It’s not so much about recurring it all the time - it’s that FAing now costs 3 credits, a card, and click on an earlier turn more. And that’s if you draw the countermeasure/the runner doesn’t trash it.
This point, along with your earlier comments re: stopping HB FA with Siphon/Vamp really makes me wonder: have you never had people rezzing stuff in response to a Siphon run being initiated? “Stopping HB” gets a lot more tricky if they rez a SanSan and an Eve when you try to siphon, bringing themselves down to zero and having you spend 10 of your own credits (rather than potential stolen money) in trash cost in order to avoid them being in position to score at the start of their turn anyway.
Not saying it can’t be done (like, by pulling the one agenda out of five cards on your HQ access, like my opponents always seem able to do), but it’s way less clear-cut than you make it sound. I do have fears when playing HB FA, but “siphoned to zero” isn’t really one of them. Hell, back in “The Siphon Summer of 2013” HB FA was literally the only playable corp in a meta where you expected to get siphoned 3-6 times every single goddamn game - that in itself should tell you something, non?
Similar principles apply to Cyberdex’ rez cost and the whole Siphon/Vamp situation.
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I feel the same applies to NEH nowadays. When people siphon me, I just go “Ok, let me rez some combination of SanSan / DBS / Pad / ICE that will get me to 0-2 credits, I hope you weren’t counting on the siphon money to go and trash my assets.”
With Cyberdex, the situation is a bit different. If you rez it, you’ve revealed to me where it is, and I can go immediately trash it for a single credit. Unless you can get it back somehow or are running multiple copies, paid speed clots / chakana locks are here to ruin your day.
That being said, I don’t see paid speed clots coming out of the same decks that are running siphon. As @Kore said, I believe it’ll be a 1-of added to Kate to give her a huge boost against NEH. With SMC, you can realistically always threaten to stop a biotic/sansan play, and with clone chips you can always threaten to bring it back from the heap at the most awkward time.
Actually, a slightly off-topic question that this brings up is, where do people usually install their Cyberdex Virus Suites? As an upgrade, you’ve got the luxury of putting it where ever you want. I’m currently just playing it completely undefended most of the time, to get the NEH draw, but I could see some value in playing it in a central and pretending it is a Crisium Grid, but I’m not sure that’s worth the tempo hit (use a card, didn’t click for a credit, didn’t get NEH card).
I generally don’t want the runner to know I have it, so playing it in RnD is risky (since they run there anyways), playing it in HQ is pretty risky as well (since they run there anyways) and installing it as an upgrade in archives just seems foolish. I think the best value is probably just to put it out there with the flood of assets and hope the runner doesn’t check, but I’m curious as to what everyone else thinks?
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Behind Merlin.
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depends on where they’re at with virus tokens. If it’s andysucker with a mountain of DS tokens then centrals look good - otherwise in a horizontal deck throwing it out naked is fine, and for anyone else a small “scoring server” is the place to be.
I played against it in HB fast advance and it was rather annoying as an upgrade on centrals. I was running parasite Gabe and having it on HQ locked me out for several turns as I didn’t want to forfeit my datasucker/parasite counters accessing it. I had seen it on R&D and not trashed it due to a mistake so I know what the upgrade was but still couldn’t do anything.
I think NEH probably wants it on HQ if you’re planning on saving it for Clot duty. HQ is usually iced up and not the most profitable place to run anyway so it’s safer there and might even protect an agenda a bit or fool them into thinking you have Crisium Grid as you said. An alternate play might be use it to bluff it as a San San. If you install two cards into a server, runner generally think of San San before anything else and you could use it to force them to run when they’re not ready or to deflect attention from another server.
Of course people rez stuff in response to siphons. But it still leaves the corp at few or zero credits, which limits their options anyway. Having an extra DBS up or even a SanSan rezzed still means the corp has no money on my turn.
It’s not so much cold stopping FA, but slowing them down enough for you to have a fighting chance of nailing more agendas out of R&D or taking something from hand.
If you can’t trash a SanSan without Siphon money, then things aren’t going well for you anyway as a runner.
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This is exactly the point where the Campaigns come in and ruin your day. For scoring purposes, 2-5 credits isn’t “few”, especially for a corp that gets another credit by the act of installing the agenda.
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I think we’re talking again about two different things.
- Clot’s existence means that an NBN player with Astro who’s been vamped, siphoned, or drained to zero while rezzing ice and has drip trashed can no longer ‘score from 0 credits’. Even a SanSan lying rezzed on the table cannot ‘score from zero credits’, even with SFSS: You still need 3 to rez and trigger a Cyberdex.
- If an HB player didn’t have 6 credits before first click, they aren’t able to FA for the most part (assuming no SFSS splash). Thanks to Clot, that number is now bumped to ‘9’ if you have one ready to go at instant speed, since it costs 3 to rez so that you can trash+fire it off.
It’s still an obstacle that the corp will need to play around, which adds them up. Of course if HB has zero credits but two adonis’s, you’ve done nothing.
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I think the point is that 3 isn’t a crazy number to be a part of what you do to go to 0. So if the runner siphons, the corp can rez their Cyberdex in response along with whatever else they aim to rez. It’ll dump creds as good as anything else.
It’s funny that Haarpsichord is pretty direct counter to any anti-fa clot based stuff. Chakana looking a bit better vs them IMO. Clot comes out. NBN get’s an ID that cares much less about it. LCG in full force heh.
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Any thoughts on how to fit Clot in @Calimsha Kate? I was thinking -1 Legwork (since Clot puts some brakes on FA we might do ok with seeing Legwork later), -1 Indexing, +1 Clot and +1 ???
For +1 ??? my candidates would be in order: Day Job, Datasucker, second Stimhack, Femme. But actually not sold on any of those 1 inf fillers here.
Eden might not be too bad, if you utopia thier hand when it’s low, then eden into legwork, you get what cards were discarded, and 2 fresh cards off RnD, also you can get fresh cards off RnD if you already ran. IMO it’s pretty underrated.
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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