I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I only just received confirmation from Lukas: the corp can use The Foundry’s ID power during an ABT to avoid trashing anything. Even if the ICE you install is the only copy in R&D, you get to trigger a shuffle, and just like with Accelerated Diagnostics, that removes the “acceleration” effect from the other cards.
How best to abuse this? It seems to me that:
You want ICE that works really well with copies of itself → NEXT ICE
You want to be able to induce runs on remotes to trigger rezzes and the ID → asset economy
You want singletons of your big ICE so you don’t have to thin R&D when you ABT.
I’ve tested it a couple of times, and found that you get an amazing amount of control about where you put your ICE. Because you so often have ICE in HQ, runners often break Minelayer, which is a pretty good trade. You can also thin it out of R&D very easily, which negates its lategame weakness. I used to have Pop-ups instead of Shadows, but I felt the list was a bit code-gate-heavy. I may also switch the Archived Memories for a Reclamation Order.
I’m very interested to hear thoughts and suggestions.
While this is a totally awesome and interesting ruling, (my initial impression of ABT+Foundry was that it was a nonbo since you end up thinning so much ICE from your deck), I suspect that the correct way to abuse the effect is to just play a foundry deck and run the ABT, (when prudent, which should be as early as possible to lessen the possibility of missing on ICE entirely). This doesn’t seem like the sort of gimmick you can really take a lot of advantage of during deckbuilding. The ideal way to do it would be to play more ICE, just so you won’t whiff as often, but that clashes with one of the best things about playing the Foundry, which is that you don’t actually need a lot of ICE.
[sorry this post is going to be a rant instead of anything useful about your decklist…]
I have to say I really dislike this ruling. Don’t get me wrong, I love one-card combos (whose names don’t start with “astroscript”), but it’s just another* case where the rules would have been consistent if it had been ruled the opposite way, and it’d be impossible to figure out on your own short of asking Lukas.
In Magic, an ability that triggered during the resolution of another ability goes into a temporary limbo zone and does not begin to resolve until after the first ability is done resolving. This is true no matter what the abilities actually do; the cards are templated so that any player (or judge) with sufficient understanding of the rules could figure out a complicated interaction that comes up during a tournament. I don’t want to find myself having to tweet at Lukas in the middle of playing for stakes.
*another example: the FAQ card clarifications say that if you lose security testing between choosing a server and running, you don’t get the replacement, but if keyhole is trashed during its own run, you do get the replacement.
another example: the FAQ card clarifications say that if you lose security testing between choosing a server and running, you don’t get the replacement, but if keyhole is trashed during its own run, you do get the replacement.
That’s actually because Security Testing has a conditional ability that triggers at the end of the run, while Sneakdoor/Keyhole’s paid ability resolves at the beginning of the run. If the ability has already started resolving but has a continuous effect (also, Joshua), then it doesn’t matter if the source of this ability stays or not.
Yes, you get thinning from your standard ICE rezzing and ID ability, but you can still get a rough idea of how much ICE is in R&D. But what you get from the Foundry is that even partial whiffs (1 ice, 2 other) or crappy ABTs (popup, minelayer, agenda) can be salvaged, and you can still feel confident firing ABT in situations that are much less attractive for the other HB IDs.
I disagree with the 'one copy of big ice avenue.
I think the way to take max advantage is with multiple copies of ice, so it can be pulled to your hand. But you need oai/BER/howler to take advantage of it.
That’s an interesting approach, but I explicitly don’t want to thin the big ice out, because I can’t afford to hard-rez it. If I ABT into NEXT or other little ice, that’s still great - I’ll Foundry up a copy unless I get a 3-ICE ABT or a really good 2-ICE ABT.
Because of all the thinning that happens, I don’t feel like I have the deck slots to include other cheat-rez cards and still have enough ICE to ensure good ABT probabilities (even with the Foundry’s ruling). Going all-in on big ICE and cheat-rez tech is a different approach and probably merits further experimentation.
I think foundry is awesome…I’ve been having a blast with it, but I don’t think it will really hit its stride until we get NEXT Gold and the rest of the grail ICE. 3 of each Grail, 3 of each NEXT, 1 Mother Goddess, 3 Sansans, 3 ABT, 3 Vitruvius, 3 NAPD, 1 other random agenda, and then the rest economy. Nothing like winning random games to your opponent face-checking a turn 1 Merlin haha