I say just splash for this dude, looks like a skilled pedagogue.
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Stick a patch and a sub boost on it and youâre good to go. Can we make that a thing? âPatch and sub boost and this ice is good!â
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Sensei would have been so much better if it was a straight reprint of Ball and Chain 
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There is no bad ice. People simply pack too few sub boosts and patches.
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jesus, that is nice.
Yeah, it went into all of my builds!
Sounds like you Astro-Breaking News-Closed Accounts on him.
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OMG that title, that is hilarious
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Thatâs might not be entirely true with respect to SanSan.
For one thing, it enables Never Advance on a 4/X agenda, which is about the only time I rezzed it in my Edge/Snare/PSF version since the game was over 80-90% of the time if I scored PSF. That version of the deck is in horribly bad position in the current meta though, if for no other reason than IHW is guaranteed to go off in a PSF kill (since the damage is one at a time and âhaving IHW in my handâ is easier counterplay than âmake sure Iâm prepared to install additional copies of Plascrete before PSF eats themâ). Keyhole neutralizes tactical tagging via Snare as R&D defense as well.
However, if there exists a modernized version of Never Advance that gets a chance to shine due to Clot taking NEH down a couple notches in the metagame, being able to slot a 4/X agenda in the Never Advance framework may give you a few deckbuilding options that you didnât have, particularly if Runners think they can let you keep your SanSans. I donât know if thereâs a 4/X agenda thatâs important enough to any currently available gameplan to warrant this line of thinking yet, but there could be, either now just waiting for someone to put the right deck together or later when some other 4/X agenda gets released in the new cycle.
For another thing, it helps throw timing off if you want to play FA around the Clots. The original Astrobiotics was a descendant of Never Advance created by @Lysander; thereâs reference to that in the BGG thread and @Lysander has his own BGG thread on that deck as well. If you trade the Biotic Labor tech for Trick of Light tech (which has seen some current play and consideration in the Clot threads already), now you have two mechanisms for throwing off Clot timing or requiring them to play it before youâve played any advancements at all. That might be another reason SanSan stays relevant (or enables your strategy if they ignore it).
Iâm with you on your opinion of Midseasons though. I think if you want to get a Runner tag flooded, youâre better off building your deck to induce it another way. There are a lot of options for this to consider (where âconsiderâ doesnât imply they will actually work): TGTBT, City Surveillance (which is better with License Acquisition, which is only playable in my mind as a Never Advance agenda), ChiLo City Grid, tactical tagging into Big Brother (thatâs how Db0âs Flytrap worked, and Manhunt makes a tactical tagging strategy even more likely to push a Runner into Tag-Me, which is good or bad depending on if you plan for that).
Right? I donât know when the admins stuck that on me, and I always kinda wondered then too if it was meant to be a compliment or a sideways dig at me. Iâm not really sure if I like it more one way or the other either 
The âbest NBN playerâ thing was meant to be tongue-in-cheek earlier too (hence the âstraight faceâ part) but obviously must not have come across that way.
BTW spags you canât make the Closed Accounts play on me now without Never Advancing it because of Clot, remember?
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Youâre not running Clot.
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Not in the context here, it isnât. It is referring to a specific post made by the user I was addressing, and then the decks that spawned from it. If installing a SanSan in a remote and leaving it for a turn or more is your idea of Never Advance, thatâs fine, but that isnât what other people are talking about when they say NBN NA. Every NBN FA deck that has existed uses that play. The decks that were winning (that were NBN) in the time frame described above were all FA decks. Pre-Biotic FA to be sure, but FA nonetheless.
Iâm referring to the builds without traps, with 2x Ash. Pretty much the taxing NBN lists you are talking about. I donât think running traps is a requirement of the build.
@jerklin got 2nd ay Philly regionals with the NBN deck we were working on from plugged-in up until regionals last year, which actually started as @Lluluienâs never advance deck. We eventually added Elis and Ashes and Sweeps Weeks and Character Assassinations/NAPDs and took out the PSFs and Snares, (I donât think we ever played Edge of the World) but there were a lot of intermediary steps. Bernice Mai is actually a pretty sweet card in the right environment, and you have access to shit like Psychic Field too now. I donât know if there is a tier one deck in all of that noise, but there is a lot of stuff to try.
Itâs hard to say what is and what isnât never advance, really, though. Most NBN decks are throwing shit unadvanced in remotes and passing the turn. Even if you can asset spam enough to sneak some agendas through, without either a flatline or fast advance threat, I donât know if it will be very good, and Clot makes the fast advance threat look dumb. @Lluluien if you werenât fast advancing with SanSans and Astro counters when you had the opportunity, you were doing it wrong. You can obviously win games by never advancing the whole way through, but the best line was almost always to score Astros whenever you could, in every build of NBN.
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[quote=âmediohxcore, post:56, topic:3289, full:trueâ]@Lluluien if you werenât fast advancing with SanSans and Astro counters when you had the opportunity, you were doing it wrong. You can obviously win games by never advancing the whole way through, but the best line was almost always to score Astros whenever you could, in every build of NBN.
[/quote]
This is kind of like saying that if youâre playing Supermodernism but not killing the Runner, youâre doing it wrong. Thatâs only true if youâre not winning by scoring agenda points, either.
Defining âopportunityâ in a way that makes sense enough here to say whether or not I was doing it wrong would be hard. I can just tell you from playing so many games with that strategy that, in practice, actually rezzing the SanSan to use for Fast Advance (where it matters with respect to Clot) wasnât often my best play - Iâd say I did that in maybe 20% of my games? Add some for dodging siphons, add some more for scoring a PSF, but those donât matter with respect to Clot unless the Runner leaves it sitting there rezzed (which never happened unless they canât do anything about it, in which case youâre going to win anyway).
Alternatively with respect to Astroscript, waiting around for another Astroscript to come to chain with wasnât typically my best play either - trying to base a judgement about how fast NEH can get ahold of those in comparison to how MN could have done so at the time I was playing heavily might give you tinted glasses with respect to seeing when it was appropriate to turtle that token and when you could do something better with it, but with Breaking News and Closed Accounts/reasonably important economy resources on the Runner side, I can tell you there are a LOT of opportunities to do other things with that token besides just chain Astroscripts, even if itâs nothing but install another agenda where Breaking News was after Closed Accounts hits. That was true in probably 70-80% of my games.
Citing any metagame changes which happened between now and then to change it (like the one I just did with NEH) is fine; I put myself in the first line of the first post that it could be a factor.
What you shouldâve said about SanSan has nothing to do with whether or not I was doing it wrong, though, and everything to do with whether or not on the Runnerâs side, he thinks that SanSan is enough of a credible threat to feel obligated to go hunting them. I think thatâs actually a very interesting question to think about, and @hhooo already it. If SanSan isnât threatening enough anymore to make any Runners interested in trashing it, then thatâs a key piece to be removed even from Never Advance since the trash cost is such an effective tax and since upgrades are even better than assets for remote install subterfuge.
But all of that said, I can cite at least one NBN deck that isnât so dependent on those Fast Advance mechanics that I donât think it will be much more than irritated by the existence of Clot. I think that makes the Never Advance basic strategy worth looking at again, not because I think someoneâs going to come up with a Never Advance deck that will compete with the current NEH madness, but because I do think that Clot will hurt the current NEH madness enough to open up the field for some other competitors in the faction.
I think there can be NBN NA builds that are comparatively resistant to Clot; if the thinking is that NBN only works because of chaining Astroscripts, thatâs the thinking that I think should be challenged.
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How about this for a definition of Never Advance: âA deck that aims to score at least two agendas by leaving it unadvanced in a taxing server for at least one turn.â
Throwing them out naked is a shell game. Scoring them from hand is FA. Building a scoring remote but not advancing the agendas (thereby making the runner pay to check if itâs an agenda) is the heart of Never Advance.
Traps or no traps, what type of agenda and such is just variations on the theme.
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I played a lot of variations of NA, and I found that despite NA intentions, most of the time, your best bet was to score an Astro with a SanSan, wait for them to trash it, and play another one in the same place, taxing them into oblivion, then going into race mode on R&D. The never advance plan worked well as an early rush, but the deck was stronger if you leaned equally on never advance and fast advance. Your versions might have played out differently, but I found ours to be very good. If you could land Ash+SanSan, you just instantly rode it to the win, without any need to leave agendas sitting in play. Thatâs just way stronger.
Now with clot coming out, Iâm not sure the best way to do it. Maybe you should be the guy to figure it out 
Iâll be playing IDs that arenât as vulnerable to ubiquitous silver bullets.
Iâm 99% sure corps are not in a strong enough position to play an NA game now, especially in NBN, nor do I think they will want to, given the chance. NBN canât set up a taxing enough remote usually, and the porous ice on centrals will often mean that even if you do install something and leave it in your hard earned taxing remote, runner decks will usually be able to position themselves to force your attention away from scoring either way. For example: You install something facedown with a rezzed Ash or educated guess of an Ash behind Eli, Data Raven. Your plan, theoretically, is to either make the runner spend all/many of their resources getting to that card through all the shit in front of it, or allow yourself the privilege of spending all 3 clicks and 3 creds next turn to score your threatened Astro/Beale.
If Iâm the runner, I will be finding myself a way around playing into that game. Often, my turn in response to a play like this is to get some sum of money (empty Kati, Lucky find, etc), install some threat of heavy R&D pressure (SOT for Indexing, Medium, etc), and build a datasucker counter or draw. You can have the NA card in the annoying remote. Only Breaking News really punishes me if I have access to clot (I havenât played crim competitively since worlds 2013, etc).
NBN has a real dilemma on their hands now. If the card is breaking news, obviously you shit all over them by scoring it and closing the runners accounts. If itâs a Beale or Astro, you may not be in a position to spend a whole turn advancing with a Medium sitting opposite your R&D. It may be worth the gamble if youâre a bit flooded and the runner hasnât caught on. But youâre taking a huge risk by sinking a whole turn into advancing in those circumstances.
This is something Iâve thought about more and more since Leela came out. Leela forces corps to play differently, most notably, by scoring 3/2s and 4/2s by playing IAA whenever possible, to minimize the damage she can do with her ability. The more I played RP against Leela, the more I found myself playing IAA on 4/2s against every runner Getting the majority of the work done on the turn of installation allows you the breathing room to finish your agenda and defend yourself appropriately from wherever the runners counter-pressure is building. The more I played this way with RP, the more I found myself playing this way with HB, the more I found myself playing this way with NEH. Games are so much easier by getting the majority of the clicks out of the way up front, and I believe thatâs the direction NBN will want to go in the future. This has tons of benefits, especially in NBN:
Imagine the scenario before, except the corp plays IAA into the DR, Eli, Ash remote. The runner can make the same plays, threaten R&D heavily, get rich, and prepare to assault the centrals. The repercussions for not checking the remote now are significantly higher. If the card is breaking news, the biggest threat from the first scenario, the runner could lose Kati, get their accounts closed, and lose security testing (and, essentially, the game). The runner could die to Scorch/Traffic Accident combos. If the card is project Beale, the runner is potentially letting the corp have three points in exchange for their counter-pressure instead of only two. Worst case scenario, the corp finishes their 3/2, and plays a Sweeps week and installs another ice on R&D to slow the runner down. The 2 advanced card could be a Reversed Accounts, and cost the runner 8 creds, and still allow the corp to defend R&D better.
Also, as a side note, playing IAA will get the runner to use resources to get Clot significantly more frequently, which is another good way to tax the runner. the install cost and usage of SMC/Clone chips adds up quickly.
This obviously leads to a different deck design, which Iâm working on, but I think that playing advanceable cards into annoying remotes will perform much better against modern runner play and modern runner decks than NA will. Front-loading the work baits clot better, and front loading the work allows you to defend counter-attacks more effectively. Thanks Leela, for teaching me to play this game better.
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There are some downsides to IAA though. For one, the bait cards are useless unless theyâre IAAâd. Compared to common NA bait cards like Snare!, Jackson, Crisium Grid or Caprice, which have a strong purpose beyond just baiting runs. Secondly, IAAâing bait is much more costly for the corp, compared to spending a single click to drop a card in the remote. You are frontloading the costs, which means the cost to bait is getting pretty high.
Not saying that the plan isnât a good one, but it does have downsides.
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Can I +2 this post instead of just +1.
The downside of this tactic is if the runner comes and takes your agenda, youâre out the extra click and credit (or two and two), so accordingly in NBN (where itâs easy to get in) the single advancement is as far as Iâd be willing to go (NAPD being the best advanceable trap in the game, after all). But on the other hand everyone seems to have internalized the âonly advance it just enoughâ optimization, as though it were as universally correct as âinstall clone chip first, then SMCâ, to the point that itâs easy to forget to even think about when overadvancing is better.
Itâs a totally essential tactic for playing blue sun glacier. Every single agenda in the deck benefits from it: you want to be IAing atlas anyway, but sometimes the counter is worth less than scoring and responding to the runner at once. NAPD should always be IAAed unless itâs game point, as itâs more useful as a âthe runner loses 20 creditsâ trap to make a 5/3 scoring window than it is in the score area.
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