Scrappy Little Space Station (StartUp - Full Guide)

ValkyriezGaming 419

This is a tempo based Near-Earth Hub: Broadcast Center list that is designed to go wide and build a board state that is difficult for the runner to manage and essentially fork them into deciding on whether or not to bother with your assets, build their own board or get accesses. From the Corp point of view, your looking to draw 3 cards per turn, jam 3 cards per turn, every turn, unless your scoring an agenda.

I've played 40 games of this exact iteration (32W 8L - 80% win rate) and around 50-60 games of some earlier iterations. When I first looked at Near-Earth Hub: Broadcast Center I wanted to use the 17 influence for something meaningful. First I tried value Snare! and whilst it was ok it wasn't helping me win. I decided to use the Asset based archetype and bring in fast advance tools with Bass CH1R180G4 and pair that with SanSan City Grid and Remastered Edition and see how that fit and I can say, it works really well.

Agenda Suite: You want to be able to score Agenda's in the turn that you draw them or from the board in a non-advanced state. Scoring Project Beale or Tomorrow's Headline from hand onto a SanSan City Grid or straight off the board is fine, but the real tempo comes when you can get a Remastered Edition scored. You can set this up to do from hand with a SanSan City Grid and a Bass CH1R180G4 on the board, or even use the Red Level Clearance to get the Bass CH1R180G4 onto the board, gain a . This won't be cheap, hence the large amount of economy assets (I'll talk to these below).

Once your at 4 points with a Remastered Edition token and a rezzed SanSan City Grid the threat of scoring a Bellona from hand is there and actually quite easy to do. Get a Bass CH1R180G4 on the board and when you draw that Bellona rez the Bass CH1R180G4, trash it and go to 4 clicks, install the Bellona onto the SanSan City Grid, advance three times and then use the token off your scored Remastered Edition to win the game. This will usually shock your runner opponent quite a little bit because its a very sudden end to the game that seemed like it was just beginning to get interesting.

If you cant get that combo going, there's nothing wrong with just IAA the Bellona behind a Tollbooth with a Gold Farmer in front of it. Chances are the runner can't afford to get it or will be so poor after you can score out any of your other agendas.

ICE: Pretty straight forward. Use your cheap ice like Whitespace and Ping to protect centrals early, Palisade for your first Daily Quest, Marilyn Campaign or Nico Campaign and then you have enough Gold Farmer and Tollbooth for one for each central worth protecting and a remote to protect your SanSan City Grid.

Why no sentry ICE? I tried F2P, it was ok but costs 4c to walk through anyway without a killer. If you want one bad enough, cut a Whitespace for it.

Assets: Good stuff advertising assets, all pretty straight forward. Nothing really worth protecting with ICE except an early Nico Campaign. Daily Business Show will help you keep your hand clean and bottom the points to protect against single accesses, Legwork paired with Docklands Pass or The Maker's Eye etc. The notable exception to the standard money and recursion assets here is CSR Campaign. This is actually really important as without it you will have to draw cards at some point with an action, which is a loss of tempo. With CSR Campaign you draw 2 cards start of turn (Corp mandatory draw) and installing a new remote will draw a card through the Near-Earth Hub: Broadcast Center ID ability. Occasionally Nico Campaign will also draw you a card when it trashes itself.

One of the best things about CSR Campaign is it's a "may" ability. This is crucial on scoring turns to decline and not draw a card so that way your hand isn't over full and your not throwing perfectly good assets into the bin. The exception to the rule here is if you want to put some points in the bin and you have a Spin Doctor on the board. Agenda's are safer there than in your hand, but beware the Spin Doctor shuffling of R&D if you have been bottoming agenda's with Daily Business Show.

Additional Points: Firstly, your a bit fragile early. Just keep putting assets on the board, rezzing them at start of turn or end of turn if its a Tiered Subscription or a Daily Quest behind a Palisade. Don't worry too much about single accesses, you will leak points over the game but don't be scared to install three cards facedown with one of them being a Project Beale. If you swarm the board enough the runner has to give up to work on thier own board, or they have no tools to deal with your SanSan City Grid behind a Tollbooth and Gold Farmer, so feel free to start building that remote well before you need it.

Why no tag punishment like Exchange of Information or Public Trail? These detract from your win condition of being faster than the runner and scoring agendas. Wasting time with tags from Ping, Funhouse and Public Trail is clicks not spent towards winning. The tag from Ping is there purely as a gear check and to make the runner waste time and money clearing the tag.

Weak matchups?: There's a few, but you can out tempo them if you don't lose to early multi access. René "Loup" Arcemont: Party Animal with an early Cookbook and Imp can be difficult to deal with, or Zahya Sadeghi: Versatile Smuggler Pennyshaver and multi access turn 1.

Best of luck with it and thanks for reading.

6 comments
12 Sep 2021 Bitterfaith

why no fully operational?

13 Sep 2021 ValkyriezGaming

@Bitterfaith Couple of reasons. Firstly, I rarely need the credits nor the draw. Secondly, its a big influence spend that I needed elsewhere and lastly, I generally only have a single remote with ice, possibly 2 at most. It just didn't synergise with that I was doing in this list, but the influence spend was the big one. I wanted bass, Marilyn and Nico.

20 Sep 2021 Radiant

Have you tried cutting the RLC for a Drafter? And maybe even a Nico for a second copy, Drafter is so good in NEH (and in general).

24 Sep 2021 ValkyriezGaming

@Radiant I did actually. I played 20 games with 2 copies of drafter in the deck. I also kept track of how often I got the subs to fire across those 20 games and the answer was 3. 3 times drafter actually did what it said on the ice in 20 games.

Nico and RLC was far more consistent.

21 Jun 2022 kikar

This deck list is super fun, thank you! So far, I've swapped out redlevel, and both CSRs for 1 archived memory and 2 NAPD cordons. I think the cordons slightly improve the anarch matchups.

16 Sep 2022 tuism

This list looks rad, I do miss some good asset spam :)

Some questions:

  • What if you replaced Bass with Seamless Launch? The nature of asset spam means it's entirely possible to have agendas sit for a turn, and Seamless Launch, while it won't trigger NEH, I think doesn't really matter since so many other things will trigger NEH. Plus, more importantly, it's not vulnerable to trashing. Also that opens up 2 influences for... Dunno, something else? Another Red Level?

  • I was thinking of cutting a tiered subscription for the third San San, because San Sans are pretty much must-trash, so having more to throw out, even if they're not rezzed or iced, makes them threats the runner have to respect. If nothing else, need to check.

Looking forward to your thoughts! :)