Gonna bring a little math to the table here. Captain posted a great game theory slideshow in the article but then said flat out, “You shouldn’t play NEH, and you shouldn’t play clot!”
I’m just gonna make up some winrates here:
runner clot: 100% vs neh / 45% vs glacier
runner no clot: 30% vs neh / 55% vs glacier
To solve, set each player’s EV of both choices equal (where “n” = P(play neh) and “c” = P(play clot)):
Wolframalpha says c=5/16 and n=1/8. If you don’t believe my made-up win% numbers of course you can click through and fiddle with them.
There are a lot of other factors, of course. This is just modeling one game. Trying to win the whole tournament, you have to think about odds to win 80%+ of your games, which comes down to variance. If you expect a mixed field of clot and no-clot, glacier is much more likely to win enough above expectation.
Yea ok what I meant to say was that “the average netrunner player is more likely to play clot than the mixed strategy nash equilibrium says you should meaning that playing NEH is irrational and playing clot is also irrational, since glacier will overpreform” (and we mostly care about spikes in tournament results)
For instance imagine if C=1/2, the probability of seeing an NEH player after round 5 is much lower than seeing a glacier player after round 5. So you would rather play clotless expecting glacier players to be the largest group at the top tables rather than play clot and have a worse matchup at the top tables (a player is relatively indifferent beteween 32nd and 64th but has a very high marginal utility increase when compareing 2nd and third and 1st and second)
As a former pro poker player it’s worth me pointing out in this discussion that the Nash Equilibrium isn’t necessarily “optimal”. What NE represents is a set of strategies for all players that would concede no advantage to the others - i.e. there is nothing anyone could do to modify their strategy to gain an advantage, even if they knew exactly what all other players’ strategies were. If everyone is playing the NE strategy then sure, you absolutely have to play Nash too in order to not be at a disadvantage; but the reality is that most players aren’t playing anything close to a NE strategy and so you shouldn’t either, because doing so is actually giving up an edge.
To return to the discussion topic… some people have to play Clot because if no one does then NEH is still top of the pile. Some people still have to play NEH too, despite Clot’s existence, because otherwise Runners will have it too easy against glaciers.
It’s worth pointing out if we’re going into this sort of discussion, that after the cut in tournaments, if they’re double elimination either you or your opponent can have the choice to corp or run. My intuition is that at that point having one of your decks have some really strong matchups at the expense of the rest of the field, with the other being a general allrounder, is a good place to be.
It also probably means that if you play NEH in a tournament, your runner deck should ideally have a decent matchup against all the major competitive corp archetypes, in case you run into a clot player in elimination.
Theres one in my deck. Thats what I’m telling everyone now. It might be true, it might not, but either way, I’m telling you its in there. Only Dan and those reading the submitted lists will know for sure.
I actually really dislike how Clot will affect the game. I think it’s sloppy design, and just pandering to players complaining about Fastrobiotics being unbeatable.
Blah blah blah math stuff and things.
That aside, here’s what you are now faced with as a competitive person choosing a deck for a tournament:
How many people will play Clot? Am I ok with hoping I dodge those decks in the swiss and they don’t make the cut? Do I want to take the chance that Clot sideswipes me in order to have a ridiculously easy game against all the slow runner decks aiming to beat glacier?
Does that sound remotely fun or deeply strategic to anyone? To me it sounds like a coin flip. Now, you could pretend we live in a world where everyone accepts NBNFA is dead and plays glacier and PE, and decks that beat glacier and PE, but other people won’t necessarily accept that world and will bring Fastrobiotics and cream you. And you can flip a coin, decide to bring Clot, and cream the FA players while losing ground to Glacier (provided of course you are playing shaper).
At my local store championship, the first one in my area post-The Valley, only two players brought shaper decks with Clot. Out of 26 players, we had tons of glacier and 2 NBN FA players. The NBN decks met in the finals. Mission accomplished FFG?
Jackson Howard was great design. A very useful card which happens to strengthen decks against one of the most powerful strategies at the time. Everyone is still playing 3 Jackson Howard in their decks, and it’s still excellent against Noise. Clot is going to yo-yo back and forth in popularity based on how much people still jam FA, and it will always just be a coin flip and praying for the right matchups in your tournament. Increased variance, bad design.
One card being in or out shouldn’t define the meta though. Shapers will be there either way, going from a 50/50 to a 80/20 by switching out one card shouldn’t be the meta.
It is LITERALLY impossible to play around clot as NEH FA. /s
If making the deck slightly less efficient by packing suboptimal cards is the ACTUAL result, I’m happy with that. For instance, start packing CVS, instead of a DBS. Its less efficient, but could potentially make a difference vs clot (not this specific example, because its a half measure). Basically the point is to make the deck not run at 1000 mph, just 850. Its not like the whole deck falls apart, especially if you tweak for it. Just NEH as we knew it suffers.
In practice clot usually annihilates you even if you “slow down to 850 mph”. So if you are going to play astrobiotics then you might as well play it at 1000 mph and just concede to clot. That creates a dynamic of [runners with clot] >> astrobiotics >> [runners not prepared for the NEH matchup].
Of course you can play around clot, that’s why the match is 80/20, not 100/0. But games vs NEH were closely contested before clot by shaper. Clotting one agenda will win you the game a huge amount of the time.
And all the NEH fastrobiotics decks have adjusted their deck slots and play styles appropriately? I would bet even more than 80/20 could be gained by tweaking the decks. Which, hopefully, will drop the win rate vs your average deck, thus having exactly the effect ffg intended (IMO).
(1) Just play astrobiotics, (maybe adding shipment from sansan or something, maybe not), and hope you made a good meta call and can dodge clot. You’re going to lose to clot shaper a huge amount of the time no matter what you put in your deck.
(2) Play some NBN deck whose plan doesn’t involve Biotic Labor. If you can build a Tollbooth remote runners are going to be stretched to break in and continue to threaten clot. The HB rush deck does a good job of demonstrating this principle: the only way clot is GREAT in a matchup is if you can afford to do basically whatever you want while you threaten clot and set up. If the corp can pressure the runner through remotes, it’s kinda whatever, even if they’re playing some FA.
