I was attending a local GNK recently & was facing a new-ish player in the final round. About 15 turns into his Corp game he sighed & called across to someone to look at his ‘awful’ hand. After he lost he sulked on about how he was agenda flooded & the guy he showed could confirm it! Being polite, I said ‘yeah, happens to all of us sometimes’ but all I could think about was ‘No! You weren’t flooded at all…you just didn’t do a thing with the Agendas the deck gave you!’

Think about it, the average glacier Corp deck has 8-9 agendas in 49 cards. That roughly means you’ll draw 1 agenda every 5-6 cards. If you’re in a game where you’ve installed, for example, 8 ICE, 4 Assets/Upgrades & played 5 Operations and find your hand is ‘clogged’ with 5 agendas then you haven’t been flooded…what’s happened is actually statistically likely!

What to do about it?

Now the point of this blog isn’t to laugh at what that guy said, but to point out & explore this common ‘flooding’ misconception. As a level-up topic lets assess what you should be doing when your deck hands you a lovely agenda. You’re looking to win after all aren’t you?

1. Fast Advance

The first suggestion for how to get rid of an Agenda? Score them right away!

“Fast Advance” is the term given to scoring an Agenda from hand in a single term. While there are several options for giving you the tools to do this, generally these two are will be your best friends for getting the ball rolling.

Biotic Labour simply lets you spend 4 Credits to gain a click, easily enough to score out a 3/1 or 3/2 Agenda.

SanSan City Grid performs the opposite, reducing the advancement cost of the Agendas. This must be pre-installed, but at 5 credits its hard for the Runner to trash multiple times!

2. Rush

A popular early game strategy is to “hit it & hope” by installing an agenda in a remote with a single piece of ICE. By doing this you are gambling that the runner won’t have they time to find the correct breaker before the next turn.

Cheap ETR ICE is what you’re looking for here (Enigma & Wraparound) are usually great choices), however Faust can cause huge problems to this tactic.

3. Never Advance

Never Advancing is a term given to installing a card in a Remote that may or may not be an Agenda, challenging the Runner to waste time & resources checking.

This typically comes in 2 flavours, a shell game or a Resource-wasting single remote.

Jinteki’s Personal Evolution Identity popularised the Shell game style, installing multiple cards each turn that may either be sweet Agendas or horrifying death filled traps.

A good example of a resource-wasting corp would be a HB Food deck. With 6 3/2 Agendas and multiple Assets & Upgrades that can be installed face down in a remote, the runner can never be sure if now is the right time to pay to get into a Remote.

4. Defensive Upgrades

Too nervous to just throw your Agendas out in the wilds of Remote space? What you need is an upgrade to protect that Agenda until your next turn comes around and you can score it out with ease.

These two are best regarded for the Job.

Ash demands that the Runner has more money that the Corp or must make 2 complete runs to get their grubby hands on the Agenda.

Caprice uses a bit of corp-weighted-randomness to hopefully keep the runner out. However most of the time Caprice demoralises the Runner on sight that they simply won’t bother running the Remote & will focus on a central instead.

Is flooding ever actually a thing?

If you’ve mulligan-ed into 3-5 agendas & don’t draw any ice, then sure…you’ve flooded out!

The point of this blog isn’t to dispel flooding as a Myth that doesn’t exist, but to encourage people to stop using it as a crutch to blame game losses on!

So next time this happens, instead of getting upset remember to ask yourself ‘Am I really flooded? What should I be doing with these agendas?’