Leverage Core Competencies to Operationalize our Strategies

AKirkland 33

My personal take on HB:ETF Glacier. The most notable differences from other ETF decklists floating around are the near-total lack of assets (of course Mr Howard gets a pass), replaced by an all-operation economy, and the full set of Mandatory Upgrades. If any of that sounds strange, hear me out, because this deck works astoundingly well.

Having so many transaction operations lets you get off the ground really fast, and so most of the ice are quite expensive (and dangerous). You want to ice up HQ and R&D as soon as possible, and then start scoring in a remote before your opponent has set up, preferably behind 2 ice. If you happen to draw an Ash 2X3ZB9CY or Caprice Nisei then your job is made even easier. Think of it as a mid-range-rush approach. With a few serious pieces of ice (maybe Tollbooth, Ichi 2.0 or Heimdall 1.0) and a defensive upgrade or two you very quickly build up a monster scoring server, and as soon as you're confident in it try to score out Mandatory Upgrades. It's easier than it sounds, trust me. I'd say I manage to score MU out in at least 50% of my games. I also can't overstate the value of your opponent needing 4 agendas in order to win.

If you don't get off the ground quite fast enough to score an MU (it happens) you have a regular ETF game to fall back on, with Biotic Labor as a secondary scoring plan to get you over the line. One thing I don't think people do often enough in a tournament is trigger Accelerated Beta Test, and there are a number of ways to do it safely. I usually either install-advance it and then score it next turn, with an additional click to install JH if things went pear-shaped, or have my JH already installed in the scoring remote and fast-advance the ABT. When you have this many expensive pieces of ice in a deck, it's absolutely worth trying to do, because you can easily get 8-16 credits worth of value out of it.

The biggest weakness of the deck is Account Siphon, since you have no assets to rez defensively. It's not hard to protect HQ sufficiently to the point where the maths stops making sense for them, but you have to be careful of Eater, which is where Turing comes in. Theoretically Turntable is terrifying, but in actuality I'd say it'll be a pretty rare occasion, and at the end of the day all the agendas are still worth 2 points.

tl;dr

Faster than most glaciers, but with equally taxing ice, this is easily the most powerful ETF deck I've played with. Give it a shot and let me know how you go with it.

1 comments
16 Jul 2015 Friff14

I love the title, though with so much meeting jargon I was expecting Efficiency Committee.

I used to run an HB operation economy deck and it worked really well. I think I'll give this a shot.