Embolus Glacier

CritHitd20 7264

Why play AoT over Mirrormorph?

1: Your ability is insanely strong IF it fires. 3 uses usually makes it well worth it BUT it is hard to make skilled players check centrals.

2: Initially I was using Daily Quest but I've really been surprised with how good Embolus is at forcing suboptimal runs on centrals, and if they don't run to trigger your ability you can build up a good number of counters. (Note, you can store power counters on Embolus by derezzing it with Divert Power; I'm running this combo as a 1x, and while it is very strong Divert Power is not worth compromising many slots to make your own Nisei counter).

3: Your ability naturally punishes a good number of alternative win conditions like DDoS and Leela if the Embolus/MCAAPs are being challenged. Rez the outermost ice whenever possible to make it easier to triger AoT on future turns.

4: You get to play CFC and Ravana which are really cool cards that are usually very bad.

Shame that there are no good Sentry Bioroids atm. I'm not a fan of expensive ice in this meta, and Tyr is the only one with meaningful subs. I've tried Sherlock 2.0 and Vikram 1.0 but they aren't as good as the usual HB suspects.

11 comments
5 May 2020 Gerrark

I love this deck. I hope Nisei prints out a few more good sentry and barrier bioriods at some point; it could help this thing become something even scarier, and I'd love that.

5 May 2020 FightingWalloon

The quest for a Caprice replacement continues for glacier. I was trying Embolus for a while but did not notice the synergy it has with AoT.

5 May 2020 CritHitd20

You getting all this Jonni?

6 May 2020 koga

Do you not like Ichi 1.0? I personally find it great on R&D to make Stargate runs a lot worse

6 May 2020 CritHitd20

Its challenging because it is good against Stargate but really bad against Apoc. This list is pretty preliminary and needs a lot of refinement tho so feel free to edit and let me know what worked for you.

6 May 2020 FightingWalloon

I had a really interesting game last night with this deck vs Wu. Usually, I find glaciers have a hard time scoring fast enough to beat the Shaper end-game, but the Emoblus and the need for them to keep running through annoying ice on centrals really helped. It broke up the remote camp strategy well. My one big weak spot was a Drafter I had to put on HQ early. A 3 cost bioroid sentry would be such a big help.

The absolute key to the game was being able to squeeze out a CFC late in the game to get 14 credits.

Playing glacier in general without a good Jackson Howard effect to control the flow of agendas in HQ can be quite tricky. I found no time in the game that I was comfortable using a Celebrity Gift because I always had at least one agenda in hand an could not afford to put a lot of ice on HQ if I wanted a viable remote and R&D.

6 May 2020 CritHitd20

Cut the giraffes cuz they are bad. Try Standard Procedure or Daily Quest instead. I'm iterating on this a lot already and I'll try and stream some games of it next week.

8 May 2020 FightingWalloon

Cool. I was trying out Daily Quest. I had not looked at Standard Procedure.

8 May 2020 CritHitd20

My inf is now 3x DQ 3x Embolus. Turns out that both is good. Who knew. Rashidas are now VLCs, only 1 Restore and 0 Divert because setup is so important. Surveyor is sadly Ichi 1.0 now but at least it is technically good against Stargate. Could do 2x Surveyor 2x Embolus 2x DQ maybe that's better?

Amina is frustratingly good against this deck and that looks like the next issue to tackle.

8 May 2020 FightingWalloon

VLC for Rashida is an interesting switch. I had switched three influence into a Digital Rights and an Attitude Adjustment because I kept having issues with Agenda flow -- either had 'em when I could not jam or didn't have them when I could. 1x of each does not solve that problem, but I was just looking for something.

9 May 2020 rotage

@CritHitd20Took this for a spin in an online SC today went 3-1. I went with your changes I kept Rashida over VLC, I love VLC but without Jinja I prefer Rashida if I have to choose.

I also added Tyr and Preemptive Action dropping 1 Ichi and 1 IPO. Tyr did some work and Preemptive was useful too. Totally agree on needing better bioroid sentrys

Really enjoyed the list and thanks for publishing