For one, that’s a 2 cred 0 card risk. And it’s one that’s in the corps hands. I can look at the creds my opponent has, see what ice I have in the server, look at how many cards he has in hand, and guess if I have a scoring window here.
The power of an instant clot is a magnitude above cards like stimhack. Stimhack is a surprise that throws off your math by 9 so you may misjudge your window and the runner could get that agenda. But that’s just 9 creds (so it’s not even 100% certain the runner will get the agenda), and has a downside to the runner.
The situation created with instant-clot will have a much bigger investment for the corp, let one surprise card give a 100% chance of stealing an agenda (because really, the point of fast advancing in the first place was that you didn’t need the safe remote). I don’t think that’s “essentially the same risk”.
I don’t think NEH can afford to scan 3 or 4 times in a game against your random shaper/anarch with clone chips/deja vu, while in it’s current form it would need to as it’s really not capable of winning without fast advance. 2 creds and 1 or 2 clicks recurs clot to buy another 3 clicks from NEH.
Unless they run other ways of dealing with that, of course.
My playgroup has indeed proxied Traffic Jam and Clot and played quite a few games. Clot is maximum rude out of Noise (or any clone-chip Anarch) and any shaper build (since they run Clone Chips and usually Self-Modifying, both of which can become a Clot if need be—the SMC especially is brutal).
It’s not insurmountable, but it has been a huge PITA to play around; enough so that we at least found we could no longer rely on The Train helping corps get out of jams.
There are going to be some really über feeling Shaper decks out there, is my oh-so-bold prediction.
edit: oh, and yes, the play is to wait until the last token is going to be placed. There will be arguments about this :).
I just don’t think it’s realistic to assume the runner will have an SMC on the field the whole time. I don’t want to be locked out against NEH, so I will have to use SMC for breakers, and MU constraints are a thing.You could still try to Biotic out the agenda behind a Wraparound / Quandary. If I can’t get to the agenda because i SMC for Clot, you can score it next turn.
Also, I think it’s good to have NEH take risks as much as any other deck. If NEH dies because of Clot, I won’t be sad. But it will still be a strong archetype for tournaments I think, just because it plays easily, fast and it crushes the noobs.
The thing is that you already have 3 advancable traps in the form of NAPD.
You can also take a few more in the form of Reversed Accounts if you want more.
The thing is, without a runner who is aggressively checking remotes, Clot doesn’t do much good. And it’s not like NEH doesn’t excel at creating so much remote spam it becomes too taxing, even just in clicks, to check them all.
At most, we’ll see NEH players move to include 2x Cyberdex, but my (very premature) guess is that the best NEH players won’t even do that; they’ll just shift the way they play when they smell Clot. Plays like putting out a naked SanSan become slightly less valuable, and some of the early runaway trains (e.g. 2nd/3rd turn Biotic-Astro – since you can’t stop the first turn…) won’t happen. That might cut into their win percentage a touch, but the intense speed and pressure of NEH will remain. Frankly, it’s not the 2nd turn Astro I fear most out of NEH – I worry about a 2nd turn Astro the same way I worry about the runner hitting 3 agendas on the top of a naked R&D (i.e. the RNG hands a win to everyone sometimes) – it’s the blistering draw economy coupled with the need for very few credits that turns almost every NEH match into a rush to access.
Meanwhile, trying to maintain a Clot threat out of Shaper also means moving more slowly (e.g. you can’t burn that first SMC to deal with a Wraparound on HQ if you’re representing a Clot play), which is generally exactly what you can’t afford to do against NEH. Out of Anarch – esp. virus spam Noise – things are a bit different, as you’re equipped to proactively play Clot out of hand and recurse it with Deja Vu if need be after a purge… but you’re also much less equipped to consistently check remotes, so that opens up other lines of play for NEH.
In all, it’s probably much more damaging to other FA builds (CI combo, etc.). But since most of those aren’t generally considered T1, this might actually do more to preserve the meta (read: stagnate) than shake it up.
tl;dr: It’s going to shift some lines of play, but I don’t anticipate sweeping changes in the meta. Kate and Noise probably gain a bit in the NEH matchup, but not enough to knock NEH out of their current position as one of the top 3 corp archetypes.
In my experience IAA in glacier is normally a play for the game. It is possible to recover if you lose it, but in a tight game you probably won’t.
As to the second half of your comment, that’s exactly my point. I, as the fast advance player, now have the look at the opponent’s board. Do they have an SMC or a Clone Chip/Personal Workshop already loaded with Clot? If not I’m good to go.
Let’s say they do have the means to get Clot into play. What does that deprive them of? Does using the SMC mean that they won’t be able to pull a breaker? Maybe they are broke? In which case can I biotic (say), IAA, wait for clot then throw an ICE over the top that they can’t get through? Or I throw down an expendable agenda and follow up with a Midseasons?
There are some good points in this thread about how this will hit the weaker fast advance decks more than NEH. That’s inevitable. But I still think that the principle - that FA decks will need to think more about scoring windows and board state and not just be able to churn out an agenda 100% certain - is a good one.
There are already plenty - you are cutting something good for it, but you are right, spending deck space on clot is not bad for noise, as it is for other runners.
Well, there are 6 viruses in the game with a cost of 1 at the moment, 3 of which are anarch.
Of those Datasucker sees alot of play and the other two see very limited play since their ability is almost blank in most Noise decks.
I will gladly cut three cards in my Noise-deck for 3 Clot which do a great job of buying time against some of the decks Noise has most problems with.
A modest proposal in support of a more civilized Astrotrain…
If Clot makes FA decks bluff, I have to imagine Lukas et al will consider it mission accomplished. Bluff as a central mechanic of ANR has always been an explicitly stated goal of this design team. Clot won’t kill FA, but it will hopefully bring it into line with other corp strats in terms of both power level and texture. It’s not as if there is no opportunity cost to including it in your runner deck (this is admittedly minimized in Noise). Especially in Shaper, it taxes your non- or minimally renewable resources even further, and it’s inclusion probably just makes a typical Shaper deck strictly worse against non-FA archetypes.
I predict a meta impact similar to that of Lotus Field. Instead of Yogs rampaging through the countryside eating harmless baby Quandaries, they have to be chaperoned by more mature decoders. It’s not as though you can’t Astrotrain at all, you just have to be more careful about it. Instead of Astrotrains barreling through crowded urban areas at 1000 mph half off the tracks, they will tootle along respectfully mindful of the presence of Clone Chips and such. That’s not a bad thing. And if some other Corp archetypes make their way into the limelight for awhile, that’s not such a bad thing either. I played NEH Fastrobiotics at GenCon not because I liked it, but because it felt too good not to play. It will still be good, but I don’t think it will any longer be “too good not to play.”
Not a ton of value discussing a card you aren’t sure is going to exist, and if it does, you certainly don’t know if all the info you have on it is correct.
CI can die in a pile of players that’s on fire that were willing to play it.
Just my 2 cents
OT, I think its reasonable to expect players to understand the timing structure. (Batches, no stack, no “in response”); But, it’d probably be good to have better documentation on the whole thing. It does seem like every pack or two, those of us who “get” the rules, we’re stuck explaining to the rest of our store how these things work and just hoping that enough people respect us to believe us.
If you got Magic players in your group, one trick you can use to explain is to say “Priority for paid abilities works the same way as priority in magic, except pretend that all abilities have ‘split second’ so no stack is needed.” Then that only leaves the seemingly arbitrary list of which priority windows do or don’t allow for ice rezzing, upgrade rezzing, or agenda scoring.
Oh yeah, and fuck this card, assuming it’s real. Turns out that NBN has the best tools to beat instant-speed clot in the form of SFSS and psycho. Maybe in the bizarro world FFG playtest meta, CI and tennin and HBFA are the heavy hitters and NEH needed a boost??
It is worth noting that psycho is not the FA card of choice in NBN for many people and shifting NBN towards a tagging strategy rather than co-oping biotic from HB doesn’t sound bad. SfSS is highly importable into HB, though and TOL is actually better than, and not even yellow (though we’ve seen some yellow decks lately with TOL). Also, suite is a neutral upgrade; so everyone can play with that.