The current Corp trend to small ice is not solely a function of neh. It is equally due to cheap superbreakers. Things like lady, david, switchblade and cutlery.
Big ice that can be destroyed cheaper than can be rezzed have shifted corps strongly to cheaper ice.
can I just say that World of Tomorrow art is quite something.
Well, what would you call an autopilot if not this? 
I mean, you took the deck for the first time in hands and did amazingly well. Try that with any other corp deck.
Of course it is not âdraw 5, winâ, but itâs really simple - protect your centrals, play your assets and upgrades, get to money, fast advance first astro, get more astros, score those for free, win. The card that I especially hate in NEH Astrobiotics is fast track. Itâs just ridiculously strong in either swinging the game (fetching another astro to continue the train), and/or sealing the game when RnD lock is in place. And you have enough fast advance elements to be able to do it all in single turn.
No other deck can pull this off. NONE.
On FFGâs test sheet, there should be
@Chris_Pedersen Almost everything can be broken cheaper than rez. I think small ice is for multiserver danger - days of âIâm locking one central, and you gonna guess which oneâ are somehow not the main trend Eater/Keyhole aside.
(imhhhhho) Lunar runnerâs stuff was to put the runner back on remote aggression. Things like Clot / whatever just push the concept so people really understand. This card is just functionnaly a mk2 / 2 inf the Source, sky is not falling.
When NEH pilots will stop whining about runner cloting their agendas, theyâll realize runners just stopped parasiting their shitty ices.
Because at no point was the deck âplaying itself.â I still had to have a vague idea of what I was doing. Blindly slapping cards down doesnât get the win. Itâs just that the potential decisions in each turn are much, much fewer in number than other decks, so itâs much easier to play without any experience. Very easy, but still not automatic - and with perhaps more practice, or more skill, it wouldâve carried me --naah, I still wouldâve had to face @eric_câs RP deck again. 
At least I got to touch the plaque.
The only other deck I had that kind of luck with was an RP Glacier deck back when Dan first posted about glacier back on Stimhack. RP Glacier and I just instantly clicked; in truth, that was the deck I was revising - I was expecting a lot of Stealth Andy so I was working on an RP with less reliance on taxing sentries and sturdier ice. I didnât have time to properly playtest, though, so into the sleeves went NBN.
right? ug
lol, do you even hear yourself?
no one is arguing that NEH is literally autopilot - of course you have to make a few simple, very basic decisions; you canât play the game otherwise. By âautopilotâ we mean that you can sleeve up a totally new deck, get the general gist of the play, and have a relatively high chance to make it to the cut. No other deck (even/especially really great decks like Danâs worlds RP or newer grail RP)give even âInexperienced pilotsâ such a high chance of simply drawing their way into a top 8 finish.
No need to be an asshole about it. Yes, Iâm pretty sure some people are using the term âautopilotâ to imply the deck plays itself. Look at @x3r0h0urâs comments above, for instance.
I understand heâs being hyperbolic but this is some peopleâs actual impression of how NEH plays: do nothing > get to 7 > score an agenda > repeat until win.
As an aside, I played two SCs in March, and these tournaments were the first time Iâd played Andy. I finished 2/21 and 5/32. Itâs entirely possible to play new decks, and play them well.
Astrobiotics isnât a no-skill deck, but you can definitely Oops-I-win much better players with it. Other decks donât really have that. Itâs also unfair to characterize players as either bad or good at Astrobiotics, thereâs plenty of players who take Astrobiotics to tournaments and play it at a reasonably decent level without necessarily having the finesse to pull themselves out of bad situations or know when or how to set up annoying remotes. Those players still win with it plenty, and have a much better shot against a superior opponent than if they were playing BS or RP or HB or whatever.
Even if all you ever do is ICE HQ and R&D, throw out naked assets, prioritize getting an Astro Counter via FA followed by scoring more of them or FAing other agendas without wasting the Astro counter to keep the train alive, youâll probably win more than half of your matches in a Store champ and give yourself a shot to win as long as youâre a decent runner.
Kati and Lucky Find across the board at all SCs. You know what that says to dedicated glacier decks, especially RP, BS boot camp, and HB? Who has money to spare and promotes Runners make âbigâ turns spending all their credits?
Snatch and Grab
Really sorry, that was pretty rude of me. I guess Iâm just saying weâre splitting hairs a bit arguing over âautopilot or not autopilot.â the important point (which your own ânot autopilotâ post seems to agree with, I think) is that the deck is way easy to play and even just decent play results in plenty of âoops I winâ scenarios.
couldnât have said it better myself. Itâs not that there sinât any skill required for the deck, itâs how good the deck performs even with mediocre play (and trust me, I know a thing or two about mediocre play 
)
How can I (and a lot of good players around here) reliably have more than 70% win ratio against astrobiotic with Kate / Leela ( and slightly less with Andy and Maxx) if itâs so easy to crush the field with it?
Also why I almost never lose to Leela when Iâm playing fastrobiotic even if the match-up shouldnât be favorable to me?
Thing is fastrobiotic is (way) harder to play than people are willing to admit and only remember when they stupidly lose to perfect draw from the Corp and poor draw from the runner. In reality the perfect astro train doesnât even happen that often and youâre forced to score an NAPD and a Beale more often than not. And as the article Iâve linked earlier said, the main reason why glacier decks works right now is because all runners right now he even to take astrobiotic into account and so need to setup/burst fast and by doing so have to gives up some mid to late game option.
In all seriousness I think a lot of people here forgot how the game was during worlds 2013 when Andy sucker and parasite Katman stomped everything in their wake because most decks were too slow to win before the runner is set up.
Spoiler : it was far worse.
Far worse for who ?
The field at any given Store champs probably contains 0-2 players who are as good at running against Astrobiotics as you. In a field full of intermediate players, Astrobiotics tends to crush the field when someone reasonably competent, (but not nec expert-level) brings it. Even if someone is as good as you against it at the tournament, theres still a good chance that you either luck out against that player (70% is far from a sure thing), or that they can win the tournament without ever having to beat that player as Corp.
The amount of viable decks (on both side) back then was wayyyyyy lower than what we have right now.
In all seriousness I think a lot of people here forgot how the game was
during worlds 2013 when Andy sucker and parasite Katman stompedâŚ
worlds 2013
2013
The cardpool has expanded so vastly that I donât think that thatâs a very relevant comparison. Common glacier decks have several flavors they could go if that ever became a problem.
Clot is a bit more problematic. It doesnât require backup. It doesnât require much support beyond standard already-played cards.
Iâll admit it looks heavy-handed so far, but not enough to make me reconsider my life or shed a tear for dedicated fastrobiotics. Itâs avenue of victory against all kinds of decks, from T1 to jank to weaker players (who sometimes make good plays because they are simply unexpected or off tempo) was always the same, and giving good fastrobiotic players a trophy for placing ICE correctly is hardly calling it âbalanced.â
Yeah I think the issue here isnât whether or not astrobiotics rewards player skill. The issue is that it rewards player skill significantly less than most other decks.
How so ? Even if the deck is easier to play and understand doesnât means that the skill ceiling is low. In fact, Iâm pretty certain that astrobiotic have the one of the highest learning curve (with HBFA/Rush) in the current top corp deck. RP, Bootcamp Blue Sun or shell game are effectively harder to understand at first but when you get how those decks works, it become pretty mechanical and easy to master.
Of course, there was 33% of runners and 25% of corps who had their box + less than half the ids and no Jackson. I donât get it.
I think that HBFA can survive clot in some form, as can NBN Midseasons. Eventually, the meta will shift towards antiglacier decks and an NBN deck with Biotic Labor will become viable again, but probably only as a meta call. CI is probably dead for a long time.
Just like people will stop playing FBF in Criminal and PE will become viable again, Clot is a narrow meta card that people will eventually start to skimp on. I am glad to see NBN FA have a hard counter, as I think it was a serious issue as it was. I am sad to see other FA decks take the hit, but they all had their time in the sun. Clot is the end of the 2nd era of FA dominance, but itâs not the end of FA forever. For the foreseeable future, any Astrobiotics player has to weigh the oops-I-win factor against the oops-I-lose factor of running up against an opponent who can set up Clot+Clone Chip. To react, FA is probably going to change from an all-in strategy to a tactic that can be utilized by rushy decks.
I think the issue @Calimsha is taking with this idea is that AstroBiotics DOES reward player skill. You can get a lot better matchups everywhere and lose to yourself a lot less often if you know what youâre doing. Itâs probably more accurate to say that AstroBiotics doesnât punish runner mediocrity rather than that it doesnât reward player skill, (though Iâm honestly not sure there is much of an actual difference).