The only situations where things are difficult is when the Corp has an astro counter, or SanSan in conjunction with SFSS.
If those are the case, you have to deploy Clot the instant the card hits the table, which means it can be faked out. That’s not the worst thing in the world, compared to the current nonexistance of ANY counter-plays (short of Utopia Shard upon seeing a Biotic go out).
It at least will probably force the inclusion of Virus Suite for NBN, and a reluctance to give up a Biotic+Astro for no reason should the Runner be able to SMC a clot.
It’s also true though that Clot’ll hit HBFA way harder than NBNFA,which is sad though. Unlike NBNFA, there already exist ways to play around HBFA…
I don’t think that’s really true at all. FA is popular because there are very few ways to interact with it all. Its strong for the same reason. NBN has the most reliable ways of doing it at the moment, but I think we’re only a couple of bonkers cards away from seeing similar decks in any other faction. You can’t play around HB FA except to go faster, which is exactly what you can do about NBN; the difference being that HB FA is admittedly a bit slower and has a harder time compounding FA tools so that it can’t do the horrendous “score from deck” move. That said, the week before my SCs my opponent installed chakanas and the next turn with HBFA I did the following:
Use up all tokens on efficiency comittee. Dig 10 cards with jackson. Biotic 2x’s. Install SanSan, agenda, and play SfSS to advance it twice. The next turn I bioticted a 3/2 off of a sansan for the same result around a Chakana.
You can absolutely play around HBFA: It doesn’t chain itself (Astro), and it requires far more money to execute than NBNFA. A bare minimum of 6 credits at the start of turn can be aggressively denied. Also, that added slower pace is vital, as that’s the real issue. HBFA isn’t a rush tactic, it’s a way to close out games with inevitability. NBN is this too, but yet it’s also rush-capable and can end games extremely fast.
Score from Deck is so much harder from HBFA (costing a minimum of 11 credits, 2 Biotics), while NBNFA needs either 1 biotic or a sansan and an astro counter.
Having a scored efficiency committee is much, much, much harder than anything required for any NBN trick.
I encourage you to look at 7 point CI. While siphon can ruin your day and many of the shards can too; there’s no interaction in the lead up to the combo aside from those plays that has any real impact on whether CI will win. You either get lucky on the HQ pulls/R&D pulls you obtain or you lose. Which is honestly what NEH is to me, too. And it can score relatively cheaply as well.
I can prevent an HBFA from scoring with aggressive use of Account Siphon and Vamp and ICE rezzes to keep them under 6, and possibly to kill stuff with HQ card destruction.
I can’t do that to NBN after the first astro, where they can topdeck score at any time with 2 credits, or 0 credits and a SFSS.
NBNFA (with Astro) improves it’s position with each score. HBFA reduces it’s position with each score. The snowball effect is quite real.
Edit: and CI is a bit different than ‘most HBFA’. I agree that’s utterly non-interactive and entirely reliant on if you have a silver bullet in your deck, or randomness of accesses.
I think we’re going to disagree here; but, I’ll emphasize again that I think NBN is currently more gross. That it is an order of magnitude above HB-FA. But, I don’t think HB-FA has as many demands or effective counter-plays as you imply it does. Shipment From SanSan+ETF means you only need 4 credits to score out of HB. The only thing making it seriously weaker is the need for all of that cash and all of those credits. But its the faction with the best recursion (archived memories, etc). So even that means it usually has enough FA redundancy.
I’m not talking from a vacuum here; I’ve played the deck. It’s more susceptible not because its FA is weak, but because it hasn’t become as efficient as NBN yet. The FA portion of the deck fires consistently and can run away with the game. CI is an example of hitting that critical mass. I think its only a matter of time before we see more of that as the card pool grows.
FA in general has been a bane for this game, warping metas for a long time. Clot is a card that gives you a consideration to play the strategy. It looks like a nuke at first, but I don’t think it is.
Bane or balance. Ash is probably played as much as biotic labor, and without fast advance it would be Glacier through and through.
Look at runners. We keep getting new tools but more and more runners just focus entirely on locking RnD. This really took hold once corps received stronger economy and Account Siphon became less dominant.
As diverse as people claim the meta is right now, I don’t think the core strategies have changed that much. In fact with PE out of favor at the moment it’s probably more stagnant than it was before O&C. You have mostly shells for punishing RnD on the runner side, and mostly shells for FA and Glacier on the corp side. Just with different artwork on the ID. Killing fast advance will just shift things even harder on the corp side since glacier is the one deck type that doesn’t really have a viable “silver bullet”.
I agree. It’s just a mostly unchecked thing. I think it’ll be less bane and more balance when its no longer a singular efficient strategy for any given deck.
Some people have already mentioned this, but while I certainly think that the interaction and potential bluff mechanics involved with clot and FA could make those NEH games much more interesting, the card just seems so finicky to me that it could actually detract from the game experience. I feel comfortable with the timing structure but in a tournament setting how many times will this be an issue? Someone will IAA and use their astro token before you have the chance to react with clot, whether they are just ignorant of the rules or made a genuine mistake and didn’t think ypu could pull out the clot for some reason. Either way it will lead to some awkward situations. Even with 2 experienced players who know exactly what they are doing it’s going to be annoying to have to pass priority after every single advancement token. But this will be totally necessary cause it’s not going to be immediately clear after which advancement you’re going to have to install clot. With sansan, astro tokens, SFSS, among all the other various FA tools, there are many ways to ‘cheat the system’ and score that agenda one action before the other guy thinks you can. Like I said, I like the idea of this kind of bluffing interaction to a degree, but if Clot is real it just seems like the timing interactions are going to be really finicky.
I’m kind of hoping it’s a piece of meta shaping propaganda. It would be pretty ingenious to force players to explore different styles of play without actually releasing anything this drastic.
I agree that it can get a bit fiddly, but that’s an issue with the rules rather than the card. Obviously it is likely to happen much less often, but the same scenario is currently possible with Chanaka and Hivemind. As others have said in relation to Nasir, the more the design space open up by timing windows get used, the better people will understand them.
But people are wising up, and are learning to install with a straight face before Biotic Labour hits (hilarious if you read it and snipe!). Or you get cool interactions like whenever I get to 7 credits as Noise, the corp immediately trashes Jackson without me having to do anything.
I’ve already had this happen multiple times in Store Championships while playing hivemind / chakana. People are so used to just putting 7 credits from their bank, throwing the agenda and biotic out, and passing their turn, because it has never mattered before.
The only thing you can do really is say “Hold up, you went too fast, in between your second and third advancement clicks, I want to react”. This is your “right” since they blatantly disregarded the timing structure of the turn. It sucks for them because now they’ve revealed exactly what card it is (when they turned it face up to score it) but hey, this is the misplay you were waiting for! My favorite situation is when I purposefully overdraw in order to put a chakana in archives, and during my discard phase, the corp is so excited to score their biotic astro that they don’t even bother looking at what I’m throwing out. 1 undefended and exposed astro later, I point to my clone chip, “surprise” chakana, and take the astro next turn.
Force them to keep the astro in an undefended remote (assuming no defended remote is available / they drew with NEH) and after you get your chakana / clot out clarify the board state: “Ok, so you’ve used two clicks to advance, you have 1 click remaining”.
I’ve caught multiple (at least 6 different people) with this type of setup and no one has raised a fuss, because I am very clear about what is happening. Most, if not all of my opponents, are usually impressed / excited to see chakana getting play, and “happy” to leave the agenda on the table. I’ve never had anyone ask to take their whole turn back (aside from a guy who IAA’d a breaking news while I had chakana out haha, sorry bud) as they understand it is their fault / misplay.
I’ve already said this before in another post, but I want to re-iterate here, it is really important you get your chakana / clot out BEFORE they can score with paid abilities. Since this is all happening on the Corp’s turn, they have priority for paid abilities, which means if they get an 3/2 to 2 counters somehow (ex: Install, Shipment from SanSan) then you’ve missed the window, and if you say something like “I want to react”, you’re basically leaking info to the Corp that you’re running Clot and after he says “Sure, you can do things after I’m done using paid abilities uses astro token” you’re going to look like a fool when you do nothing . It gets really tricky when they have SanSan’s and Astro tokens because you’ve got to start making judgement calls on when is the latest possible time you can afford to get the chakana / clot out. When it gets to that stage, it’s honestly better to just have chakana out and primed, because that way you are guaranteed that they have to blow another FA tool or purge.
Complete understanding of the timing structure is critical to playing decks like this where you have the ability to catch them off guard.
Imagine that I cut one architect and include 2 June bugs in my neh. I can install them and not lose a card because of my id so no problem with including them. I can advance them as an napd or bluff them as one. OR once I see an smc, install them, biotic, advance advance. Clot gets installed and I stop. The runner will go for the agenda and lose 4 net or die to 6 net if i have an astro counter and advance the June bug before access.
I think that 2 June bugs will be big in astrobiotics neh…
Yup, I think the real solution is just playing traps, like you mentioned.
I had a Valencia Blackmail Chakana deck that I was playing and in testing, I found the most effective way to beat it was to just advance traps. Blackmailing into a Cerebral Overwriter or Ghost Branch hurts
So in response, I started playing infiltration. I had SOT for blackmail anyways, so why not?
Junebug is great (I love the interaction with Astro!), because it allows you to check if the Runner does in fact have clot, in that an IAA or Biotic IAA will usually provoke them to go install it at paid speed. Once you kill a few people with it, you can start getting meta and installing unprotected Beales, scoring them for 3 points on the following turn. The huge downside with junebug is that it does absolutely nothing for you in RnD or HQ, aside from maybe scare the runner briefly, and provoke them to install Deus Ex / Feedback Filter.
Against clot specifically (not hivemind chakana shenanigans), I think the Never Advance style will work even better. There’s already a few players in my meta that simply spam remotes, with snares and psychic fields among them. The one time you don’t check, surprise, it was Astro! And clot does nothing against that. Snares have the added benefit of protecting RnD & tagging, and Psychic Fields at least have a trash cost.
I think which flavor you choose will come down to a meta call. I currently play Astrobiotics, but lately I’ve been itching to remove 1 or 2 biotics for some more… interesting options.
I’ve finally gotten a Corp deck that I like (TWIY Grail) and I’m fretting about the Clot factor. The next SC is at the end of March so I’m expecting Clot will be here by then.
Options are to not play the deck, or to play around Clot.
I do think that FA decks will have plenty of opportunities to do what they do, due to runners just not running Clot, or not having access to one.
That said, there will be plenty of times when Clot will show up and wreck your plans. I think Shipment from San San will be good to sneak a few agendas out, potentially against unsuspecting runners. This requires a San San City Grid, or an Astro token, however.
Debating on the Cyberdex Virus Suite. The 3 rez 1 trash cost is quite unattractive. You can play it on the board as an upgrade, but it’s just as likely to get accessed and trashed for little benefit.
Adding it to the deck also takes some of its power away. I would have to cut something like Anon Tips, which I don’t want to do.
I totally agree - it’s funny though I think how many people are putting this or other counters out there as “see clot won’t be that great,” when that is exactly the point: anything that forces NBN to slow down for even one click, nevermind multiple entire turns, nevermind influence and deckslots, gives runners the time they need to not simply auto-lose to “I drew the FA tools I needed all in a row, gg on turn 5”
imho traps are less of a burnden to run in slower FA decks like HB (especially with cerebral in-faction) - these decks have already had to rely on more than coin-flip card draws to win for a while.
It also means ‘siphon to zero’ does actually stop an Astrotrain. You can’t rez and use a Cyberdex with 0 credits, before using SFSS + astrocounter to keep the train going.
What decks are running both Clone Chips/SMC and Account Siphons though? Clot is only going to stop fast advance if you can install it on the corp’s turn and you are going to be hard pressed to find the influence for both those and Clot.
The only effect on the meta I’m expecting from Clot is that it becomes a 1 of in Kat and is yet another cheap virus for Noise. I don’t see it being included in criminals anytime soon.
. It gets really tricky when they have SanSan’s and Astro tokens because you’ve got to start making judgement calls on when is the latest possible time you can afford to get the chakana / clot out. When it gets to that stage, it’s honestly better to just have chakana out and primed, because that way you are guaranteed that they have to blow another FA tool or purge.