Oh yeah? Doing the 3 credit runner first turn gig isn’t as strong as I was hoping?
- It’s very difficult to do in a smart way. You don’t just want to rez your PADs/Adonis/Launch and have them go trash it.
- It doesn’t really do you that much when Career Fair into Liberated Accounts is thing.
- The runner has to run your unrezzed Pop-Up/Special Offer to trigger so they can just easily avoid losing credits until they have enough credits to where losing 1 just doesn’t really matter.
- It’s hard to keep that 1 credit loss a turn on over the course of the game.
If Spark was either “the Runner loses 1 credit every time you rez an Ad” (Ad Blitz ftw) or “when x player’s turn begins (either the Runner or the Corp but not both because that would be bonkers), the Runner loses 1 credit for each rezzed Ad” then that would be something to work with. As it stands, given how few Advertisements there actually are in the game, 8 by the time D&D comes out, and how strong Runner economies are, I just don’t see Spark being a better choice than any other NBN ID. Though like I said, I’m still going to play around with to to troll people with Pop-Ups and Product Placements.
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Yeah, IMO, Spark should have been for every ad, not just the first each turn.
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Product Placement still seems pretty good to me, for value. It’s a nice way to shore up various servers, especially the centrals. Either they give you about a Hedge Fund’s worth of econ advantage by trashing it, or they don’t and can run into it again and again. It’s no News Team, but I’ll take whatever I can to help with R&D lock.
I can totally see Spark not being all that great, especially if one ends up going too hard on Ads. They really should have had 17 influence, given that NBN doesn’t really have many Ads that provide long-term money (thinking mostly of how both Marked Accounts and Reality Threedee aren’t, and so how for that you may want to get the Sexy Robot Money, at which point you’re blowing a bunch of influence).
I think it’s supposed to be part of a larger denial/control plan, using Blacklist and Snoop and things, but I’m not sure that there’s quite enough to make it viable just yet, much as I want to see such a thing. Seems like good for occasional fun, and pounding the odd meta that has poor runners.
[quote=“Zebadiah, post:855, topic:3984, full:true”]
Yeah, IMO, Spark should have been for every ad, not just the first each turn.
[/quote]Nah. I can see that Spark needs a boost, but making the drain bigger leads to situations that FFG wants to avoid. If it’s each ad, then Ad Blitz, even in limited form, becomes frightening. Hell, instead of Hedge > Ad > Ad you could drop three, and as long as you’ve got a mix of PADs and Launch Campaigns that includes at least one of the latter you’ve got them unable to do much more than click for cash and Hedge to get going.
Not to say I don’t want that as a thing, but if it’d never rotate it’d pretty quickly be one of the go-to archetypes and runners would either get MORE strong econ or complain about the matchup forever. If it was 2c each time, still the first, you could drop the runner down to 1c on their first turn.
I think it just needed some other passive or low-level boosts to push it forward. Extra influence, or an increased starting handsize (even by one card), something like that. Make it more than just ads while keeping it ad-focused and not making the ads make things wholly unplayable for the runner.
Extra influence = more Bioroid Campaigns.
Extra card at start = more consistency, higher likelihood of having ads in starting hand, better mulligan decisions, better chance of ice, etc. Even the one card makes a huge difference – gets you to 7 with Corp draw, meaning that if you play out you’re at 5 starting on turn 2. Also makes Turn One Ad Blitz slightly more feasible, though likely very silly.
Either way also makes it easier to just… do something with the economic advantage you should theoretically be getting. Because one of the challenges I see is working out what to actually do with all the money you theoretically make/economic advantage you supposed wrest from the runner.
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To be fair to ffg, it’s hard to make a roughly spark-esque ability to be competitive without being obnoxious to play against. So this is a good id to be conservative on. To also be fair to them, I don’t know what the attraction is to play spark as a non-spike player is, so I’m not really sure why they were fucking around in this design space anyway.
That’s what’s boggled my mind most about ffg is how they’re so willing t print hard denial cards while being so uninterested in the hardcore competitive community.
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I’m actually thinking a singleton Ad Blitz could be super handy if you are already running 3x popup 3x special offer and a couple of product placements, I think you could consistently get 2-3 targets out of it which might be enough to justify it’s inclusion.
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Heck, if you run just PADs as well that gives you another three targets right there. The ability to recur some of those – especially the ice and Product Placements – seem like the big goal most of the time anyway. Recurring the other ads is a sometimes-useful bonus, I think. Launch Campaign seems actually decent if you want to recur it like that, unless your opponent is Whiz/has Scrubber, because it’ll cost you as much to pop one out and rez it with Blitz as it will for the runner to trash, and if they don’t trash it, well, you make the money back next turn.
Honestly, taking the discussed Spark stuff and running it in NEH is tempting, as NEH always is. The extra draw, the easy benefit of having facedown cards, the lack of need to run some of the more troublesome ads to make the ability work, the extra influence to fit things… I dunno. I kinda hope not.
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I mentioned the PADs, as a way to take slightly more advantage of Ad Blitz and potentially drain the runner economy by forcing them to trash them. They’re not ideal for Ad Blitz, but they’re pricey targets for a lot of runners, especially if they’re coming out with a Special Offer in front. You need servers low on ice for recurring the Offers to be worth it, so it seems to me like servers with easily-trashed econ seems like a reasonable enough choice.
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Oh sorry, I wasn’t criticizing your idea when I said I didn’t mention the PADs for ad blitz! I was responding to another post that got deleted. I will delete my posts as well since they don’t make sense anymore haha.
I think being able to recur the PADs is definitely a viable play depending on the board state, and def a perk of running Ad Blitz. I do, however, feel like the main reason to run a singleton copy would be the free to rez “economy” ads like popup, product placement and special offer, which I think we agree on 
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Oh wow. Been reading this thread for days trying to catch up, and this post just enlightened me that Ad Blitz lets you resurrect Pop-ups. And Special Offer. That’s really really good.
It’s better in NEH, the ETF of NBN. Hub’s poor design in that respect: it makes all other yellow IDs hipster jank.
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I actually think the Harp will be at least as popular as NEH moving forwards.
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Yeah, it folds to Imp and film critic, but otherwise you’re putting down two astro and guaranteeing a train of sorts
Not so much for that, just because R&D multiaccess is a big weakness for many NBN decks, and Harp mitigates this somewhat.
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Not so much, but that play is possible without any additional cards, and all those on access agendas have the potential to be crazy. Imagine space camp and award bait in archives never advancing a Beale to 4 points
I’ve been trying a few different Butchershop-style builds out of Haarpsichord (can we call it Hurtsichord?), there’s definite potential there, but remains to be seen what effect Film Critic will have.
Hardest part is wrapping your head around the ability I found. It’s honestly really weird as it breaks several of the fundamental rules of Netrunner I’ve taught myself. Like, lots of agendas in one place makes you vulnerable… in Haarp, lots of agendas in one place (clumped in RnD, all installed in naked servers, or in Archives) is strangely safer. In fact, 3 TGTBT in archives is a really good position to be in, especially if they’re under a Data Raven.
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Another one I noticed is that agenda flood isn’t as much a concern because they can’t steal the game from you with legwork.
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I believe, though obviously haven’t tested this, that Butchershop & Psycho-Beale will move to Harp, Astrobiotics & NEARPAD will stay in NEH, Making News tagstorm will be a thing, and New Angeles Sol might be able to play a decent-ish slow build with at least ELP.
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I haven’t seen an official answer, yet. I’d think it falls into the same space that IG does and just affects every card since it says “all”.
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I think the etf/NEH comparison is understandable but wrong.
Etf works basically no matter the deck you’re playing, low assets, high assets, glacier rush because money is always useful and every deck wants to atleast install ice an agendas and Jackson.
A card on the other hand isn’t always useful (when you’re playing glacier you often want to slow the game down and build up without putting more agendas into the game, which drawing does). Asset spam opens you up to sec testing abuse In any long term game which means glacier+assets is a non-go. Additionally, if you’re not doing asset spam your ability gets lowered to 3-5 draws in a game. Which isn’t amazing.
Why NEH is so ubiquitous out of NBn is for two reasons:
- NBn doesn’t have the card support for glacier. There best cards are aggressive rush cards (Astor, sansan, pop up, wraparound). So the best rush id is the only Id that sees play.
- Assets in NBn are close enough to the best Econ all things equal that NEH takes advance of there natural Econ best.
For a non-NEH deck to be viable NBn needs better glacier and non-drip Econ support.
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NBN has some pretty good operation econ in Sweeps Week.
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