatic choice.
I and others made rushing TWIY* 40 working very well… If you can sacrifice a few points of course.
Probably not the best of ideas to light up this thread again, but here we go: If we’re going to think about the necessary conditions for a hypothetical 45 card deck, how does it play?
It wants to score out agendas early and in rapid succession
It can reliably defend R&D or doesn’t worry about losing agendas to R&D accesses
It already includes tempo cards that you could otherwise add to pad out a 45 card deck to get to 49. (I’m thinking of Fast Track, Subliminal Messaging, and similar in-faction cards.)
Off the top of my head, you could experiment with a NEXT Design deck built along those lines. Rush early, fast advance late.
Before clot came out, I had a 40 card TWIY deck that was fun to play and I used in a tournament. It was very fast but obviously vulnerable to R&D digs.
…then you realise you could play this in 40…
If you realize the runner don’t phase 3, then better catch him in mid phase 2.
There’s tricks to learn there.
18 in 40-44 is not the same as 20 in 45-49. Agendas will fall in your basket or the runner’s but if frequency of scoring is high, if your deck is adapted, you’ve got an advantage vs the (maybe slow, maybe poor, maybe gearchecked) runner.
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