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To make up for lost time I’m going to do a bit of a special JoTW this week- three whole decks! Of course, each one will have to be described in a bit shorter form than usual, but the overall point of this week is not so much to focus on one deck, but focus on an idea- thinking of different ways around a problem and coming up with strategies to implement them.

This week’s problem is the ever-present near earth hub, so I thought I’d look at one deck in each faction that shows a different way of addressing the challenges NEH Astrobiotics presents. An Anarch disruption deck featuring the newly invigorated Noise, a criminal control deck using The Source recursion and a Blitz deck featuring the master of Shaper aggression, Kit.

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“Anti-NEH Noise”

Identity: Anarchs: Noise

Cards: 45 / 45

Influence: 15 / 15

Event (11)

2x Deja Vu

3x Dirty Laundry

3x Hostage ●●●●●●

3x Sure Gamble

Hardware (6)

3x Cyberfeeder

3x Grimoire

Program (25)

3x Cache ●●●

3x Crypsis

3x Datasucker

3x Imp

3x Knight

3x Lamprey

2x Mimic

3x Parasite

2x Scheherazade

Resource (3)

1x Aesops Pawnshop ●●

1x Professional Contacts ●●

1x The Source ●●

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Disrupting a corp in this case is about forcing them to constantly re-evaluate their gameplan. One of the strengths of Astrobiotics is that its gameplan is normally quite difficult to interact with. Most of its key pieces are untrashable or are expensive to trash. Most of its tools are reliable and efficient. An astrobiotics player can formulate a plan and not really have to worry too much about what a runner is doing beyond securing their centrals against power attacks. Near Earth Hub turned this into overdrive by giving the corp player a little bit more momentum, enough that they can dictate the pace of the game even more.

Noise in general is a disruptive ID, and his identity ability is powerful enough that he doesn’t really need supporting cards to provide further disruption. However, since it’s a cheap virus and really good for a number of reasons we’re going to want to play Imp, which lets you mess up those bits of their plan you don’t mill out…

Finding the time and money to get things rolling here is criticial, so I’m going with a Hostage kit to find a single The Source early in the game to force the corp to slow down their just a little and give the disruption chain time to get rolling. It can also help me find Aesop’s Pawnshop more reliably, a key to giving Noise the economic space he needs to play smoothly.

Once established, the goal of this deck is to apply pressure using the ever shifting pattern of Anarch tools available. With Cyberfeeder, Professional Contacts, Aesops Pawnshop and Scheherazade Available to smooth out your drawing and installing, you should be at least cost-neutral a few turns in and if the game continues start making money hand over fist while you continue to mill.

A note on variance, because I see a lot of Noise players get frustrated at their deck more than others. Normally variance is quite hard to see, because you’re accessing cards, forgetting the unimportant ones and celebrating with each agenda you hit. For this kind of deck though, your ‘accesses’ are mills and you see them all at once so you feel a lot more strongly when you can look at seven or eight cards together and not see an agenda than if you see them one at a time. This is going to happen sometimes, it’s not a weakness of Noise, it’s just he makes it a lot more obvious when it happens.

Milling an agenda off the top of R&D is to all intents and purposes the same as taking it off the top, it denies access to it to the corp. The big difference with Noise is your accesses deny everything, so you don’t get those turns where you access an operation and then the corp gets it on their turn. This means that Noise is very slightly more susceptible to letting agendas into HQ if he has R&D control than most runners, something worth keeping in mind for making your runs- hit HQ a lot, let your mills do your R&D accessing for you.

Ultimately the power of this deck is putting a clock on the game. With a 49 card deck, the corp can expect usually around 36-40 turns, depending on how much they draw, but against you they only really get 20, perhaps less. NEH decks, with their auto-draw ability and reliance on Jackson Howard to keep on pulling cards, might even get less than that, which is why a smooth, consistent milling strategy can put them under so much pressure. You aren’t trying to control their plan, or interrupt it, so much as make it far, far riskier for them to implement.

Don’t think of your milling too much, just think of Noise as an ID who says ‘the corp removes 50% of their deck from the game’. As a runner, your goal is just to slow the corp down, mess with their plans and eventually they’ll collapse like a house of cards (which, of course, is exactly what they are…)

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“Anti-NEH andy”

Identity: Criminal: Andromeda

Cards: 45 / 45

Influence: 13 / 15

Event (17)

1x Account Siphon

3x Dirty Laundry

3x Hostage

1x Indexing ●●●

1x Legwork

2x Planned Assault

3x Special Order

3x Sure Gamble

Hardware (6)

3x Dyson Mem Chip

3x Logos

Program (5)

1x Corroder ●●

1x Garrote

1x Magnum Opus ●●

1x Sneakdoor Beta

1x ZU.13 Key Master ●●

Resource (17)

3x Daily Casts

3x Fall Guy

3x Same Old Thing

2x The Source ●●●●

3x The Supplier

3x Underworld Contact

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Control decks are all about dictating how the game goes until you have put yourself in an exceptional position. They differ from blitz or tempo decks (Kit’s deck is one of these) in that the goal is to slow down and lock down until you get to a position from which you can play with a large advantage, while Tempo tends to come out of the gates fast and try and win before the opposing deck can stabilize and implement their own plan.

Once again, The Source is a crucial card here, but unlike Noise it’s a core part of the deck. ‘Recurring’ it using Fall Guy and your spare copy can really slow down or outright stop the horrific nastiness that NEH brings with Fast Track – Sansan City Grid – Astroscript Pilot Program counter plays. Without easy access to that, and having to use both a Sansan and a biotic labor to fast advance the first Astroscript, the fragilities of the deck become more apparent.

With The Supplier and Professional Contacts helping you draw through your deck gainfully and build your position in the time you have gained and Logos letting you pull what you need to keep the stranglehold on you can rely on a very light but punchy suite of event based tools and dedicate more deck slots to powerful economy. I’ve left 2 influence free here, so you can tweak things to your liking. In particular, choosing a more punchy code gate breaker like Gordian Blade or Torch might be a better idea if your meta is rich in Lotus Fields, Tollbooths and Inazumas. Otherwise, a Vamp or a Clone Chip are good options, the former if kill decks are popular, the latter if trashing is a big thing in your meta.

Playing a control deck is all about calculated trading, making the corp spend as much money and time as possible to do anything and then capitalising on the fact you’ve drained them. The classic example of this would be if the corp bankrupts themselves to score an astroscript, as is common, your Logos lets you grab an Indexing to immediately counterpunch and sort the top of their deck to hopefully level the score and also get more time. Once this deck is set up properly, it is terrifying- Magnum Opus economy supported by Underworld Contacts, Sneakdoor Beta giving pressure on archives and solid breaker suite. Andromeda’s starting hand lets you get your lockdown rolling from the start and will hopefully let you turn the game into a back and forth scrap, one in which the current crop of tempo based Corp decks will inevitably become weaker and you will inevitably become stronger.

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“Anti-NEH Kit”

Identity: Shapers: Rielle ‘Kit’ Peddler

Cards: 45 / 45

Influence: 10 / 10

Event (23)

3x Diesel

3x Dirty Laundry

2x Escher

2x Lucky Find ●●●●

2x Quality Time

2x Scavenge

3x Sure Gamble

3x Test Run

3x The Makers Eye

Hardware (8)

3x Clone Chip

3x Prepaid VoicePAD

2x The Personal Touch

Program (12)

3x Datasucker ●●●

1x Inti

2x Leprechaun

1x Paintbrush

1x Parasite ●●

3x Self-Modifying Code

1x Yog.0 ●

Resource (2)

2x Same Old Thing

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This is the deck I’m running at the moment, not so much because it’s my favorite but because it’s the opposite of the sort of decks I normally play and I want to try a different style of play. Looking at the ICE being played right now and the way ICE fields are being constructed, it’s clear that Kit’s ability is exceptionally valuable, in particular with Yog.0. With the pace of the game right now, the cost of spending a credit or two a turn to bust through ICE and check on things is prohibitive without either a turbo efficient economy (kate) or mitigators like desperado/datasucker (Androeda). A Yog.0 based attack means your runs for the turn are going to be free, one way or the other, which is another way of getting around the ‘I need to attack constantly and not end up drained’ puzzle. The key to this deck is making your runs both free and successful.

Kit lets you turn any server one ICE deep into one that yog can easily zip through. The remainder of this deck is making sure it can cope with the ‘Yog punisher’ ICE. Personal Touch gets you through Lotus Field, as well as making Eli 1.0 easier, Inti negates Wraparound and Datasucker lets you keep a store to keep your Yog safe from Grim, Archer and so forth. It also encourages the corp to spend money rezzing before they see your yog if you get it out early and, of course lets you spend excess counters to instagib the most annoying ICE with Parasite, keeping the field a manageable one or two ICE deep.

Since Kit is influence light, I’m depending on a single Parasite and a lot of recursion tools. I’ve gone for a Prepaid Voicepad + old school shaper draw cards economy for this deck, despite it being not quite as strong as in Kate, the ability to test-run parasites over and over using the Voicepads and Same Old Thing lets you keep the pressure on. They also make Escher a much more cost efficient proposition, and anyone who’s been on the end of getting Eschered by Kit will know that it totally resets your plans to 0.

A few cards in the deck are dedicated to the occasional glacier opponent, Leprechauns and a Paintbrush to give more ins against a deep ICE server if the game gets to that stage. If basically everyone in your meta is playing modern HB fast advance (NEXT based), NBN or Jinteki then you might want to consider switching these for more power cards, but they help you transition into a long game against the taxing/glacier type decks like Redcoats.

With constant, hyper-efficient pressure your random accesses will hit agendas and start putting even more pressure on the corp to shore up their defenses. With no pressure to get money to run, you’re free to prepare big plays of your own and counteract the moves of your opponent in the most cost-inefficient way for them possible. Once you get rolling it’s very hard for the corp to find the time to ICE up, clear sucker counters and so on, without giving you a window to maker’s eye and secure the next couple of turns for drawing and setting up to flip the table back at them.

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So there you go, three ways of approaching dealing with the NEH problem. You can render their defenses invalid, while still forcing them to spend the money to use them (Kit), you can counteract their gameplan and win in the long run (Andy), or you can increase the risk in them using the strategy that makes them so strong and use the uncertainty that creates to make your own plays more impactful (Noise). Objectively I feel that the best approach, assuming all players are equally skilled and equally capable with all kinds of skill, is heavy aggression and tempo based pressure, which is what has made Voicepad Kate and Andromeda the go-to strategies right now, but Netrunner is fun because there are so many ways to play. I decided to showcase some different ways of dealing with the issues, since every player will feel most comfortable with a different style of play.

Given the triple helping this week, I’m going to skip Jank again next week and write up something a little special…

Stay tuned.