Team Fusion-Haa brings you the next big thing in HB mid-range…
@Chill84, @Jdalart, @Arkidents, @Danwarr
Some netrunner cards are blatantly powerful, no one would disagree that Astroscript Pilot Program is pound for pound, a more powerful card than Braintrust. The game would be boring if every card comparison was this easy – two things bring power disparity between similar cards in line.
- Influence/Card Pool restrictions:
With the case of Astroscript, it’s “balanced” and contextualized by the other cards that can be played beside it. You can’t play astroscript outside of NBN, very often players need to find “the next best thing” in their non nbn 3/2 slots.
- Drawbacks:
Some cards balance themselves by asking the player to make a trade-off. 10 credits for 2 tags, 1 bad publicity for 5 extra credits, etc. These are the most interesting cards, because they dare players to mitigate their drawbacks or even turn them into advantages.
The deck that our group designed takes on that particular challenge with respect to the most swingy 3/2 agenda of all time: Accelerated Beta Test.
Only fire beta tests with Jackson on the table, after using a precognition, when Jupiter is in retrograde, and only if you are losing is a common approach to the card. Every player who has ever played HB has felt the pain of a failed beta test, and known the thrill of a game saving successful test.
It’s like getting handed a slice of sheet cake at an office party, you might end up with a center slice of the yellow part with a thin film of white icing on top like some depressing cupcake, or you might get an all chocolate corner glory-piece festooned with twists of ganache. What are you going to get? Will this make me fat?? Is this gluten free?? Nobody knows!
But hold! – What if I told you that there was a card that put the cake spatula in YOUR hands. Plus it’s in faction, rezzes for 1 and costs the same to get rid of as an NAPD is to steal.
Asset · 1c 4t
Haas-Bioroid • The Universe of Tomorrow
Whenever you score an agenda, you may install a card from Archives or HQ, ignoring the install cost.
Jackson ABT combos because you will flip 3 cards, and if there are enough agenda points in the garbage for you to lose, jackson can save them, Team sponsorship combos much more aggressively. If you scored an agenda to trigger team, chances are you have what the kids might call a scoring window. You don’t even need a target for TS when you score ABT because you are flipping 3 fresh cards off the stack and you get to pick the best one and put it down for $free.99
Install-advance ABT is a glacier power play because it could be an NAPD, it could even be a Priority Requisition that you will biotic next turn, and if it isn’t you get to score a 3/2 and use your last click to install another 3/2 to score, extending your scoring window if the circumstances are right.
Team Sponsorship does all that work for you, and it even helps you tutor for the next beta test and put it into play the same turn. That’s more tempo than Kasparov’s Bxd5 in game 4 against Topalov at Wijk aan Zee in 1999!
In the goal of making ABT the best card in the deck, ICE rather than combos is the main consideration. When it’s all said and done, you still always want at least 1 ICE when you score a test. 22 ICE is a good number for NEXT Design decks to get frequent 2-3 click starts – we want our ICE suite to be as close to that number as possible in order to get the strongest beta tests.
At the same time, the quality of ICE matters a lot. The better your ICE, the more powerful your beta tests can be, and the more value you get out of the free installs, easily setting up 5 deep no-win servers. Playing a lot of rush ICE makes it easy to land the first beta test, but when you have 5 agenda points to go and a 3 quandary remote, it can be a long slog to match point.
The final consideration before finalizing an ICE suite and fleshing out the rest of the deck is: how does my deck function when my opponent knows how to play around my strategy? Keeping Jacksons off of HB’s table is really standard procedure to make it unsafe for them to beta test – now we’re mixing in 3 additional high trash cost cards that serve a similar function.
Allowing this deck to have live team sponsorships is a recipe for disaster. It is a must-trash card, it is an NAPD worth 0 points.
Fusion-Haa’s accelerated playtest team attacked the shell of this deck from all angles, after about 6 weeks of testing, we found that a set of mid-range ICE with high individual value pieces was the optimum suite for the current environment.
Haas-Bioroid: Engineering the Future
Agenda (9)
3x Accelerated Beta Test
3x NAPD Contract
2x Priority Requisition
1x Project Vitruvius
Asset (11)
3x Adonis Campaign
2x Eve Campaign
3x Jackson Howard •••
3x Team Sponsorship
Upgrade (7)
2x Ash 2X3ZB9CY
2x Breaker Bay Grid
1x Caprice Nisei ••••
1x Crisium Grid •
1x Cyberdex Virus Suite
Operation (3)
3x Hedge Fund
Barrier (6)
3x Eli 1.0
1x Heimdall 2.0
2x Wall of Static
Code Gate (8)
1x Crick •••
2x Enigma
2x Tollbooth ••••
3x Turing
Sentry (5)
3x Architect
2x Ichi 1.0
15 influence spent (max 15)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Universe of Tomorrow
Agendas:
Because we are getting more card draw from ABT, and it is easier to pick out the agendas we want to score. 3 NAPDS are played to double down on the asset tax and because scoring one off of the table isn’t a big deal for this deck like it is for others.
One Vitruvious over 2 The Future is Now for deck space concerns, I would play 3/1s if I were running a different agenda suite. TFN is a great card, but without a fast advance shell, it didn’t pull it’s weight and had to go.
Priority Requisition gives the deck some consistent speed, the ability to end a game in 2 turns with only 1 card as opposed to 2-3 cards like in all 2 pointer decks, is very valuable. Pri Req generates more instant value than any other 5/3. Hades Fragment is anti-synergy for the deck, and the game should never go long enough that it’s ability matters. Obviously, global food initiative is insane for this deck.
Ice Suite:
Architect 2 cred tax, does not die to doomblade
Eli variable taxes, dies to doombLady
Tollbooth and Turing, dies to d4blade
Ichi, never dies
Crick, guards archives for cheap, must break, turns off sec testing, early dirty laundry, data leak, sneaks, installs pri-req when noise tries to steal it.
This is a high variance deck, and the ICE reflects that. There aren’t enough ICE that generate instant value, so we fill out the ICE by using All of the best value ICE and some quality pieces that can safely be rezzed early without much cost like Enigma and Wall of Static.
The Rest:
The first cracks at this deck were running SSCG, and I found the cost to be too prohibitive to rez for the deck to flow. @Jdalart brought us over the design hump by adopting Breaker Bay Grid as a hedge fund you can architect into play. Keeping the deck high on cards that can be cheated into play is the name of the game. Biotic Labor didn’t make the cut as an agenda stop-gap – late game scores are going to be off of the backs of Ash and Caprice if all else fails.
The remainder of the deck follows up with recurring hate cards like Caprice, Ash, Cyberdex and Crisium Grid, and economy cards that tax and sidestep account siphon for you.
Conclusions:
Team Sponsorship is a big game changer, play 3 copies, expect them to be killed on sight – your game unfolds like a regular HB glacier deck with you having a leg-up in economy when your opponent is respecting the snowball.
Yes Whizzard is good against this deck, we know. Everyone playing Whizzard please raise your hands.
If you can dodge a wrench, you can play HB.