NAPD Contracts has always been very powerful. I remember when it was first released, I didn’t replace the x3 Market Research in my tagstorm deck because OBVIOUSLY, Market Research was a better fit for the deck if not a better card overall. Now I see how wrong I was since NAPD has enabled a taxing corp strategy to dominate most runners and turn even a low-mid tax deck like NBN Fast Advance into mid-high tax.
I recently played a SHL3 game with NAPD against Valencia and found it much less powerful. I think it will be up to whether or not Valencia is competitive enough, but NAPD might have finally met its match. I would like NAPD to be less powerful since being broke isn’t fun, but I wonder if Valencia is enough to discourage its ubiquity.
Valencia’s definitely a strong ID. I don’t think she’s going to dominate the meta and I don’t think she’s as good as MaxX is, but she’s very strong, and good enough to win tournaments.
At the same time, I’m not sure if a small portion of the field scaring you off a card is too reasonable. NEH will still play 3 almost certainly - you don’t score them often and the benefits it gives you over any other card in the slot makes it still worthwhile. I mean sure, if NEH could play 2x The Future Perfect, it probably would, but NAPD’s not a bad second place, even if against a small portion of the field it’s unscorable.
Outside of NEH, I’m more open to looking for replacements - but I’m not sure there are any that are good enough just yet. NAPD’s still good as a 5/2, which I guess is part of the problem.
NAPD may fade out if we get some better agendas (especially for HB, their agendas look practically silly compared to Nisei, Astro, Atlas, and they’re the only Corp where the best agenda suites are mostly/solely neutral cards), though as it stands, I’m not sure it’s going anywhere yet.
From my experiences so far it nerfs NAPD slightly, but probably not enough to drop it out of any corp decks that it was being used in before. I’ve played a fair bit of Valencia and honestly, the biggest benefit I’ve had so far is that some people forget that it needs 5 advacements to score it. It’s a bit like Quetzal, who makes barriers worse overall, but not enough to cause a real drop in barrier usage.
The BP clause on NAPD is only relevant in two cases:
You have more than 1 BP
You want to fast-advance it
Case #1 I don’t really see happening, because Blue Sun and Elizabeth Mills are cards that actually exist. As a result, about the last thing you want to do as Valencia is to stuff your deck with copies of cards that make your bad matchup even worse (i.e. Investigative Journalism).
Case #2 is somewhat relevant occasionally in the NEH vs. Val matchup, because it might make them wait for a proper agenda (or Fast Track) to close out the game, but completely pointless otherwise.
In all other situations you once again need at least 2 BP to make the NAPD scoring take more than the the two turns it does normally. You could theoretically argue “sure, but when it’s a 5/2, they gotta have the server completely prepared beforehand”, but… honestly? meh. Not enough to nerf it into the shoebox.
The fact about NAPD is that scoring it was never your plan A anyway. If you have 1 BP, it’s a pretty minor nerf. If you have more, you shouldn’t really play on scoring it, BUT YOU NEVER WANTED TO ANYWAY. Every deck playing NAPD would rather be scoring a 5/3 or Astro or Nisei or Atlas anyway. Keep playing your NAPDs, and if you play against Val, just score something else.
I dunno, especially with Ash, NAPD is a pretty good agenda to score if you’re taxing the runner. There are so many times when you just know you can score an NAPD–as long as they don’t have a Stimhunk or something.
I don’t think val is enough, but Andromeda and others might be. I’m experimenting with bp packages out of other runners. If we can get bp competitive in general I think the math changes.
I’m gonna say that Valencia tend to annoy me more than MaxX when I’m playing NEH.
As a guy who notoriously score NAPD behind Pup/Eli/Popup out of NEH and RP, It annoy me like hell to prepare a server one turn in advance if I ever want to score an NAPD early on (like on turn 2 after my opponent trashed a sansan turn 1 without drawing econ). It’s not backbreaking but it’s one less tool for me as a corp player.
I think this is the most relevant point of Valencia’s coexistence with NAPD, but I think people are right that it generally won’t prevent corps from playing NAPD.