I’ve read or heard people talk about a key thing to do against decks that spam out lots of assets. They say that you should only trash the key assets. Since you can’t possibly trash them all without wrecking your own economy, you should pick or choose.
As a new player, though, I have not yet figured out what the key assets are.
Help a newbie out. What kinds of assets fall into the “always trash” vs. “never trash” vs. “it depends” categories?
I think always trash applies to cards that directly service the corps win condition. Bio-ethics, Zealous Judge, SanSan City Grid, Jeeves Model Bioroids are all cards that can do this. There’s different situations where you’re forced to trash a card for the sake of your chances at winning. For instance, if you can reliably keep clot on the board, SanSan City Grid becomes a neutered threat. If you can avoid damage and have no resources, Zealous Judge and Bio-ethics become less dangerous, assuming you can afford the protection. Jeeves Model Bioroids aren’t always a must trash, but if a deck is playing Subliminal Messaging, Lateral Growth and Shipment from SanSan, you better trash that as soon as you can afford it.
In the case of cards like Caprice Nisei and Ash, these cards become important to trash to have a better shot at attacking your opponents servers. If you’re playing Rumor Mill, they become less threatening. It all depends on what cards you have at the time, and have access to (in your deck).
Cards that have expensive costs are hard to trash immediately unless you are playing Whizzard or have Scrubbers out, or your opponent has bad publicity. These can create scoring windows for your opponent when you dip to a low credit amount.
You generally want to trash cards like Adonis Campaign if they aren’t protected, or any economy asset that is unprotected for that matter. This is obviously different if it’s, say, a PAD Campaign or Marked Accounts, and you’re at such low credits you would waste your whole next turn clicking for credits. If you’re playing a denial deck, you would want to hunt down revert economy cards with extreme prejudice, but sometimes you can’t find your economy and you have to make a decision as to whether you want to say, build your board state or pressure the opponent for accesses.
If you notice that the Corp is able to do things they otherwise would not without a certain card, trash that card when you see it, don’t let the corp gain use out of it. You’ll get used to these situations eventually, people will mention combos of cards that are generally played in specific factions, and you’ll know to look out for these cards during your random accesses during the game.
Any of the political assets are trash-on-sight imo: they give massive boons to the corp, and they have affordable trash costs.
Draw assets (Jackson, Daily Biz) are high priority. Don’t kill yourself trashing them, but leaving them on the board will let the Corp get well ahead.
FA assets like Jeeves and SanSan are a serious threat and should be dealt with soon as well.
Economy assets can go either way. If you’re playing a denial game, you have to get rid of them. If not, 1$ gains like PAD, Marked Accts, and Mental Health can probably stay. Stronger econ cards like Adonis, Eve, and Sundew will give the corp a pretty huge money advantage I’ve time, so I usually try to kill those. If you don’t trash the strong ones, you’ll concede the money war and will have to win on a different front (ice destruction over R&D + Medium, for example).
In general, assets will benefit the Corp more if they are played early. Therefore, I usually try to eliminate any notable assets in the first few turns if I can afford to do so.
How do others feel about powerful combo pieces like Team Sponsorship or Aryabhata Tech?
Do not suffer the Sensie to live.
Important to note, you should basically never trash anything out of R&D. Caprice, Batty, Breaker Bay Grid (if they don’t already have one), Cyberdex, Jackson (if they don’t have one and you think they REALLY need one) and MAYBE Sensie/Bankers are the only things you should ever pay money to trash from deck. Making a habit out of trashing Sansans from R&D is a great way to always be broke.
"Why are you late on the corp ?"
When you can answer the white rabbit question, then you know what to trash.
You can try to guess too, but you need experience to know exactly what and when to trash.
For general rules:
Rezzed or Not - If the rez cost of a card is relatively high compared to the trash cost, often you want to wait for the corp to rez it before you trash it. If they’ll break even anyways (like Adonis Campaign) then simply being installed is generally enough - they’ll make back the cost anyways. This is only relevant if they aren’t filthy rich. Examples: Eve Campaign, sometimes Hostile Infrastructure.
Trash Cost - If the trash cost is low (1-2 credits) usually trash on access. Simply removing a non-agenda from the game is useful, both reducing the number of accesses needed to win and denying an opportunity for the Corp. Examples: Cyberdex Virus Suite usually, Caprice Nisei, Sensie Actors Union/other political assets, Boom!.
Powerful Effects - Some cards are just insanely strong, either in general or specifically in their deck. This requires your judgment, usually. Examples: Sensie Actors Union/other political assets, Jeeves Model Bioroids (sucks that its so expensive), SanSan City Grid (possibly wait till rezzed, depending on situation), Ash 2X3ZB9CY, Boom!.
Relevant or Not - Some cards are no longer relevant to the game because of the way things are going. Examples: Economy when they have tons of money already and/or you are too poor, Ash 2X3ZB9CY when you have no hope of getting in their remote anyways and you’re poor, Crisium Grid if you don’t have any cards that it affects.
Mix those together and you should have a rough idea of when to trash things. Playing cards that provide credits to trash things (Whizzard/Scrubber/Paricia) changes the math a bit, encouraging you to trash more often.
In chess, a knight is worth about 3 points, a rook is worth about 5 points, and the queen is worth about 9 points, using the standard scale of valuing material. Computer simulations show that those values stay mostly constant, but they can change, in the lategame maybe a rook gets to 5.4, or if a knight is jammed in a corner, maybe he only counts two points towards the likelihood you win the game.
This you can come up with a similar system for trashables, but the rules change more dramatically in netrunner, they can drop or climb to double. Trashing PAD Campaign is not usually worth it, but if you actually have a siphon lock going it, keeping your credit denial plan cohesive can be valuable. If the corp has 6 points, you should never trash team sponsorship. If the corp has 4 points, but there are 3 rezzed team sponsorships and good remote security, you probably still shouldn’t trash team sponsorship: a corp that fires 3 team sponsorships has the game 99% locked up where a corp that fires 2 team sponsorships has it 98% locked up. 4, or even 3 or 1 credits used to trash the sponsorship could be used locking HQ and R&D out of agenda access or challenging that tough remote to make sure the corp doesn’t score any more agendas this game.
Trashing econ assets when the corp has “enough” money can be bad. Trashing materials that don’t match your remote lock versus central lock preference correctly can be bad (rezzed DBS is not that bad if you’re remote locking, it’s backbreaking if you want a central lock or central race).
Jeeves is very often not worth trashing. Especially in NBN, where the priority is draw (Sensie/Jackson), and recursion (Sponsorship/Jackson). Most often Jeeves is a PAD Campaign. For it to do it’s most common powerful thing (FA), it needs a 3 card combo outside of a rezzed Jeeves: agenda, Shipment, and Subliminal (or Lateral). All that just to score 2 points. And used Subliminals can be denied by running. You’re often better off clearing out the draw and/or checking R&D than paying 5 to trash Jeeves. If you get discounts for trashing, that’s a different story.
SanSan City Grid is more often worth trashing than runners expect. Especially, if you don’t have reliable R&D multi-access. Even if they have an Astro counter and are at 5 points (or a known Biotic and lots of credits). You don’t want to give the Corp the ability to click one draw to double the chances of seeing an agenda (or using Fast Track) and also scoring it that same turn.
Always trash Zaibatsu Loyalty
On a less serious note, someone from Germany said that assets are like vegetables: you hate to eat them, but you’ll be better off if you do.
On a more serious note: you have to ask yourself, whether you want to suffer the tempo hit of trashing the assets/upgrades or suffer the consequences of letting the corp have them. More often than not it is worth taking the tempo hit, but there really is no universal rule: sometimes you let naked Banker’s Unions stay, whilst in different games you bother trashing Marked Accounts behind ICE.
Few tips:
I have a simple three-tiered system for determining what to trash:
Works every time. Also, be Whizzard. It makes the decisions much easier.
If you are going for a remote-lock, then trashing things out of centrals becomes better because you are planning to run the remote every time a card goes in there.
That said, if you have a remote lock and are still running R&D you either
The most common case in which it is correct to run R&D in when it is basically the only remaining server on which you can win (the corp is threatening the FA win, or the other servers are too expensive to run efficiently anymore). In this case your only goal is to maximize your R&D accesses so trashing cards from there is ONLY helpful if you can immediately get back in the same turn (or if you trash an upgrade that could inhibit future R&D runs like Ash or Caprice). Otherwise it will cost you accesses in the long run.
Should those ole Prepaid decks not used their Maker Eyes when their first goal was a remote lock?
Remote lock is great in theory, but against some Corps it’s unsustainable. If you just ran and trashed the Adonis in the remote, and next turn they put another ice and another card in the remote, running again is likely what the corp wanted you to do. You can probably get in again and stealing an agenda may be your best outcome, but you probably opened up a huge tempo advantage for the Corp.
I agree that once you have to pivot from a remote lock, that HQ is better first target. But high impact R&D runs earlier in the game can help a remote-lock runner close out games that can slip from them if it goes long (or you guess incorrectly if the remote has an agenda too often).
I would argue that many mediocre PPK players threw countless games by playing a Maker’s too early.[quote=“tvaduva, post:13, topic:8239”]
But high impact R&D runs earlier in the game can help a remote-lock runner close out games that can slip from them if it goes long
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I don’t understand this point at all. If remotelock is your wincon then you REALLY don’t want to trash nonsense out of R&D, since doing so will help the corp draw agendas to score before your lock sets in (while also delaying your lock since you are spending money).
Indeed. I can think back to my earlier days of running PPK, and my favorite way to give away the game to HB was to make a Maker’s Eye run when R&D was too thick. First, this move often gave the corp a scoring window, as I’d do it on too little money in my “remote lock” deck. Second, if I’m blowing Maker’s early, there’s a vastly lowered chance of hitting an agenda as opposed to later in the game, once the corp has had to recycle the agendas back into the deck with Jackson for half the game.
I didn’t say anything about trashing out of R&D or give a criteria on what should be trashed out of R&D. My response was to your comment: if and when to run R&D when you’re main goal is remote lock.
Maybe I misunderstood your point. You seem to be saying that you shouldn’t be running R&D as long as you have a remote lock, until the Corp makes it too expensive or is about to win outside of the remote.
I think if you tunnel vision on one win condition, then a good Corp player can exploit that. It’s better to take high value shots at R&D (i.e. Maker’s Eye after they shuffle with Jackson if it’s not prohibitively expensive to get into R&D) in the mid-game.
Mumbad virtual tour is a definite must trash