You’re comparing apples to oranges. The last legal expansion for GenCon was Upstalk. This means the decklist was missing D4v1d, Ghost Runner, Order of Sol, Astrolabe, Utopia Shard, “Lady”, and Earthrise Hotel. While the deck might be able to sustain the loss of D4v1d, the other six are important additions that happen to serve some function or other versus NEH. For example, Utopia Shard means that they cannot Fast Track to score from R&D, and “Lady” lets you walk through Eli 1.0 much more easily.
(I was also trying to build a similar Nasir deck pre-GenCon, but it did not stand a chance versus NEH.)
Yeah, and yeah. Both are actually taking place today, in my opinion. I’m mostly done researching for the Professor primer, now I just need like, a week to put my mess of notes into an actually readable format.
My biggest debate (to myself, not a ‘mass debate’, dun dun daaaaaa) is scavenge. Just seems to sit in hand. How are you all finding your usage of it? Some tactical options with it?
I’ve used it on Lady a bit, and on D4 a bit. But I generally can always install them back with a clone chip by installing over with other things. Scavenge removes that extra click, but I’ve never been unable to get those tools back timeously.
I don’t see a lot of NEH around, so Imp didn’t make into my final list in favor of a second Parasite. This could be influencing my experiences with scavenge, good point.
The closest to this is Sneakdoor + Nerve Agent: two high-influence, high-investment programs. With Order and Chaos, it might be interesting to see if there are viable additions.
A big thing scavenge does for me is let my econ engine build tools even if I don’t know what I’ll need yet. With scavenge in hands I don’t feel bad about PW a d4 out early; if it turns out what I really need is another parasite, scavenge gives me a free one in exchange for the d4 or some other tool that PW paid for but I don’t need.
Agreed that a low NEH meets may be skewing things for you. Imp is a boss against NEH and often a prime scavenge target.
No way - that shit takes forever to set up, takes a million bucks and might end up being very low-impact and easy to shut off.
I propose that D4V1D + Imp + Datasucker + Parasite + Medium + Nerve Agent + a ton of Shaper stuff (recursion, tutoring, some breakers) is a much more relevant example.
How does that take less time and money to set up? That’s basically just a majority of a Professor deck.
Sneakdoor + Nerve Agent is a powerful combination since Nerve Agent still works on normal HQ runs as well, pressuring two servers. I wouldn’t say it’s easy to shut off, but it certainly demands a defense. I don’t think it’s good enough to make the professor competitive, but it’s the best combo he’s got.
Because what I listed is a set of tools that, when all included, give you decent to good matchups against a majority of current corp decks. You’re not expected to have them all on the table at the same time, you’re expected to benefit greatly from having all of them available at the same time.
So yeah, that’s how it takes less time and money to set up
Here’s the problem: to connect beyond the first turn, you’ll also need at least one breaker (of an unknown kind, so let’s assume a SMC will be involved). That means you’re at 4-5 MU, without considering that this is actually more of a mid-game play, and thus you’re expected to have some stuff out already. Which means you’re adding another thing to the equation: either a CyberSolutions or bigger (4+ cred) or a Djinn/Leprechaun (which is finnicky and having to plan for it actually robs you of flexibility).
I’m speaking from experience here - having actually played the Prof at some tournaments gave me the insight that Sneakdoor is best used as a one-turn thing - either with Test Run (in which case Imp is usually a better partner for it than Nerve Agent is), or with Scavenge (by turning it into an Opus, Parasite, D4V1D or something else that’s actually useful).
Sneakdoor + Nerve Agent is something that happens naturally during the course of a game because you had cheap early game HQ accesses, so you dropped Nerve and went to town, then exploited an Archives weakness later, when you had nothing better to do. It’s definitely not the killer feature that makes you choose Prof, though.
Being able to pack Imp, D4V1D, recurrent ICE destruction, escalating multi-access on both RnD and HQ, and still be able to pack some sweet-ass breakers like Faerie and Morning Star? That just might.
This. A lot of people (myself shamefully included) even seem to forget that it can be used for programs besides the one trashed! If you get sucked into the mindset of using it only to “reload” you lose out on the incredible flexibility and surprise of economical access to the heap.
For worlds (noise) and with rara in exile I’ve used it as a ‘trade-up’ program, using recurring credits from cyber-feeder in noise, and rara you can upgrade your cards fairly effectively, or get rid of unused programs for nice big useful ones. Scavenge is the absolute tits.
Scavenge is one of the most versatile cards in the deck - I keep wondering whether I should add a third. It resets “Lady”, Imp, D4v1d, Cyber-Cypher, and Femme, it gives you a use for late-game SMCs, it gives you another hit with Parasite, lets you rescue programs, switches out Mimic or Inti (or rarely Cyber-Cypher) if they’re obsolete, or saves some credits.
Have you considered cutting Opus for Kati Jones? You can store up money on her that you can’t lose when checking ICE, and it doesn’t take up a ton of memory that you don’t really have.
I agree that the memory is an issue sometimes and that Kati’s ability to hoard creds is useful. I could see a similar build with Kati Jones instead of Magnum Opus. Personally, I prefer the Opus since it’s highly effective in today’s asset-heavy metagame. The fact that you can triple MO and trash a SanSan (or double MO for a Mental Health Clinic/PAD/Daily Business Show) is highly useful. Additionally, you can tutor for Opus via SMC, and I often Stimhack for it. But again - could go either way.
Having tried the deck with opus, although not having tried with kati, I’m inclined to say opus fits the tempo of the deck better. It’s very much a “draw a bunch to set up quickly and then stop drawing for the rest of the game” deck; I spend a lot of early turns clicking all 4 times to draw and host on workshop, and kati would cramp that style. Moreover, opus basically costs 0 to install, and by the time you’re ready for it, most ice is rezzed and you’re just trying to maintain the R&D lock.
BTW, I never found myself wanting to stimhack out the opus early. I always just used the stimhacks to accelerate out RDIs, femme, lady, and so on, and/or to kill sansan.
Cool points. Maybe I’m just not thinking about it correctly in terms of my options. Especially the Cypher reset and similar tactics. Good ideas this. Will keep practicing with it.
Kati is one of the first variations I tried (actually, when this article came out, I was already running a nasir deck very similar to this one but with Kati, and Kati was simply the last part of that old deck to go as I tried out El-ad’s suggestions)
Economy is weird for Nasir. Big tempo hits are often fine (and sometimes ideal) but the nickel-and-dime costs of doing business wear him down very quickly. Basically what it boils down to is that I often don’t have clicks to spend on money until I really need it, and I ended up taking 3 off of Kati (or worse yet, letting her remain empty for turn after turn). Magnum, on the other hand, is often remarkably easy to get out (stimhack plus smc works, as does PW + Order of Sol, or scavenge off any random PW-paid-for swiss army tool) and provides the petty-cash-on-demand that Nasir so often needs.
I’ve never had a problem with memory with this deck, so I can’t speak to that problem. astrolabe alone handles 3-breakers-plus-MO, and it’s usually pretty easy to get a mem chip out long before you even need it.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if a more experienced player would be better able to manage Kati and therefore leverage the memory and setup costs advantage. I am all too aware that MO has a reputation for being a lazy/new/bad runner’s crutch, so there may definitely be better options, but I think El-ad really makes the case here.
