Someone asked what AoT I was running

Looks incredibly solid, although the ice seems a little on the small side. Did you find that heimdall was enough to keep runners out?

@znsolomon Let's reply to that question with a case analysis. There are really 3 Fracters to consider, "Lady", "Paperclip", and "bad fracters".

For Bioroid barriers to consider, there are Heimdall 1.0/2.0 or Eli 1.0/Markus 1.0, lets look at the matchups:

Paperclip vs Heimdall, well, it does cost 5 to break, so it is pretty much a Fairchild 2.0 for 8, which is not great.

Paperclip vs Eli, so it costs 3 to break, which means that it is cheaper to break then to click past, making Eli a liability, it increases install cost of you ice, while not stopping people from clicking into your server.

Lady vs Heimdall, well it works, exactly twice, then you need another Lady, unless you want to take brain damage, which is fine as well.

Lady vs Eli, works 4 times. if you let the draw 1 routine fire, and that is fine.

"Bad fracter" vs Heimdall, now they are in real trouble. If someone brings a Inti to a Heimdall fight, or even just some decent breaker like Demara, they are in real trouble.

"Bad fracter" vs Eli, they will just spend 2 clicks, annoying, but not a huge deal.

Considering those cases, Heimdall 1.0 is really the barrier of choice for AoT. The only real other options are to skip barriers, which means that you lose super hard to Study Guide for example, or run some other barrier, which I don't find compelling as I really want AoT to trigger of every run, and it only triggers if they pass bioroids.

That said, if I where to add another barrier to this deck, it would be Heimdall 2.0, so it is not like Heimdall 1.0 is the best of a lot of great options. For more discussion about this, I made this reddit post a while ago:

www.reddit.com

Lastly, about keeping runners "out", the card that does that is Ash, not your ice, your ice is there to drain all their resources so they can't beat the ash trace, or afford to trash your assets, or afford to do a lot of runs. Also killing them if they do something dumb.

@helanhalvan I do see where you're coming from, and a lot of this comes down to differences in decks (my AoT plays no 5/3s and is much more tempo focused), but I think you're overlooking something; the cost. Heimdall costs 4 creds to rez with AoT, and that's just not good enough for a card that can be clicked through. The only bioroids that should cost you any credits at all in an AoT deck are cards that do something no other ice does (ichi is one of the few good 'roid sentries, zed can be battied to hit consoles, and Eli 2.0 gives you draw and there isn't really another option) or cards that present a big f-off barrier to the runner (fairchild 3 and big fairchild). having a suite of ice that cost 0-2 creds to rez means you can run lean and mean on credits, which your deck seems to want to do (all econ is trashable and doesn't make you too much money unless they leave an adonis alone). I think your deck would be really solid if you swapped heimdall for eli 2 and fairchild 2 for fairchild 3.

@znsolomon I would never cut Fairchild 2.0, it is probably the best ice in HB.

While I would like to add Fairchild 3.0, it is restricted, and I think GFI benefits the deck more then FC3 would. Alto running 2 restricted cards would make the deck better =).

The thing with Heimdall vs Eli is that Heimdall really forces the runner to get a barrier breaker, and punishes people that don't have Paperclip quite hard, which some something Eli 2.0 really does not do. Eli is also really cheap to break with clippy, which Heimdall is not, while it is not the cost to tax rate of your other ice, it at least costs as much to break as most of them. Therefore, having Heimdall on a scoring remote is great, but having a Eli can be really bad as it requires more ice to be added to make a safe server, and makes installing more ice more costly. On central servers, I wouldn't really want either of them. I have tried both, and Heimdall is much better.

Fair enough, it seems like your deck is much more glacier-focused than mine anyway. If you ever transitioned to a lighter style of play with no 5/3s, I'd recommend Eli 2.0 and use fairchild 3 as your restricted card. Still seems like an awesome deck though, thanks for reminding me that MCAAP exists ;)