Into the Void

This is the deck that has been preventing me from making any new friends on jinteki for the past couple of weeks.

The idea is pretty simple – install some good ice whose power ACME tweaks into the outer space, complement them with the most anoetic defensive upgrade in town and start pushing agendas.

By the way, you know the kind of agendas that make the runners happy when they see them? Well, that ain’t the kind we’re playing.

Here come a bunch of my personal notes on this deck that may or may not be true – I feel like there is much more to this archetype than meets the eye and I am still pretty far from having it all explored.

1. We are aiming at a 2-remote server tableau – one to score agendas in and one to generate funds. The latter is usually just a Daily Quest behind a single Data Ward, the former will be a Dagwood sandwich of whatever ice comes our way.

2. Playing a Data Ward means capping a server – as this piece of ice is only mediocre while not being outermost, use them wisely.

3. There are no NGO Fronts or other baits here – if a server is good enough to be worth a bait, it is also good enough to host an advanced agenda. Needless to say, that agenda can always be a 15 Minutes you will get back your next click or a Quantum Predictive Model if you feel like the runner might end the run tagged.

4. Rashidas and Spin Doctors can give you insane tempo early-game. Use it to ice up all your central servers and prevent the runner from taking early advantage of any Dirty Laundry DreamNet Tapwrm Pennyshaver nonsense that is now going to just clog their grips. Remember that in ACME an outermost IP Block has a hard ETR.

5. If there is any risk of having your Send a Message stolen be sure to have unrezzed ice available somewhere – the kind of tempo this agenda gives you with ice like Hydra is just ridiculous.

6. At some point the runner is likely to go tag-me against this deck, so that they can start ignoring Funhouses. This is when your Predictive Planograms start to shine, but they are are pretty decent flexible tool even against a runner with no tag to their name. There is no other tag-punishment but a singleton Exchange of Information, though. Having the runner swamped in tags is by no means our win condition here.

7. There are, of course, some things that can rain on our anoetic parade, most notably:

• Apocalypse – if we suspect there might be one on the horizon, it would make sense to put an Anoetic Void on our most secure central server instead of the remote.

• Political Operative – the most basic answer to our Anoetic Void. Luckily, runners only have a couple of them, and we can recycle our upgrades over and over with the help of good Doctors

• Tāo Salonga – our shaper friend has a way with ice that can make our Data Wards innermost, rendering them mostly useless. Luckily, it only happens a few times each game, so we can play around it with some strategically placed Funhouses.

• Sunny Lebeau – bad news is, Security Nexus is probably the best answer in town to our Data Wards and Hydras. Good news is, it only works once per turn. Also, the World's Best Mom made the subrutine on Data Raven irrelevant, but now that our tag-on-encounter ice says "FUN" instead of "NEVERMORE", the only piece of ice in our suite that is affected by her link is IP Block. I can live with that.

• Virus MaxX madness – this is one amazing deck, but our ice suite is still pretty effective against it. If viruses get more ubiquitous in the meta, though, starting to host our servers on Navi Mumbai City Grid might become worth a consideration.

This is my take on the NBN glacier in the current meta. Feel free to play around with it, twisting and tweaking it to your liking. Don’t expect to make any friends in the process, but that’s OK – we ACME players simply enjoy living in a void ;)