Blue Sun & Clot: Nasir's Dream Come True?

There is of course a lot of discussion around clot and what it could mean for the meta. I for one dont believe Fast-advance is dead or anything but I do expect to see a slowdown in corp play and maybe some stronger pieces of Ice. Blue Sun is also a thing now and you get to see some huge ice fortresses when playing.

Which makes me think, this is an environment that could give Nasir’s ability a boost. Maybe not enough to make him competitive, but certainly stronger than before.

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There are two guys at Redcaps in Philly who play Nasir and he’s bonkers when piloted well. You should see the amount of work that Order of Sol can do, with Nasir hanging around 1-3 credits.

I’d like them to take the decks to some tournaments to prove it some, but I guess you still have to worry about dumb old Pop Up Window. I’ve been wrecked by Nasir more than once now and believe he should be given another look.

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Just because Blue Sun has expensive ICE doesn’t mean they’ll ever give you $14 for a Curtain Wall.

The Bootcamp Glacier version at least can rez its important ICE with Bootcamp or Oversights without giving Nasir a cent, then slap an unrezzed Ice Wall in front of the remote to zero him out before the Ash trace.

Stealing the NAPDs that are auto-include in every Corp deck remains an issue as well.

For a competitive Nasir deck, I think the place to start is auto-forfeiting the NEH matchup and teching to have a chance against Blue Sun and other Glaciers (D4V1D, etc) over playing Clot.

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For the record I dont think Nasir should play Clot, I was just thinking that corps deckbuilding around clot could help him.

Oversight AI is a problem, but how many times are they gonna do that? And isnt the whole idea to oversight AI to then remove the ice and then install it normally?

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They can use Bootcamp to rez the Curtain Wall on their own terms. It’s a problem but I still think the Blue Sun matchup shouldn’t be more terrible for Nasir than it is for others. Especially if they want to be picking up other pieces of ice and rezzing repeatedly.

I guess a repeated Ice Wall in the face could be annoying. I believe the Nasir decks at our store have Imp and Parasite to handle things like that.

I agree with Steve. I’ve played a lot of Blue Sun glacier against my brother’s Nasir’s deck and Blue Sun is actually one of Nasir’s worst match-ups. You can pickup your cheap ice, causing the runner to go down to 1 or 2 credits run after run.

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Anyone who hasn’t played the matchup of blue sun and nasir should grab a friend and try it. It’s like you’re playing a totally different game.

It’s true that blue sun has a lot of tools that in theory can auto-win (ice wall and bootcamps), but in practice it takes time to find them and set up the right board state thereafter. For example you can only bootcamp one ice per turn, but you also need to use bootcamps to find adonis so you can make enough money to preemptively rez stuff. Meanwhile nasir is R&D locking you and parasiting your hives, and you can also expect him to be quick to kill OAIs with smc->david. The situation can easily snowball in either direction.

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Yeah, I think something that’s pretty telling is that I’ve heard both “Nasir destroys Blue Sun” and “Blue Sun destroys Nasir” probably an equal amount, which implies that the matchup is as volatile as one might expect. Of course, in both cases, the winning player is probably just the better player, but it snowballs hard because of the nature of the IDs.

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Glad to hear this from the Blue Sun maestro. I suspected it but didn’t have much experience with the matchup to know for sure. I guess I root for the underplayed IDs so happy to hear Nasir has a shot.

The biggest problem I had with Nasir wasn’t FA, it was Midseasons. You’re always poor and you really, really don’t want to be tagged because you are absolutely dead without your resources (mostly PW and Order of Sol). Butcher Shop is still really strong and you may as well just extend the hand instead of playing that matchup.

If anyone has any bright ideas to solve that slight issue, I’d love to hear them. Nasir was super cool but having a dead loss as one of my expected matchups doesn’t seem like a great idea.

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Paper tripping? I’ve always looked for a reason for that to exist.

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As someone who’s played a LOT of Nasir, Blue Sun was never the issue. Fastro was one of them, but not even the worst if you packed Inti and Imp. I found RP way worse. If you’re not fully set up, multi-sub ICE is a pain. Having to deal with NAPD, TFP, and Caprice put a lot of pressure on your Ghost Runners and Imp, and stopping the Sundew isn’t always the easiest feat either, depending on how they time it. Yeah, these are all fundamentals of the matchup, but they always felt amplified with Mr. Meidan.

Playing Parasite recursion and Suckers in Nasir makes standard RP much easier, I find. You can insta-kill Komainu and Tsurugi on rez, for a profit. I also run 1x Test Run, which is nice for unexpectedly Femme-ing into their remote. Obviously it’s still a hard matchup but with a bit of tech for it I don’t think it’s much harder for a well-piloted Nasir than for any other Shaper.

I agree with Clamatius that tagstorm is a horrible matchup. Toolbox helps, kinda, with the 2 link, but since Nasir is generally so poor it’s real hard to beat traces when you need to. A good trick if you do get tagged though is to put out more than one Workshop and spread your stuff out over them. At the very least it doubles the click+cred cost for the corp of trashing them. Never put more than one thing on a Shop at a time though.

On-topic, I find Blue Sun is a real mixed bag, as people have been saying. D4v1d is a necessity in Nasir because of that matchup I think. Again, Parasite helps a lot for Ice Walls. Occasionally the BS player will think they can get away with giving you a bunch of money off a rez and still keep you out, and again this is where Test Run is good as it provides a quick unexpected answer to whatever they rezzed, funded by the money they gave you. I’ve not played Nasir against Bootcamp BS yet though, I imagine that’s a different kettle of fish.

Playing Nasir Wyrm-asite was some of the most fun I have had as a Runner this year. I stopped around O&C, though, but would definitely pick it up again.

I found the RP match-up to be completely win-able, by the way. Magnum Opus helps you a lot, and I generally found that I could have 2-3 Parasites ready by the time they have 2 pieces of Ice + Caprice in a scoring server. Getting datasucker counters helps you a lot. Of course, if their economy runs completely amok you’re going to have a problem, but destroying their scoring server does suck for them. The R&D pressure was also great.

That’s always been the issue that has stopped me even giving him a run out. I’ve played against too many Nasir decks that folded to a cheap ICE plus ASH or SEA/Midseasons. It’s possible there are builds out there that can cope with it. I just haven’t played them yet.

Perhaps Kati Jones could work as a safe place to stash money for a trace you can see coming (i.e. Midseasons or Ash). I’m going to try something like that out next time I go to my FLGS.

Doesn’t work well against Midseasons, since they can just use the next click to kill off Kati.

I played a few games against my friend who was running Natman with a lot of recurring credits. It threw my game way off. Early Atman 3 made me sad, as Caduceus and Hive are both at 3. Sure I could move my ice walls around, but Inti laughs at it unless you advance it, and if you advance it, you don’t want to be moving it around.

I had the same dilemma with boot camp. If I leave it in the scoring remote to rez ice at the turn beginning, I’m not making money. I really think boot camp gets its own remote behind an ice wall in that matchup, and hope you get the other or draw the adonis itself before the runner starts getting R&D lock.

I ended up winning more than I lost, and he was frustrated, but it was definitely a tense matchup that felt totally different.

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Well, my point was to use Kati to unload some 12+ creds after you steal an agenda, to prevent the Midseason from landing. Don’t know if it’ll work in practice though.

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Thats how I believe Katie should be used as well, only use the credits on her if needed, and never run on last click.

Low str ice sucks for nasir, but not so much in the early game, you are busy bulding your rig and the Corp is still busy rezzing ice and getting its economy going to really threaten a kill or tag.

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