With an asset economy what is enough of a deterrence to keep runners from going to trash the asset?
From an NEH deck I have been playing I use Data Raven over marked accounts and it has kept most runners away from trashing marked accounts. Is Data Raven an appropriately valued ice for this? If not, is it too much or too little? Data Raven won’t keep them out but it will make it expensive for them to get to it and trash.
I was thinking PAD campaign might be a better choice than marked accounts, but it makes a bigger target.
A 4 cost ice that costs them nothing on encounter is definitely too expensive.
I think ice such as pop up, pup, ice wall, quandary, even when they have the right breaker out, are ideal. You tax them a bit, if they do break in then ideally you install a new asset in the empty remote.
It depends on the deck and the strength of the drip.
But I think the honest to goodness best answer is: The best deterrent is a good offense.
Give a runner time and they’ll pick off your assets to keep you poor. If you give them enough other things to worry about they’ll have to let something stick or be broke.
2 clicks for marked, 1 to install and 1 to use. You could argue the first click isn’t really worth counting since you get a card from NEH regardless. The first usage is basically Gila Hands. I’m usually ok with giving the corp 1 usage of gila hands.
If you rez a data raven defending it, you’ve put yourself at -4 credits. It will take another three uses before the Marked pays you more than just clicking for credits would have (without the raven).
+2 for every usage of Marked over clicking for credits. So see you in 6+ turns?
I usually use Quandary and Pop-up Window to protect my assets.
I hate to say “it depends” but “it depends”. Specifically on the trade off between how much losing the asset slows you down versus how much it slows down the runner.
Sundew in RP, for example, is going to get trashed by a good runner pretty much regardless. Low trash cost, rapid money gain at no cost. Your job is to make them bleed for it without undermining your ability to set up a scoring server.
By contrast, Marked Accounts in an NEH deck doesn’t need any protection unless you are skint and they have Imps. High trash cost, marginal money gain. The runner has bigger things to worry about (frankly, so do you).
This isn’t exactly what you asked, but in my HB Glacier deck, I splash for Pup for this exact purpose. Just place it in front of asset economy and everything I rez there now costs 2 credits more to trash. Pop Ups are also decent for this purpose.
Sometimes I will put down an Eli 1.0 to protect my assets, but this is mostly only worth it for Adonis/Eve campaigns.
The other good defense is simply having a lot of them. NEH has 3 very good high-trash cost assets, Pad Campaign, Daily Business Show, and Marked Accounts (4 including SanSan). Not that it is necessarily the best option to play 3x of each, but having “enough” will simply be far too taxing for the runner to trash all of them, especially if you play assets constantly.
So I need some idea of how to play this. Do I hold onto them until I have more things to drop at once? Or do I make use of some ice to protect it first.
Like he said, it depends. If your first remote as RP is a sundew, you can count on the runner to come and trash it. So no, unprotected sundews early in the game are (usually) not that great(still a -2 in your favor!)
NEH just spams a(1) asset every 1-2 turns, and if they really want to trash the first 2 marked accounts, fine, you know you will find some PADs later.
Depends on your ID, Deck, Playstyle, do what works for you! If you find no one will run a single server if you drop 3 assets in one turn, what’s your point in stopping to do so?