This seems like a super obvious change to make. You virtually never Advance Ice Wall, you just use it as an early stopgap, then move it for Inside Job or Knifed protection or to surgically add just the right amount of Lady counter tax. Paying $1 extra isn’t a big deal in Blue Sun because it’s Blue Sun, and the ability to be a pest tax on HQ against Siphon or any kind of denial deck could prove to be pretty important.
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Any thought on Breaker Bay Grid in BS?
What do you think? Only targets it has are Ash and Adonis.
To get value out of it you could replace OAIs with 2 BrBays and 2 Roots maybe? Then play 2 Hadrian’s in place of the 3 Curtains. That has to be worse. Making the runner jump to deny OAI/CW is almost as good as clicking twice for 13 credits.
Also, you have to bounce the BBG before the Adonis (or Root) to really get value out of it.
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you had to have been trolling right…
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Ah really? Goddamnit.
Great writeup. I played a lot of @bblum’s list this league season, with poor results. The article helps me understand why…
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Thanks for the article @bblum your comments about ICE selection in some other thread somewhere also helped me out with this deck quite a bit.
I have been playing this for a while, and I did this with the agenda suite except I use a Hostile Takeover rather than Chronos Project. The situation that made me keep this is if you find yourself at 4 points with an Atlas counter (which isn’t too uncommon), you can IAA a 2 point agenda. If they steal it, you probably now have a window to Atlas the 3 pointer and score that. If they don’t then you score the 2 pointer and Atlas out the Hostile Takeover. Also, if you don’t have an Atlas counter and that 2 pointer you just IAA’d is an Atlas, then if they don’t take it you now have the counter to find Hostile Takeover. I also found this was safer for unclear scoring windows, as the runner won’t win from 4 points if they steal it.
It seemed like a similar effect to 2 3-pointers, but less risky on random accesses. I felt like that was worth a card slot. I have only very rarely scored HT as something other than the 7th point, but being able to turn an Atlas counter into the 7th point seemed pretty good. Admittedly, I haven’t been playing as much since Clot hit, so I haven’t seen how much that interferes (although I don’t think it is very much, this can still go in the scoring server).
Do you think the well-timed Chronos is stronger at the moment?
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Not sure, I thought about hostile too.
I’ll make an exception if it’s chronos project. One downfall of the current agenda suite is that stuff without advancement counters on it isn’t threatening; the worst that can happen to a runner who sits back and moneys up is that the corp never-advances 4 points worth of atlas while skipping 4 full turns of running adonis. Chronos has teeth, and even a kate who’s aware of it needs to stretch herself really thin to play around it near levy-time.
I regretted not bringing a copy of it to the SSCI. Swap out the wormhole for it, or (as long as nobody plays calimsha kate in your area) one of the crisiums.
I’ve thought on it. It seems solid, although I’ll only call it worth the slot if you expect to see a medium megadig combo runner. Rush an atlas counter, grab it, protect it, and you automatically win; otherwise you almost certainly lose 
In any matchup where you can expect a sentry’s subroutine to actually fire (i.e., not crim), trashing a hardware is higher impact than trashing a program.
Yes and no. The 11 (or 7) credit tax is serious business, and without it, you really hurt for enough density of ice that can close out a game. In the right meta Orion can be good, but it’s rubbish against stealth andy. You could make a case for wormhole alongside nebula, but either one alone is kind of lackluster. Hadrian’s used to be a big role-player in the deck, at a sweet spot of rez/tax, but now Lady…
Curtain demands some practised judgement calls to figure out when and where it won’t be a liability to rez, but it wins lots of games. And I’d rather have the OAI package than not.
It’s a good insight. Try it, but I dunno what to cut for it.
The first bootcamp deck I made had 1 each of adonis, melange, and grndl, thinking it would be a toolbox, but I just always found myself bootcamping for adonis, as the others were too click-intensive to use. I don’t think I’d wanna actually show it to the runner, just hope to draw it naturally at the right time.
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It’s not that obvious to me. I actually think HQ might be the worst server for ice wall to be on – putting it on the remote lets you get aggressive with adonis even when you’re near-broke, and on R&D it taxes Lady. Optimizing for an HQ tax is only really relevant against crims. When kate wants to get into HQ, it’s not points of strength on the ice that will stop her.
Yep this is a huge part of why the atlas->pri req threat works. When both players are rich, the low-stakes plays with 2 pointers let you break the stalemate.
I can see the value of hostile, but chronos offers the potential to hugely shore up what I see as the toughest matchup. They do different things.
great article man. keep em coming.
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Although I haven’t run this list myself yet, I do love playing against it. “Real” netrunner at its finest.
And besides the content of the article - which is top notch of course - it also striked me how well written this piece is. Props!
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Very well written article.
I used to run a Meat Damage/Program destruction Blue Sun in the past with poor results (damn shapers with all their tools!) and now I’m definetly gonna try this!
Would you recommed trying -1 Pri Req, +1 High Risk Investment to counter rich runners when you cannot force them to give you a proper scoring window?
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This is awesome, I’ve been playing versions of this list for months, so its good to see some expert advice on how to play it.
I think Taurus is too good in almost every match-up not to have. As you mention, it’s fantastic against any deck that uses RDI and 5-strength sentries are very difficult to trash. It’s also great against Kate since trashing a prepaid in the mid to late game is huge and even if they know about taurus it’s a pain for them.
I was really interested to see the Snatch and Grab (instead of a third restructure I assume?). I’ve never tried that. How useful is it to trash Kati? I feel like Snatch and Grab is best against match-ups that are already good (crim and many anarch) and not useful against the most dangerous match-up (prepaid Kate) or even very annoying ones (Opus CT).
biggest thing I learned is how much of a priority Interns is for Jackson
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The good matchups are far from sure things, and Kati is usually Crim/Slow Anarch’s best tool against you. It also trashes Pawnshop against noise.
The bigger problem with S&G is that you can play around it pretty effectively if you suspect it’s there. (Just make sure you never have less money on Kati than in the bank).
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Whenever i met runners who play PPVP Kate with both parasite and datasucker, I always find myself really sad…
Other than that, this deck has been good to me so far.
@Calimsha told me to try it. As a strange idea, I really would put a Shikyu there, removing both ash.
Ash is good but if the runner come, you’re enforcing the credit the runner should have to steal a NAPD.
In my very early BlueSun tests, I had fun with rezing (or not) and ping-ponging Will-o behing etr ice, putting 3/x agendas and play that sort of Sakai-ish mini-mindgames. So maybe I’d remove an ice for the Shi-kyu spot and replace the Ash by Will-o x 2
Taurus seem to be autoinclude there too : Caduceus gearcheck only Mimic and after this, it’s dead ice. I understand the taxation it does but would remove one or two of them for Taurus : loosing the console and MU is something most runners can’t really afford mid game to end game.
Not sure to test this without these changes… I’m NA-ing way too much to play Weyland with joy actually.
I may try a french format too (54 card 5/3 x 2, rest of x/2) but as I’m really far from being a Weyland specialist, I’m not sure this is the best idea for this corp. This is a great format for HB and Jinteki decks actually but in a stop-and-go deck like this, not really sure. In this case, I would put a current (point below) and another interns.
You avoided str4 ice for Atman, which is fine but something like a stupid LagTime would makes quasi-auto victory. So now it would be fine to know what you did not put there just because of atman 4…
It’s Been brought to my attention that my first post sounded like I beat Ben last weekend lol. Quite funny, I did not beat or play him just to clear the air. I got a couple of lucky wins against a far superior player that is all.