Which ID is optimal vs asset spam?

Netrunner General
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Hi all. Started playing after a very long hiatus and I see asset spam is still very well. I just can’t enjoy netrunner vs this style of deck so Im wondering if there is a decktype that completely melts CtM and Sportsmeal the vast majority of the time?

I tried regval with 2 hacktivist meetings and 2 scrubbers but she seem to lose hard to CtM’s tracing due to anarch economy being very resource dependent. Also messed a bit with tag-me crim but I dont think they can keep up just smashing assets all day because of the central focus.

Is there a silver bullet list that I can play which is horribly biased vs these types of decks above all else? Feel free to link decks but mention any further asset hate one may sub in if they have a vendetta.

p.s ‘fair’ corp decks have seemed lackluster so far so maybe there just isn’t and at most I can focus one of the two. Either way let me know.

Cheers!

EDIT: thank you all for the great advice. I posted my current deck list let me know what you think.

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I’d honestly say that reg Val or reg Maxx is probably still one of the better matchups vs CTM. So long as you don’t run too aggressively in the early game and basically just mulligan for money to stay ahead of the tags/HHN, the matchup becomes much easier. Hayley or Ayla with Misdirection is very nice as well, as you can bait them into wasting their money trying to tag you, and then just remove it for vastly cheaper with Misdirection.

As for Sportsmetal, I honestly ignore most of their assets. Sometimes I’ll kill Jeeves to stop them from never-advancing 4/2s, but the majority of the time I’ll just try and win in centrals through multiaccess.

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In my experience, the issue is more often than not how you play against this decks and you’ll find your counters useless without the proper strategy backing. That is, you can overload your deck with anti-asset tech, but you’ll find it won’t get you past the winning line unless you dump an ungodly amount of it. Val is actually quite good against CTM and other asset spam decks.

Personally, I think the real issue is money and targetting the wrong assets. Remember: You can let the Corp have certain cards at certain times.

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YUP. I ABSOLUTELY struggle with my “decision tree” versus Asset Spam decks. Turtlebacks seems key for their Economy, but Daily Business Show helps them draw the right cards…OH DAMN now they’ve got a Jeeves rezzed.

For players who have done the mental work, I’d love to know either their thinking method or a simple, “Kill This First, Kill This Second” List :slight_smile:

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Some tips from the top of my head. I tried to make a list but I think it would be very misleading so I decided to just cover some helpful examples:

First, nothing is worth getting hit with Hard-Hitting News. If you have to choose between a potential HHN and trashing a key asset, let the Corp have it.

Second, no card trash is worth ruining your economy. Don’t spend a lot of money trashing cards that could go into making runs. Your goal is not to play the asset game but to prevent the Corp from playing it while you run.

Commercial Bankers Group: Any political asset must be destroyed as soon as possible. No exceptions. There’s a list two of them are banned and the other is on the limited list. If you let people have Bankers, you lose.

Corporate Town: This will crush your economy and make you unable to play. There’s a big exception, though: Never, ever trash Corporate Town if it would put you in a hole.If it’s in a big remote, consider ignoring it and running HQ instead. You won’t recover fast enough if you run that remote and the Corp will score.

Daily Bussiness Show: You won’t beat an asset spam deck by playing their asset game, you’ll win by keeping them in check long enough that you can steal agendas and win. DBS prevents agendas from getting to HQ and gives them more assets so it should be a priority target. However, don’t

Hostile Infrastructure: This is the most important and powerful card for Genomics and other Jinteki asset builds. You’ll lose if you have to trash cards with them on the table or if you stop trashing cards because they are on the table. There’s nothing worse than ignoring them just to hit an Snare! in HQ and realize it will be there next turn. They are expensive, though, so you can wait to destroy them. But go and destroy them.

Team Sponsorship: Trash this card ONLY after trashing other important targets. If you keep the Corp poor and can run on centrals, this card won’t be great. Trash them when you can “clean the table” or leave the Corp with a few, unimportant cards.

Drip economy cards (PAD, MHC, Illegal Arms Factory, etc.): A PAD Campaign takes 5 turns to recover its investment, 4 if you spent a click to check it. This means you can leave them on the table for a while. However note that if you don’t trash these cards, you’ll eventually lose hard. Simply keep an eye on the Corp’s economy and trash these cards before the Corp’s advantage becomes too strong.

Turtlebacks: This is a higher priority target than a PAD because it can give 2 credits per turn. Often decks that use this card rely on it quite strongly.

Mumba Temple: Like Turtlebacks, it’s a higher priotity target because it gives 2 credits per turn. Despite its power, it doesn’t give “real” money so I prefer to trash the Turtlebacks first.

Melange, Mining Corp: No longer used very much, but trash it on sight if it is. It’s a one-card economy.

Jeeves: For me this is a low-priority target if the Corp isn’t scoring. Getting one extra install or an extra credit and not even on all turns is not a big worry. I mostly treat it like a PAD.

Amani Senai: This is a card that punishes you for being poor. Focus on having money first, then focus on other important targets. Remember, it only fires if someone is scoring and you can control that. Trash it when you are comfortable making runs.

Hope that helps

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These are great suggestions. I’ll also put out there that I’ll often let DBS slide for a while if I can otherwise keep the board under control. Eventually, they’ll either cycle through or perform a shuffle (e.g. with preemptive action), leaving R&D chock full of agenda-y goodness.

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This is an excellent list. AWESOME!

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I agree with everyone else so far, and I think it’s worth mentioning that, with the current card pool, none of the asset-focused corps really feel broken or like they require silver bullets to deal with; since you haven’t been playing recently, you likely just need to redevelop card knowledge and figure out how to adjust your play to the meta.

That said, if you’ve got a vendetta, you might want to hide in a kullë and call in Freedom Khumalo. The ID ability gives you a secondary economy that the corp can only interact with by spending a turn to purge (almost never worth it). Since the primary threat of HHN->EoI or HHN->HPT/Boom! relies on forcing you to a) trash assets and thereby lose tempo or b) leave assets uncontested and fall behind on tempo, if you aren’t hurting your own (credit) economy to dismantle theirs, most corps will find it very difficult to keep up. Once you’ve got CtM in a position where their only reasonable line of play is to try to force you through a remote multiple times (rather than spamming out assets), you’re much more likely to win the game.

You can’t run on autopilot, though: figuring out your trashing priority (which is highly situational), as well as how to optimize using your ID ability as opposed to trashing for credits, is still important, as is knowing when to save the ability to trash operations from HQ or to use as pseudo-multiaccess on R&D. Whether or not you have Strike up and/or the corp has scored ARES both make big differences to how you should approach running and trashing. Sometimes you have to let a high priority asset sit on the board an extra turn so that you can trash a MVT for free. If you’re locked out of a remote, TeamSpo and Amani Senai suddenly shoot up the priority list. Et cetera.

Here’s a Freedom build I’ve had a lot of success with. I’d consider Yusuf, Dirty Laundry, Sure Gamble, Inject, Stimhack/Strike an ideal opening hand vs CtM and Gagarin, swapping Inject for IHW vs IG, but, as ever, you really just mulligan for money and draw.

That list is tuned to have more game against rush/glacier without giving up too much against assets, but here are some cards to consider if you want to focus even more on asset-reliant corps, in roughly descending order of how useful I think they are:

  • The third Dirty Laundry
  • Cutting the Paperclip for the third Yusuf
  • A fake point (Mad Dash [restricted], Kasi String, Freedom Through Equality, Notoriety)
  • Cutting Aumakua (due to IP Block, only gets installed if you’re committed to tagme)
  • The Shadow Net (bit of a nonbo with Turntable, but super against Sportsmetal)
  • Hacktivist Meeting (if you want your restricted slot or the inf from E Strike for something else)
  • Falsified Credentials (2 inf and really this is better if there’s a taxing remote involved)
  • Hunting Grounds (1 inf, turns off Raven and Tollbooth if you’re up against American CtM, Komainu vs IG)
  • Consume (5 inf, but it lets you go tagme with impunity as long as you can trash the EoI or use Turntable effectively)
  • Cutting the D4v1d/Clone Chip package (not a lot of high-strength ICE) and maybe an MKUltra (but not against Sportsmetal)
  • Virus Breeding Ground (builds up counters even if you aren’t running, unlike Yusuf and Datasucker)
  • Hijacked Router (haven’t played with this but I’ve seen it show up in other lists)
  • PAD Tap (1 inf and just got a slight boost from NISEI, but not likely worth the slot)
  • Salsette Slums (really only if Museum comes off the ban list, but cleanly answers Breached Dome)

Happy hunting!

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Mining Accident is going to get you more mileage than Scrubber in Val IMO, lagely because BP is always useful. Salsette Slums is another silver bullet for the CtM matchup. I would argue that EStrike is better than Hacktivist even vs CtM, unless you already have Salsette Slums. The Archivist is a further possible tech card, but can be niche. Stimhack is amazing as always, letting you trash anything and beat the CtM trace probably for free.

Spam Sportsmetal lacks inherent protection for their assets, which means you can (and should) easily snipe important assets, particularly if you’ve racked up some Bad Publicity. It’s difficult for them to put you in the same kind of lockdown as CtM, as they don’t have run punishment (HHN) nor trash-tax (CtM ability/ARES). So you have more control over the game and can pick your battles. If they have lots of facedown remotes, some of them are probably agendas they’re trying to sneak out. If possible, try to steal the last set of agendas all in one go, like with a massive The Turning Wheel run on R&D. (Trash as much as you can afford in order to prevent them from resetting your accesses by drawing cards.) That way they don’t get to play Game Changer for +6 clicks or what have you.

For trash priority, I would suggest focusing on a type of card and trash all of that type. The corp gets more out of their assets if they have a variety, covering all their bases. Sometimes that means letting them have tons of money but denying them draw-filtering, or vice versa. Make sure they have a weakness to exploit.

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This is a nice list full of good tips, I don’t mean to belittle it, but this is the problem with playing vs CTM. It basically boils down to:

Tip 1: nothing is worth getting hit with Hard-Hitting News. So don’t run.
Tip 2: it costs like 6+ credits to trash something because of the CTM trace, which will tank your econ. So don’t trash stuff.
Tip 3: if you let them have Bankers you lose. So you have to run and trash stuff.
Tip 4 and beyond: I already lost the game so I stopped reading.

The reality is all nuance; there is no easy answer to “should I trash Bankers turn 1?” or “do I check every remote to make sure it’s not ARES or Rashida?”. You have to weigh the risks of floating tags at various times, and the value of advancing your own board vs letting them build up theirs, and sometimes you just Stimhack a naked Bankers group.

Having to make those difficult choices is one of the reasons it appeals to the many of the top players.

But to the less competitive player it feels lose-lose. You trash Bankers turn 1, get Hard-Hitting News’ed, never recover. After the game a better player tells you “yeah see that was your mistake, you can’t afford to trash that Bankers and end your turn with less than 8 credits, then they HHN you and win on tempo.”

Next you play again, leave the Bankers until your econ is stable, at which point they have 2 of them and 2 DBS and a scoring remote with a Tollbooth on it and an MVT and Calibration Testing in it, so you lose. After the game a better player tells you “yeah see that was your mistake, you should have trashed Bankers sooner”

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CTM + Bankers is a bit dumb. Political assets are just poorly designed and CtM doesn’t help matters.

Note, however, that all corporate-trashing is lose-lose. The Corp is playing cards to make you lose. There’s no scenario where the Corp playing their cards is not a lose for you, otherwise the game wouldn’t work!

Anyways, giving the Corp a few more credits is far, far preferable to getting hit by HHN. You cannot win the game tagged from the second turn onwards, but you can win a game perfectly well even if you let Bankers online for four turns and NBN gains an extra 9 credits. That’s not good for you, sure, but you are not going to lose because the Corp got a free Tollbooth.

Against NBN a good play is to clear all the cheap assets (like Bankers) on the same turn. The worst thing you can do is trash just one asset per turn. And yes, throwing down a Stimhack on an asset and then clearing the rest isn’t actually a bad option.

It should not take you long to reach the pointw here you have 20 credits and can spend half of them thrasing a couple cards. You need a turn to empty a Liberated Account and it has 16 credits on it, after all. If you are staring down 4 assets and a scoring remote with 2 upgrades in it, some time must have passed.

In that situation, I would just trash the two Bankers ont he same turn and build money to contest the remote. Trashing the two Bankers costs 8 credits if you pay full price on the trace. After that, the Corp has no more money and they have spend quite a bit on the DBS and the Tollbooth. You can probably use a Legwork soon and steal something from there.

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Dirty Laundry and some other econ is also almost always a snap keep when it comes to the mull. DL lets you check a remote Click 1 with forward tempo and ducks an MVT. If you can then jam Lib + Take 8 or Sure Gamble, they probably won’t be able to HHN or have to tank their own tempo to do so.

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Hacktivist doesn’t directly combat resources or CtM ability. Scrubber is slow. To be good at dismantling CtM’s boardstate, you want your Val to have 3 Employee Strike and 3 Stimhacks. Possibly with 1-2 Same Old Thing to recur if needed.

Let’s say at the start of their turn CtM rezzes Daily Business Show and Bankers, while you are barely over HHN safety line. This is a very bad situation to be in. Scrubber will give you two credits, not much. Hacktivist will give you some chance to trash the HHN, but you have to play it the turn before (so they have a choice of not rezzing, and you have to waste time running remotes to check for Beales and 3/1s, and you risk hitting a MVT while doing so).

On the other hand, you can Stimhack the DBS, then run Bankers and get out of trouble nearly for free. Or play Strike, trash Bankers, let DBS live for a while (unless you have a way to money up on your final click, then you can kill DBS as well).

Then you get an additional bonus: Stimhack and Strike are way more useful in non-spam matchups than Hacktivist and Scrubber :slight_smile:

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Mining is just better than Scrubber. It either gets you to HHN safezone faster because you take their creds or gets you BP (way better than Scrub creds), and it has applications in nonspam MUs. All for the same 2c.

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so is the real answer Dorm Computer? :slight_smile:

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I’d love to see Mumbad Temple.go banned again, as it’s sort of the tipping point for making these kind of unfun decks strong again.

I don’t see anyone else playing it, but Miss Bones has been doing a lot of work for me.

Not only does it feel good to draw.against spam, it has value in most match-ups as it’s critical tempo against jinja, jeeves and illegal arms factory. Only 2 influance if you ever have a little left over to spalsh out of faction.

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I was so ready to agree with you, and then I remembered the time SIU + Zealous Judge Gagarin Boomed me without making a run.

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Thank you all. Here is my list since the post. It’s based on the no.1 val deck but I included astrolabe, earthrise and career fairs because I just never felt like I like i had enough econ while doing things and didn’t like turntable. Influence wise I still had to run hacktivist meeting instead of employee strike unless I give up astrolabe for turntable :/. It does work and it’s nice to have currents so I found it decent so far.

I did get rid of the scrubbers- way too slow card.

Event (28)

-3 +Career Fair ●​●​●​

-3 +Deuces Wild ●​●​●​

-2 +Dirty Laundry

-2 +Falsified Credentials ●​●​●​●​

-2 +Hacktivist Meeting

-3 +I’ve Had Worse

-3 +Inject

-3 +Mining Accident

-1 +Rebirth ●​

-3 +Stimhack

-3 +Sure Gamble

Hardware (1)

-1 +Astrolabe ●​●​

Program (10)

-3 +Black Orchestra

-2 +Datasucker

-2 +MKUltra

-3 +Paperclip

Resource (11)

-3 +Daily Casts

-3 +Earthrise Hotel

-3 +Liberated Account

-2 +The Turning Wheel ●​●

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I doubt a single copy of Astrolabe in a 50 card deck is really going to do much against asset heavy matchups, at least not consistently. You need to have it down before they start building their board and you aren’t very likely to draw into it early. Like others have said, E. Strike is probably going to help you a lot more than Hacktivist in this specific matchup, but it also offers utility in basically every other matchup besides NEXT Design or Custom Biotics (:laughing:).

While I don’t want to discourage creative deckbuilding, I think you might benefit from practicing a regular E. Strike Val list and figuring out how to win the matchups you struggle with through better piloting rather than making changes that ultimately weaken a proven list.

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Mnnn I subbed out the astrolabe and hacktivist for 2 E-strike and turntable. Still running career fairs and earthrise those have been paydirt.

ghbali, the archivist and dorm computer are cute but econ is always good so far and 3 dirty laundry/datasucker just feels too much.