My belief is “No, AoT doesn’t help with anything.” I’ve played AoT a couple of times and watched a fair few AoT games. It’s a slow motion car crash. Really, really sad to watch even if it can manage to get to 4 points fairly often.
There is a good AoT deck out there, I think, but I feel we’re all missing something that might help it define its own little archetype within the HB family… We’re playing it like ETF and it’s not going well.
I feel like HB has a lot of powerful cards, giving it excellent economy, ICE, and good 3/2 agendas should set it up for a pretty strong game.
However, we are so used to playing HB out of ETF that we are used to having an unbreakable stream of credits in every game. Losing that free econ hurts quite a bit, and no other HB ID has offered the same level of power.
Would RP’s ID ability in HB be better than ETF? It wouldn’t take much to imagine a pretty bonkers board state, but taxing the runner doesn’t seem as powerful as fueling your own game state.
I think ETF as an ID will remain the best HB ID for as long as it is legal in the game.
I sure can’t figure out how to make it strong enough to stand a chance in the current runner meta. Ice just does not seem all that consequential right now. Runners have so much money, such efficient breakers, and so many tricks that HB just feels totally reactive and helpless.
Agreed. Although I think Barriers are going to become the new taxing ice in a bit because of both switchblade and yog.
We just need more quality barriers to make that happen! Heimdall 2.0 isn’t enough!
Curious. I was starting to feel that way earlier this year, at the height of the Faust meta, where the only solution was to compensate by running a ridiculous number of assets. I don’t feel that way now.
Is it possible you’re trying to turtle for too long? In the late lategame most runners will be favoured over most corps, but if you take your chances, you shouldn’t get stuck in too long a game most of the time.I would view HB Fast Advance as a decent mid-range deck atm.
Rush decks definitely seem in a good place right now, especially if you’re packing some sort of finisher (biotic/caprice). It does however seem like the late game belongs to runners again (as I believe it should), rather than to decks like RP and Foodcoats. Even so, I don’t think glacier decks need more than one more decent upgrade that doesn’t die to Rumor Mill.
Maybe. My experience has been that it is hard to get a remote where I can never advance in the mid-game. It main be that I am just too timid.
What I’d say AoT is missing is some strong and robust bioroid assets/upgrades to rez off its ability.
Right now it lets you get ice for cheap…but a) ice doesn’t matter against so many runner archetypes, and b) ice proves value only as and when the runner chooses to engage with it.
If running through that fairchild 1.0 meant they got to rez an Eve Campaign for 1c it’d become a lot more scary.
Manta Grid will be out soon. I’ve not seen any text for it yet but I’m hoping for some kind of defensive upgrade. As a region it wouldn’t die as soon as Rumor mill hits the table.
https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2016/5/9/23-seconds/
(Sat behind Rumor Mill getting ready to stab it in the back (Hopefully))
Well remembered. Personally I was hoping for something in Weyland, but I’ll take what I’m given.
I can’t say for sure without seeing your list/your games, but I suspect this is at least part of it. Playing foodcoats well right now really requires aggressive remote play. Protecting an early campaign (and HQ against siphon decks) should be your first priority, even at the expense of icing centrals. Obviously you need to adjust based on your opponent and whether you expect something like Account Siphon on turn one, but you absolutely can be too careful, and trying to defend against everything will mean you’re not well defended enough against anything.
This.
In fact, one of the ‘rookie’ mistakes often made is icing R&D at all, without a credible threat to it (Medium/RDI/Makers Eye). HQ is almost always more dense than R&D is, and a lot of HQ events hurt (Account Siphon) so icing HQ is usually the right choice instead of R&D.
HB in particular wants to get an ICE on a remote with a Campaign behind it asap.
I’m interested in this; what do you mean by it? All you’re actually trying to do is to get a remote that the runner cannot run once/turn for the rest of the game. As long as their entire turn involved running on this remote, if they didn’t come up with a net positive on credits, you have a valid Never Advance remote: Stick something in there every turn. It doesn’t always have to be an Asset. You can bait runs with agendas as long as it won’t give them the game.
For me, I frequently lose most often with HB when I jam too aggressive and force the Runner to have a statistically improbable line… and they pull it out. (ie, all SOT/Deja Vu gone from a Val deck… Jam an Agenda; they play their second Blackmail. Still 20+ cards remaining, so next turn I jam another Agenda… And they actually are holding their 3rd blackmail in hand, and thus get the win.)
Maybe I’ve just built some bad remotes and/or had some bad experiences. I’ve had games vs. Smoke and Sunny where they could run a three-deep remote every turn with very few credits. I’ve also had games vs. Blackmail spam Val, Dyper Haley, and cutlery anarchs who just ignore or destroy ice in one way or another.
I fully recognize that I pilot error is likely the biggest issue here. I appreciate the experience and insights shared by others.
You also are talking about two archetypes that are designed to hunt and eat glacier. Both Security Nexus and Stealth are the proverbial rock to glacier’s scissors.
Before Rumor Mill, you could mitigate this through the increased security provided by Caprice Nisei. Post Rumor Mill, it is still okay, but it is a large Achilles heel.
The meta has smelled the blood in the water and many players have had two years of fighting the beast to know when it tires and when to strike.
With some time and new blood the beast may rise again from the digital jungle. But for now it rests, licking its wounds and dreaming of bygone days.
All of those runners do something a little outside the norm (Cutlery Anarch and Smoke are the most ‘normal’ of runners.) and thus need special tech to counter.
Sunny: As soon as you see this ID, you’re now a Rush deck. It’s very difficult to beat Sunny in the long game, so you want to get to game point as soon as you can. Once she’s set up (You’ll know because she’ll run once a turn) HB actually has one of the best chances of getting out from under her. Because she doesn’t have Clot in most cases, you can Biotic out a 3/2 to win if you got to 5 points earlier. She should have your R&D locked, so draw for agendas and biotic, discard most anything else (you can throw campaigns into your remote server on your last click so that she has to go check it.)
Blackmail Spam Val: (Which is most Val, btw.) So HB doesn’t usually run the necessary tech to beat this straight up, which is Executive Boot Camp. So, instead, you have to exhaust her Blackmails. They are not infinite. 3/2’s are your friend. Also, don’t forget that you can win from 4 points on a Never Advance GFI play, with double Biotic in hand. You’re almost never scoring GFI using a traditional IAA against her.
Dyper Hayley: Like Val, you lack necessary tech for this. The best plan is the same as against Sunny and try to rush out as fast as you can. The problem is that you don’t get to have a turn once she goes off.You can potentially be cheeky and hide agendas in Archives with a Jackson on board to make them all come back, but Rumor Mill probably stops that plan. The other cute play is to put an Ash onto Archives, but that only buys you one click at most. Really just not a good matchup for HB at all.
Cutlery Anarchs: Your goal is to make them run through a piece of taxing ice more than once. Easiest way to do that is to hold rezzes so they don’t know which cutlery to fire. Ideal play is to stack two ICE on a server, let them through the first, and rez the back ICE (which is ETR). Then when they Cutlery in to kill the back ICE, rez the front ICE (which is taxing, like Ichi or Fairchild). Other than that, good luck. They’re built to destroy towers of ICE, which is what you kinda built your deck to do, so…
Smoke: Tollbooth is your out. Smoke walks through servers really easily… Once she’s set up. So, like Sunny/Dyper, try and Rush before she sets the hooks in with all three breakers and at least one Cloak+Net Mercur.
Like @Myriad says, though, most of the meta decks are tuned to defeat Glacier, which has helped push it out of meta.
Also, firing and hitting ice with ABT helps both Dyper and Val match-up. Always Be Firing ™. Foodcoats tends to have enough ice, where firing ABT is pretty reasonable most of the time anyway.
Just watch for the Escher play out of Dyper. Crisium on HQ if you get a couple of rezzed ice on R&D can basically win the game for you. They don’t tend to have enough econ to trash Crisium and pull off the combo.
Man, I really want a piece of ice that you can just rez when you install it. It would be great hate against a lot of these glacier-hating gameplans.
Glacier is tremendously poorly positioned right now. It’s not just that there happen to be a few runner archetypes that have positive matchups against it, it’s that virtually every runner is good against glacier or has an extremely problematic tech card (Blackmail, Rumor Mill, Security Nexus, etc.). Jammy ETFs came about in the first place because rush was much better positioned, at what point do you realize you should just play rush instead of pretending to play glacier but needing to rush in most of your matchups?
My example was not meant to be the singular example. I agree. Don’t play glacier right now.
So we can take it as read that traditional glacier Foodcoats does not compete right now.
I was wondering if there might be a way to give the glacier a secondary win condition with a kill package that takes the place of the Ash & Caprice and a small number of the ice or other cards. What would a potential kill package look like for HB?
Could you do a “passive” trap-based kill with things like Cerebral Overwriter and/or Jinteki traps?
Is there an importable Weyland meat damage package?
The passive package would be aimed more at slowing down runs and remote aggression, so it might synergize better with the basic glacier approach.
I really don’t know if there is any merit in these thoughts. Just looking for discussion and some ideas to test at this point.
That is an excellent question. It has some merit because most players do not expect a kill package out of a glacier style ID.
There are a few problems. First being the nature of passive traps like junebug or cerebral overwriter. If even one of the traps gets seen out of R&D the jig is up and the runner won’t run any server without being sure they won’t die. Second, if you do sneak out a trap and the runner ignores it, then you should have just installed an agenda. (this is usually caused by protecting your remote too much, thereby giving the runner more incentive to either do setup for next turn or to pound centrals or to better their board state). The way to catch them is to have the trap be protected, but not too much. But any runner worth their memchips will wonder why you just IAA’d behind one piece of ice with a DDoS on the field. It is clearly too easy, meaning you want them to faceplant it, meaning it is a trap.
Passive traps are very difficult to pull off. Snares out of R&D get around that, but advancable traps just don’t catch runners, and waste time you could just be scoring agendas.
There are other options. Use HHN as a caprice/ash. If you can tag them they have to decide to either run the server or clear tags, which means if they run the server you can punish them with closed accounts, eoi, scorch, boom, etc.
But still, if you are importing a boom or scorch package you also need tags. And if the runner faces up against a palana deck and hasnt seen any influence, they are really gonna wonder.
Lack of influence showing usually means one of three things: SanSan City Grid, Biotic Labor, or Scorched Earth.