What do you mean by specifically fast advance? I think it’s a mistake to play NBN right now without Astroscript and Beale, so at that point Fast Advancing is going to be a part of your strategy.
That said, I’ve always played an NBN deck whose primary goal is not to astro-chain out (though it’s been a wonderful plan B that got a lot more tricky when clot came out) and leveraging tags has been the primary point of testing for me. I feel like the primary issue right now with NBN isn’t having good ways to tax/tag (Manhunt turned that corner for me) but rather to have ways to tag, punish -AND- survive tagme. I can usually put two of those three into a deck, but if you try to tag and punish you’re going to leave yourself fairly ICE thin. Even if you go into tagging ICE rather than Midseason (I find Midseason tagging takes up a lot of deck slots because you need to pack in more economy as well), you’re generally not going to have a lot of ICE that can help you survive a runner just going “Screw it” and running you into the ground before you can punish. It doesn’t help that the Blitz Kate archetype can generally go tagme when it wants to.
Right now I’ve shifted to a MN taxing deck that uses tags as a way to tax clicks and money from the runner while scoring out of a remote and fast advancing when able. It uses Ash to cover the remote and Manhunt to help with keeping some asset economy pieces unattractive to run early. I haven’t gotten a lot of testing in with it yet, but the cards look strong.
Another option for tag taxing is to use non-tagging tracer ICE like Caduceus and Viper (Viper should be 3x in Making News all the time, if you ask me) and throwing in ChiLo City Grid to turn them into tag machines. I tried for a while to get that to work but frankly the issue was that ChiLo was too expensive to rez at 3. I feel like straight swapping the ChiLos for Hunters would have been a good call, but when the ChiLos worked (say on a Viper → Data Raven server) they worked so beautifully…
Rush out an Astro by turn 2, then proceed to point and laugh at clot as you Shipment from SanSan your way to victory. I plan to literally change nothing in my deck, I will continue to win every game as corp. The threat of clot is overblown just like the threat of will-o-the-wisp was overblown. I’ve never seen anyone play will-o, I doubt I’ll see many clot.
I run 2 shipment and 2 SanSan. Honestly the 3rd SanSan was always redundant. The only changes I’ve made to my NEH deck was to drop a guard for Troll. Talk about an underrated card, Troll is amazing against Anarchs on archives. I’ve won so many games against Anarchs by bouncing them with troll when they run on the last click to steal from archives. Also Eli+Troll is hilarious.
I don’t think Ash is really that much better than caprice in some of these MN decks outside of the occasional advantage in pumping the trace (plus influence of course). Ash basically threatens 2 tags on the runner (raven) while caprice threatens infinite…if you can afford it. This is all dependent on ICE selection I suppose. I don’t see the need for trace ICE that tag outside of Raven though. Constructing the deck to put the Raven in the scoring remote with upgrades that force 2+ runs really turn the raven “on”. The way these types of decks are playing out composition-wise I’m not even confident MN is superior to NEH or harp when that comes out, but i’m giving it a shot.
I’m testing 2 caprice, 2 ash, a red herring, and a bernice just to see how they interact. I would say that if I had 2 bernice’s the Ash becomes superior enough to just flat-out remove the caprice’s and improve my ICE or insert scorched. I just haven’t had much experience using caprice so I’m curious to see just how taxing she averages for me.
@x3r0h0ur if you are using ash’s, redherrings, etc. Universal connectivity (preferably in the scoring remote) becomes something that can be tossed into the tag-punishment card pool as a one-off, maybe even two in the right deck. I personally don’t have the guts to put in free-lancer. I would not go with shoot the moon myself because NBN’s big ICE is just laughed at too often by a Femme and importing expensive ICE seems really influence taxing. That’s my off the top impression, maybe i’m mistaken. I’ve just been burned by that card too much.
I think if you want to go virgo and ICE of its ilk you need at least one sub-boost. Two if you can find the room. It’s an awesome face-check ICE, you just have to have the econ to support it as a 5-cost sentry because lets face it…that’s basically what you’re paying.
Played 2 amazing Kate players and a really good Kit this weekend at my local monthly tourney. All of them ran clot, I Astro trained them into the dirt. Clot is a non-issue, I suggest other NBN players act like it never came out cause in a month or so no one will be running it because it’s so useless.
Scored Astro early, then they had to install clot on every remote I made or risk Shipment from SanSan. This strain was simply too much for even skilled players to cope with. My clearing counters coupled with my use of Grim and rototurret lead to too much program destruction. They couldn’t keep Clot up and keep their breakers and maintain their economy. Basically I didn’t change anything, I played like clot never came out.
-Clot makes them lazy, they check remotes less, so naked agendas work great against Clot
-If they can’t stop the first Astro they probably won’t win, just like a deck without Clot
-Clot makes them weary to run, because if they spend their credits and SMC to make a run they might give you a window to biotic out an agenda
-Clot is purely a psychological tool to frighten a corp to not FA and has very little tangible effects compared to its mental effect (fear of the thing is greater than the thing)
-Though I played against clot almost exclusively, not many others ran it since they expected other players to run it
Clot doesn’t do a lot if you can score the first Astro. But if the clot is available to stop the first astro it’s a different game. I think your analysis is close. I think it’s great, it makes people think, evaluate the board state and take risks. It doesn’t kill NEH fast advance, but it changes the deck a bit (SfSS is now in every deck, it’s not a super impactful card until clot came out - beanstalk value).
Your deck doesn’t sound like standard NEH fast advance to me!
FWIW at London regionals yesterday I FAed a lot of agendas with HB. Clot never hit the table, but I think I may have lost 1 game worrying about it.
