Nexus Andy: Edinburgh Intercity 2016

lilelia 323

Posting because I really really want Nexus Andy to be competitive, and I think this deck gets partly there, so hopefully better deckbuilders than me can make it happen.

Took this along with a fairly standard Next ETF deck up to the Edinburgh Intercity tournament. For people who don't know the format, you go in teams of 4 with each corp and runner faction (including neutral runners as 1 faction) represented in each team. I'm an anarch/occasional jank shaper by nature and hadn't played criminal competitively for months, but this is what I was left with. Since I'd been tinkering with a Nexus Kate deck for a while, I decided to try to port it into Andromeda. It ended up only going 2-3 on the day, though my corp deck went 5-0 so it was mostly against strong players.

I was wary of fast corp decks running all over me, and tried to make my deck as quick to set up as possible, without sacrificing too much late game power. Early Hostages bring you what you need depending on match-up (Film Critic for PE/Argus/Haarp/most Jinteki, Scrubber for asset spam, Kati/Supplier for most others), Career Fair/Supplier make it easier to get things out quickly and cheaply and mostly cheap breakers mean you can threaten remotes early and run centrals a bit to keep their credits in check.

There are some notable omissions. AS and Inside Job are pretty much auto-includes in my crim decks but they don't fit here. You don't have the early game power to actually land an Account Siphon, especially since most corps are expecting it (without fail every corp iced HQ first turn and most stuck Crisium/Caprice there too) and you can slow them down by threatening it just as much as someone who actually has it. Similarly, the threat of Inside Job is often more important than using it, especially since you don't actually want to be contesting many servers until you're set up a bit. Though against nbn trying to sneak out Astro behind a gearcheck, it would actually be pretty handy, and I really wish there was the deckspace for 1 or 2. I decided Data Folding was very nice, but ultimately whatever I swapped for it would have made the deck slower or sacrificed too much functionality. I also decided that a second R&D Interface was a better use of influence than The Source. I'm pretty certain this was incorrect, and possible making this change is part of the answer to making this deck work.

Match-ups on the day:

Game 1: Sync tracer tax deck. They got off to a great start with 2 Sweeps Weeks in hand, but most of their ice was tracer, gg. 4-0

Game 2: Foodcoats ETF. They scored a couple agendas early while I set up and trashed their asset econ. I got the game locked down fairly quick but they Bioticd their last agenda for the win. 6-2

Game 3: Glacier RP. Similar to the previous match, though the loss occurred as they Battyd a Rototurret to trash enough of my rig to score the winning agenda. 8-4

Game 4: Genomics trap deck. Hit all the snares ever (4 or 5 I think) but kept my hand up and kept hitting remotes/RnD until I had enough points for the win. Scrubber did so much work here trashing the normally 0 trash cost traps. 12-4

Game 5: NEH fastrobiotics. I knew the person piloting this deck and had played against it a fair amount and was terrified of the match-up. Rightly so, the game was brutally fast, with a partial Astro train and some SanSan use for the win before I could snag more than a couple points.

Wow, that turned into a long write-up. Any comments/critiques welcome. In the meantime, I'll stick to playing around with my Kate version (so far undefeated, I should probably just accept it's better).

1 comments
7 Mar 2016 Horse85

Dude. Rabbit Holes.

Also, Account Siphon and Inside Job are the reasons to play a blue ID. Which means they're the things that make Nexus Andy better than Nexus Kate.

Was this pre-Mongoose? Because I prefer 2 Mongoose over the whole Garrote-Femme-Faerie package. Saves card slots and is just as good if not better. This definitely wasn't pre-Passport or Rex, though. At least one of those belongs in every blue deck. Criminals just have a lot of trouble with code gates, so they need like a weird package of Passport and Rex for early pressure, with either Zu or Gordian for the late game. And Corroder's obviously good, but Breach can also definitely come in handy.

I played Power Taps for a long time in my Nexus Andy, but ended up deciding they just weren't necessary. They're kinda win-more, like if they're doing anything, then that means you're set up and firing Nexus every turn, which probably means you're gonna win anyway. I guess they're better if you don't have Rabbit Holes, but like I said earlier, having Rabbit Holes is good.

I do like the Hostage Connection package. Some neat stuff in there, might try that out myself.