I’m actually planning on revisiting old-school Katman with clot, perhaps only running 2x datasucker for it.
But they would rez the CVS when you vamped them, in order to be able to trigger it next turn.
Isn’t clot costing 2 inf now ?
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Source???
Reflecting on this, games 1 and 3 (where I played tweaked NEH decks against clot shapers) felt like I was never really in it. Whatever NEH has to combat clot, it must be something else, possibly having meatier ice and running 2 x ash. Game 1 I tried Shipment from SanSan with trick of light and a single Cyberdex, game 3 was powershutdown, also with Shipment. I think I scored a single 3/2 between the two games, and even that was down to semi-misplay by the runner.
The other two games I lost by a margin of a single credit, but felt less about the clot. I could probably have managed my recursion better when running as Valencia against HB, and in the 4th game I think I ended up scoring all my agendas in a remote anyway.
Very big change to the meta I think, if clot comes out like this. Someone mentioned that NEH will still be able to consistently win by playing around clot; I don’t think I agree.
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I told y’all Clot with instant-speed recursion was going to kill FA dead 
. We’re back to NA strategies, I think.
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What really gets to me about this changing meta is that IHW pretty much killed flat line decks and now Clot is killing FA. Seems like variety is getting taken out of the meta. Anyways, I digress. Let’s keep this on topic about streaming. I enjoyed watching a bit of the Clot playtesting, @bblum.
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I moved the above 3 posts here from the streaming thread. Now we can keep it on topic about clot instead. 
I’m pretty discouraged about this card now. My only hope is that maybe some sort of making news deck with ashes and extra tollbooths can be good again, and still be able to play FA vs crim.
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what did you expect?
I was hoping for SFSS and cyberdex to give NEH some reasonable counterplay. But they just didn’t matter at all.
I imagine it’ll fade out some, in time, though. Not for a while, certainly, but it’s an influence drain and there’s always going to be a need for more of that. Once NBN is on the rocks and FA is dead, it dies too, largely. It’s not as essential as Plascrete for keeping down losses-out-of-nowhere,
I could also see MN making a comeback, because Midseasons ought to still be perfectly effective at scorching people out and also setting up a Psychographics… which Clot hits, but that means they do have to pull it out for every face-down play to a server or risk you scoring it. Seems like something could be done with that?
I just don’t see what is keeping NEH from moving towards a hybrid style like ETF (a deck I think can still win through Clot). NEH has great assets and great ICE. Importing triple Eli is only 3 influence. You get Tollbooth in faction. I think NEH can still play FA but it will look different. Some might argue it’s not the same and they may be right, but this is what I meant when I hypothesized NBN can still play FA and win consistently. Ultimately I think Clot will bring FA win percentage down to a number closer to the other Corp strategies. RP already groans at Stealth Andy; it’s only fair that FA has something to groan about now.
@bblum did you end up winning that game with your Kit build?
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Tollbooth is the single reliable lategame ice it has. And marked accounts ain’t no adonis. That’s not a comparison to the hugely effecient ice HB gets accross the board, and their economy to help set it up.
What stops NEH from doing the same is that they have Astro to make up for all the deficiencies they have elsewhere. Scoring just one 2/3 is huge. And they aren’t going to do that with a 3 taxing ice remote, they don’t have the economy for it, nor the ice.
So yes, a card that hits by far their strongest card and the strongest of the 4 playstyles the entire faction has (of which two are decidedly not tier one) is going to have an effect.
beyond that, clot+SMC is solidly unfair.
Making news taxing deck worked really well for me last year and I truly don’t see why it won’t work anymore. We just need to be less complacent and try some way to make it works again 
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If anything, I feel like there are more varied options for Making News, now – or will be, soon. Expose will make Muckraker and Grim both usable in a taxing deck, Gutenberg will be taxing in any deck that wants to tag the runner, Troll is a fun little tax that’s hard to avoid or otherwise deal with, Sub-Boost can make Drac0 and Troll both more obnoxious still, we have Shoot the Moon as another way of making use of loads of tags, Primary Transmission Dish means that you can potentially do more with multiple trace ice, Snoop lets you potentially avoid dealing with IHW, we have Information Overload to further punish tag floating but also attempt to build it back up, and Universal Connectivity Fee can probably be a damn nuisance in conjunction with a taxing deck/the new NBN current.
Not all of those will go together or be in an optimal deck, but there are certainly a great many options that I feel have been passed over because NEH has been better. They aren’t going to be at that level necessarily, but I’m sure the vairety of trace stuff opens up MN’s options some and lets people do more things with it, meaning it’s well-positioned to be the jewel in the NBN crown for the next little while.
That’s the thing - with the 2 install/2 inf statline, clot really heavily punishes pure FA strategies like Astrobiotics. However, it’s a pain to keep an SMC/clone chip+4 credits on the table when the corps pressuring you to run a scoring remote. And Chronos Project (I swear, that card just keeps getting better) turns off Clone chip for a while.
Honestly, that’s where I’d want to push it to. No FA ever is a boring grindfest of a meta, but pure FA is all sorts of problematic. Clot really encourages the Corp to have FA be part of the plan, rather than THE plan.
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You saw the NBN I tried. And it was a lot of fun. Against the better players though, inable to close out (or I was the problem, but hey, I’m perfect obviously ;)).
But that tax depends on the combo with tags. Lets be fair, that’s still more awkward that simply stacking eli’s, ichi’s, heimdall 1.0’s, etc.
And still a key to that was despite that it tended to play to get to the lategame, it only had two ways to victory, overadvancing beale and getting an astro scored. The fact that astro train exists was the only thing that made it halfway viable.
This is something I’ve been playing around with. I’ve made a deck with only 1 biotic and 3 sansans which runs 2 ash and beefier ice, with the aim of setting up a taxing remote if needed, while still being able to FA if the runner doesn’t have clot. I’ve also tried a slightly trolly NEH glacier, which doesn’t run any FA tools and uses the deckslots/influence on 2 ash /1 caprice and stronger ice and economy. NEH has the benefit of Tollbooth and Jackson inhouse, which gives a huge amount of influence for importing upgrades and better ice, but I’m not yet sure if it can compete with more standard taxing builds, especially out of HB.
Going the tagging route is valid, either out of NEH or Making News. In my experience of playing that type of deck though, the real strength is that you combine a credible fast advance threat with tagging/tag punishing/killing tools. Once you take away the astro threat with clot, I suspect it’ll be much easier for the runner to just sit back and build up money in preparation for a few well timed runs. We’ll see.
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