AoA: A weapon (Louisville Regional Top 8)

Nice job, man. Thanks for the reports!

I actually played you that day. You were my round 6 opponent. Both of your decks were very rough. I'll comment separately on each decks in respect to our games: I faced you with NBN: Making News myself. And yes, you kept me very broke. I some how managed to get out 5 points before you ended me. Granted the 5th point was just a lucky Breaking News. Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with the Data Leak Reversals since I trashed them. But that kept me broke doing that. I may have to give this build a try myself, since I'm currently playing with Noise.

I ran a very similar deck at Louisville, but unfortunately did not do nearly as well. Looking at your previous iteration, I notice that you have hemorrhage, what made you decide to drop it? I found it quite useful, and synergized well with Gorman drip, however I think I'm going to drop it to try out imp. No vamp? I found it very useful following a siphon, or even just to take away those 3 creds they gained last turn so they couldn't gain traction even if I didn't have a siphon. What made you decide to go keyhole over medium? I found that medium+DLR made for very efficient R&D runs, giving me all the information and trashing power I needed to plan my next turn.

its funny you mention NBN players putting a pop up on R&D. I ran into the same thing in one of my games, however I didn't parasite it away, I'd run R&D for my first four clicks digging with medium, then on my 5th click (Joshua B.) I'd siphon away those 4 creds I just gave them, funding my next turns runs.

I thought hem didn't keep up tempo with what I was doing, and 3 keyhole seemed way better. Vamp went out because I don't like 1 ofs in the deck when it comes to events, I would rather shore up the hard hitting resources. Imp was amazing all day, hands down amazing. Keyhole was in anticipation of jinteki madness, which, now having played some, might not be a big issue. Also Keyhole wins faster against NBN and thats really what I was teching against. As for NBN, I found that I had to spend less clicks drawing if I could get to a maintainable gamestate, that being, no ice on R&D and keyhole access until the corp answered. They had to draw to find more ice. Also I think it was a by-product of having found gorman early, and encouraging them to click to draw for ice and money rather than doing it for them. Either way gains you money, but my way left me with no tags or no tags to avoid closed accounts and other bad things.

We played in round ~5 of the Swiss. I felt pretty good as HB against this, but unlucky mills with ~10-15 mills and 1 agenda helped out tremendously. Glad you did so well and had a great time!

Next time I'm coming tech'ed for HB and I'll cope with NBN :) Every HB player I played made me feel powerless, so good for you guys!

I was the one who eliminated you with my HB ToL deck, it was great to finally meet you after seeing your comments around here. :-) I'll be excited to see the new tricks Noise can pull on good ol' ETF.

It's cool that I got to play a lot of people that knew my handle online, but obviously didn't know me in person. I can't promise it'll be Noise that I stick to, but he definitely is my favorite.

I really like Anarch as well, I just have a hard time playing them in competition. Magnum Opus has spoiled me.

I have been playing this deck it's a lot of fun but I wanted to ask some advice as to what to do against decks with taxing ice.

Specifically I have been having a lot of problems again HB. HB seems to quickly put together layered servers with relatively cheap pieces of ICE that are very expensive for this deck to get through. Things like ELI, Caduceus, Wraparound (because you don't always have knights) are cheap to rez but horrific to break with crypsis. As an example in one game the server had 2x ELI and a Wraparound... which would have cost me 3 crypsis tokens and 20 credits to break... whilst only costing 8 credits to rez. He then stuck a Melange behind this, I went in, killed it, and he just played another one!

Basically I found myself locked out of pretty much all 3 centrals in fairly short order unless I wanted to spend 10-15 credits every run.

How would you suggest countering this? Should I have just drawn like a madman for more knights?

I was thinking that maybe adding 1 or 2 e3 feedbacks would help me.

(but then of course I don't really want to remove any of the influence either...)

I just found that taxing decks relatively easily pulled ahead on economy and locked me down unless I could literally account syphon them from turn one.

re: getting locked out... I think that's where the Parasites and Datasuckers come in.

Indeed destroying ice is the key, but I think HB is far too fast for this. Keeping them off cash AND out of Ice is almost impossible. As you can tell from my write up, I had issues with them myself, and as some analysis has been done in the past few days I think I've arrived at the following conclusions.

1.) Noises mill ability has to suffice for all the milling you're going to do. You need the slots for something else. That something else has been staring us in the face since core set, and we avoided it due to econ, this deck, with siphon should have no issues with that. The answer is CyberFeeder. Installing crypsis for less, and constantly paying for viruses is also great. On those turns we need to run, its a free '3 clicks' worth of credits contributed to the run. We all love PPVP because it makes events more efficient right??? Well this does that for runs and installs, which is the other 2 ways you spend your freshly stolen cash. CyberFeeder is a click on armitage or 2 clicks for cash worth of effort, saving us clicks we need for bioroids. With crypsis we're constrained on clicks, and as such, we suffer against Haas. Doing -3 DLR +3 CF is a solid change IMO. Josh B helps us overcome this so the 3 of him is too much to cut.

2.) Blind siphoning HQ early is fine. A common siphon counter is to leave an unrezzed ice on HQ until you see siphon coming. Embrace this and the heavy siphon recursion and do it. Because of the nature of HB ice, you can safely assume that 50% of the time the ice is going to be clickable. So if we click through an Eli or Viktor 2.0 to get in (or break the corp to 0 and get an access), it's worth it. Keep in mind that the worst they can do is close our accounts, rarely anything else (since you have no chance to clear tags). Staying atop them and keeping them from getting Gila Hands scored is huge. Remember to utilize their porous ice early to press the advantage.

3.) The sad part is that Keyhole is terrible against HB due to the ice strength to cost ratios. You have to be able to run repeatedly and if part of the ice's cost is balanced by it's clickability, it makes sense that it's inefficient to run multiple times. Thus Medium has to go back in, so that even if you click through, with 2 mediums, this pressure STILL adds up (especially when you're picking up sucker tokens too, which will later be used to trash the ichi or whatever on top of the Eli slowing you down). -3 Keyhole +2 medium +1 free slot (Josh B most likely). This is good because my final change.

4.) Overmind replaces crypsis. It still works when compared to the deep red version because of the free counters from grimoire, but the extra MU is enough to keep you in counters. Overmind saves you those precious clicks, and allows you to develop your board. With this change, cyberfeeder becomes less clear (since getting the discount on reinstalling crypsis which might be lost due to lack of clicks is a significant benefit of CF). I'd keep the DLR and just swap to overmind if you can feel okay giving up the mills from virus and want DLR still. +3 medium -3 keyhole evens out to the same number of mills from the ID.

There is no easy solution to HB, that's why they're probably the top faction even when tech'ed against (obviously NBN can be teched into submission).

There are other solutions like running E3, like running mimic (makes ichi a non-issue mostly, which saves you tons of pain), or dropping knight and adding other breakers, but you sacrifice a lot of power against other factions, which feels iffy at best. HB will always just be a pain in the ass for Noise AoA, but with the above changes, I think it can be significantly mitigated.

Thank you for such an in depth and well considered response!

Going to deal with them backwards. Because you know, why not.

4) I don't like this vs HB simply due to the prevalence of ICE with 2 or 3 subs. It feels like a single run could easily cost 5 overmind counters, and this is just too much of a tax (even though you save the money and clicks, you then have spent 4 on a now useless overmind).

3) Agreed. Keyhole seems to be very good or a dead draw. Having 3 on what might be a dead draw seems problematic. I'm considering a combination of possibilities. At the moment I'm liking the idea of replacing one keyhole with a medium and then finding a way to get a djinn or two into the deck. This would help with overall consistency as well as allowing you to summon the medium when it is needed... and also a parasite or datasucker if they were needed. Djinn actually seems like it might do a lot of work in this deck to smooth out the times when draws aren't going so well. What do you think?

2) I will give this a go! Good idea! (it's the games where you just don't draw syphon early that such though >.

1) I really like the idea of cyber feeder.... I'm just loath to give up my DLR to get it :( Having said that, I can't see what else you could cut from the deck.

That's a really tough call!

Using overmind should help attack quicker, which means more suckers, more costs for them, and you can always click through the bioroids. This should give you more ability for ice destruction. Ultimately you're getting more accesses, making medium better than with crypsis. Some of this is resigned to 'this is the best we can do against HB with this build' type thinking, because it still has to play the other corps.

Thanks a lot for your help. I will try out an overmind version and see what happens. Maybe I am underrating its usefulness.

My current variant has -3 DLR, -2 Joshua B, -1 keyhole, -1 plascrete, -3 crypsis, -1 armitage

+3 Djinn, +3 cyberfeeder, +2 medium, +3 overmind

I am hoping this will mean I can go for keyhole or medium (whichever is more appropriate), use the cyberfeeders for extra money and give the overmind a shot. Djinn with its extra mem and tutor ability should allow me to find the right viruses when i need them as well as allowing a lot to be installed concurrently.

Given that clicks are no longer a huge issue (since DLR and crypsis are gone) i didnt mind losing josh b.

Any thoughts?

I think Josh B is largely used to help catch up when behind and hit hard with DLR when you can, so without those, yea I think it's okay. I'm concerned with how slow Djinn is honestly, I would just trash whatever viruses you don't have room for honestly. I'd have to experiment more with how good traditional noise stuff plays into this type. I'm actually more interested in a whizzard AoA build right now though.

I really like this archetype (both your version and Steven Wooley's), but you're right that it has issues against HB (in all of their variations). I've found, though, that heavy pressure to RnD with Keyhole and focusing on trashing their econ does wonders. What was your keyhole strategy when handling them?

honestly, I was so locked out vs HB that I never had the spare Econ to install keyhole, I was always concerned with hitting the next siphon to stop the money before biotic took off. I wonder if hitting the hand more and imping those components and taking accesses in the process is the key.

Ultimately, I believe that the real answer is to break the skeleton into 2 Account siphon, 3 clone chip and 1 floating influence which I'm using for fall guy. The purpose being more parasites. HB has tons of ice, but you can click in and get suckers, and then trash the ice, even HB's econ will falter having to find an rez all that ice. Try it out, it might be the answer.