Midway Station Grid does nothing with Pup because you don’t use breakers on Pup.
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Nice, I was considering something similar myself - probably out of NEXT Design. Bit of an experiment.
Tried Next ICE with HBFA, im pretty sure that the combo is underwhelming…You need A LOT of ice rezzed together to make it work, maybe normal HB ice is better…
Yeah agreed, I don’t think NEXT ICE is there quite yet. quantity wise is borderline viable, but they really need a way to get it all rezzed on mass, otherwise they just get killed off one at a time while they’re small. Some kind of operation that allows the Corp to rez any number of NEXT ICE might do the trick.
Amazon Industrial Zone?
I’ve been having great success with NEXT cards. Having your gearcheck ICE become taxing in the late game is actually a very powerful effect! You end up somewhat weaker than normal to Parasite, but can easily mitigate this with Archived Memories or Interns.
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The soon-to-be-in-faction Architect’ll help with that some, too.
Yeah it’s possible I suppose. I’ve only just clocked for the first time that it’s not unique actually - I had always thought it was. But nevertheless, it’s expensive for what it does - you need to play at least two ICE with it in order to make your money back on it, so it’s not the best for economy. NEXT Design is light on influence as well so I’d probably pass on buying in this kind of thing. I think we’ll see growing support for NEXT - it’s playing a long game 
One neat thing you can do with the new HB cards that Roybal has been playing around with is to use NEXT ICE in conjunction with Power Shutdown. Killing Datasuckers makes it much more likely that the strength on NEXT Bronze is going to make a difference, and blowing stuff up generally extends the length of the game to give you more time to find a critical mass of NEXT. HB also has recursion in faction, enabling you to play Power Shutdown a lot of times or simply rescue agendas from Archives if you mill them.
Power Shutdown also works well with Archer, (killing Datasuckers, Clone Chips, and Faeries easily), so it’s possible there is an HB program trash deck that makes use of both the NEXT ICE and Sleepers/Archer, spending influence on 2 Archer, 3 Jackson, 3 Shutdown, and an Inazuma or Lotus Fields or something. You also have Troubleshooter in faction, if that’s something you want to try.
Bottom line: NEXT ICE might not be an auto-include in HBFA at this point, but they get better if you can extend the game, potentially either just by playing a glacier deck or setting the runner back in some other way. Unfortunately the current trend of Parasite in everything makes this harder, and I’m not sure that’s going away anytime soon.
midway station is great! now you can playing taxing Custom Biotics, YAY! Maybe it’ll be awesome in NBN someday but its still ok. I suppose its much easier to 3-stack a bunch of cheap ice and use midway to double the cost of entry. Keeps your costs low and their cost high (albeit a 4 cred intial investment). Maybe it’ll open up scoring windows that way as it’s another beale/astro disguise.
domestics effect is “tax the runner X credits when they run to see what that is”. You don’t care if they grab it (generally) as it may open up a scoring window for something ‘real’ and if they don’t you get an agenda point for ‘free’. is that better than ash? i guess we’ll see if there’s an application
PTD has applications in making news for increasing trace success magnitude but admittedly that’s limited. I will be attempting to pull off a 7 card data hound dig for my own amusement however. could make for a disgusting midseasons. The dream number of tags is 13 so I suppose one of these could mean you pull it off for only 7 actual creds.
You are misrepresenting the issue. I’m not contending that HB players not play Biotic and 2/3s. (Which is how you frame it). I’m contending that you run both. The comparison is there to present value, not to vouch for a replacement.
The issue is less Biotic or Domestic, and more Archived or Domestic. Or Eve #3 or Domestic. Or whatever. As you say, HB is stacked with tools… draw, money, and recursion. I can’t imagine any of those “last of X” cards are better than Domestic Sleepers.
TLDR; Domestic Sleepers is the classic win-more card you want to play (at least the first one. )
Ah, you’re right; my mistake.
I’ve been testing variations on this for some time. I’m not 100% that it’s good, simply because Power Shutdown is near-useless against many modern Shaper decks. However, it does seem quite effective against Criminals.
I wasn’t suggesting that you wouldn’t be running both - it would be insane not to still have the FA tools in that kind of build. Your original point was:
And my argument was that you were misrepresenting the issue by stating it was two cards and implying that was a negative in comparison with Domestic Sleepers. Yes it is two cards, but the chances of you having both an FA trick and a 3/2 agenda (any agenda, not a specific one) I would argue is greater than the chances of having drawn a specific agenda (Sleepers) in order to serve as your seventh agenda point - which can be your only reason for including it.
Moreover, you’re so likely to have already drawn an alternative 3/2 by the time you’re searching for game point that you probably don’t need Sleepers anywhere near as much as you think. It’s actually more useful if you draw and score the Sleepers early, rather than score 6 and need to search for it. But to get it early you’d need multiples which is something I think you want to avoid with Sleepers (for fast advance anyway).
What is your interpretation of “win-more” here? My understanding of that term is that it’s a situation where you just win harder in situations where you were already going to win. In my opinion cards that facilitate that are not as useful as ones that help to swing a game that’s hanging in the balance or to improve a losing position into a winning one. That wasn’t always the case: the old tournament scoring made agenda points important, so winning quickly was important and that’s one of the reasons why Jinteki and Weyland were disfavoured in the first cycle. But now that doesn’t matter - the only need to finish a game early is to make more time for game two (or a longer lunch break).
Ok so how do you make NEH work? Really just Astrobiotics with better ICE (and less card draw)?
does not compute
(:P)
I meant that you could probably cut Anonymous Tips because the ID itself provides decent card draw.
You just take your already successful NBN deck and switch the IDs over.
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Actually I don’t think it’s that simple. Maybe that works great with Making News, but it doesn’t work for TWIY* Fastrobiotics. My brother and I have played several test games, and he has come to the conclusion that NEH is inferior to TWIY, at least as far as fast advancing is concerned. Between the increased deck size, decreased hand size, and the asset Econ that he feels is actually interfering with his scoring, he’s just not happy with it.
statistically speaking, 40 cards instead of 45 cards in your deck increases your odds of finding a 3of card by 3%, You pass that level consistency after 1 free card draw, everything else is just gravy. Handsize might be a major benefit, but I recommend cutting all asset economy for regular economy and trying it again, you don’t have to go all in on making remotes, as ~3-4 triggers and the extra influence should get you more than your money’s worth.
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