I moved the above 3 posts here from the streaming thread. Now we can keep it on topic about clot instead. 
Iām 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.
what did you expect?
I was hoping for SFSS and cyberdex to give NEH some reasonable counterplay. But they just didnāt matter at all.
I imagine itāll fade out some, in time, though. Not for a while, certainly, but itās an influence drain and thereās always going to be a need for more of that. Once NBN is on the rocks and FA is dead, it dies too, largely. Itās 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 Psychographicsā¦ 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 donāt 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 itās 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; itās only fair that FA has something to groan about now.
@bblum did you end up winning that game with your Kit build?
Tollbooth is the single reliable lategame ice it has. And marked accounts aināt no adonis. Thatās 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 arenāt going to do that with a 3 taxing ice remote, they donāt 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 donāt see why it wonāt work anymore. We just need to be less complacent and try some way to make it works again 
If anything, I feel like there are more varied options for Making News, now ā 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 thatās 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 arenāt going to be at that level necessarily, but Iām sure the vairety of trace stuff opens up MNās options some and lets people do more things with it, meaning itās well-positioned to be the jewel in the NBN crown for the next little while.
Thatās the thing - with the 2 install/2 inf statline, clot really heavily punishes pure FA strategies like Astrobiotics. However, itās 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, thatās where Iād 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.
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, Iām perfect obviously ;)).
But that tax depends on the combo with tags. Lets be fair, thatās still more awkward that simply stacking eliās, ichiās, heimdall 1.0ās, 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 Iāve been playing around with. Iāve 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 doesnāt have clot. Iāve also tried a slightly trolly NEH glacier, which doesnāt 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 Iām 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 itāll be much easier for the runner to just sit back and build up money in preparation for a few well timed runs. Weāll see.
I kinda feel like thatās the whole point, though: even against good players Fastrobiotics NEH is a meta-warping behemoth, and generally considered the deck to beat. Against all other players itās just a fun-ruining RNG win machine.
There are already many other NBN archetypes that have achieved (somewhat lower level) success- I see no reason that one or more of them should rise to prominence once top players start looking elsewhere for winning decks.
Saying āthats all well and good, but thereās no denying X Y or Z deck isnāt as good as current fastrobiotics playā is missing the point - theyāre trying to make it a worse deck.
Midseasons NEH is pretty scary, as is NEARPAD against anything but Criminal
Clot hurts all NBN builds, not just fastro, though. The ability to chain through Astro/Sansans or to FA via Psycho is what keeps NBN strong.
Clot will also kill a lot of effective HB strats that rely on FA to close games out; it also roflstomps CI.
I get the desire to see less Biotic out of NEH, but as a solution to that problem Clot is overly broad. Compare it to The Source, say.
I think cyberdex is a total non-starter for making NEH resistant to clot because you canāt really keep it protected for a turn. Power shutdown seems like a much better idea to investigate: it kills SMC / Clone Chip and helps you score from remotes.
In one of the games we tried on stream Rotom was trying out power shutdown, I think the one where I was kit. It wasnāt good.
My feeling is that they needed to make it broad to ensure it would work. Comparing to the source, as you say, I see that the source is utter garbage and totally unplayable, while clot may actually get put into decks!
I guess I just canāt mourn the fall of the astrochain (however partial a fall it may be). Pretty much every NBN deck I build ends up astrochaining for the win in at least 30% of games- itās so good it sucks the air out of the room, and often youāre a fool if you try to play your deck rather than just mashing the astro button.
This idea- that not only can NBN not protect anything for a single turn, but that they shouldnāt have to, seems backwards to me. Everyone else, even other FA decks, as some point needs to throw down a card that the runner canāt quite deal with this turn. NBN has been living the high life, and maybe itās time we actually figure out how to play this faction.
I would be interested in seeing his list. While itās entirely possible that there is no good PS NEH deck, if there is such a deck then I would expect it to be a separate local maximum entirely as opposed to ātake standard NEH and jam in PSā. Though my intuition is the former is more probable.