[SG Only] Seamless ManeVoid

izzy 382

If Urtica Cipher is one flavor of classic netrunner, then Anoetic Void is another! Hey again, Gateway Players, today let's talk about building a corp that's going to try to score out.

Scoring corps have a few options, in general. Some corps just rush - installing cheap ice to gearcheck the runner and advancing out behind it, some corps try to fast advance and score agendas from hand, and some never tip their hand as to which installs are agendas by never advancing until the turn they score.

Rush usually works best when you can fork the runner, punishing early aggression with scary cards, and Gateway doesn't really have the same level of threat you'd want. That's more at home in NBN or Weyland anyway, most of the time, and today we've got good ol' Haas-Bioroid to build. On the other hand, Fast Advance is super powerful when you have the tools for it, but in Gateway Only I'm sad to say we don't.

What we do have is Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design and her best friend, Seamless Launch, the girlbosses of never advance. PD lets us recur the Launch after each score, setting us up for the next one, and a pair of them event lets us never-advance out a 5/3.

Okay, but how do we keep an agenda on the table for a full turn? ICE is great in the early game, but eventually the runner will have breakers, and our bioroids won't keep out a determined runner, so it can't be our complete gameplan. Once we add cards like Manegarm Skunkworks, that run starts getting really expensive — and we're asking the runner to run that remote every time we install a card, because every card could be the next agenda!

ICE is good, but defensive upgrades win games.

We can push that synergy even further if we spend our influence on it: enter Anoetic Void. Both it and Manegarm Skunkworks trigger when the run is successful, and because you control both you get to decide which order they happen in! If you choose Manegarm first, the runner's got to commit to paying that tax, and then you get the choice to Void them out of the run and ask them to come back. Add some taxing ICE out front and the runner is going to be making hard choices. That's 8 influence spent, happily.

With a gameplan in mind, we can pick our Agenda suite to complement it. We're great at scoring 4/2s, and Offworld Office is one of the best things we can be doing. Luminal Transubstantiation is another obvious pick. Orbital Superiority isn't great for us, but there's not many choices in Gateway, and since we want to hit our 18 points exactly, we'll be playing 2 of those and 2 Send a Message to fill things out. The ideal will be scoring a Send a Message and two 2-pointers, but more often we'll be scoring 4 2 pointers.

Once you have a gameplan and the cards picked to support it, it's a good time to shop your influence. Spin Doctor is the key here: Almost every corp deck should be on 3 copies. (If your game plan doesn't leave room for three copies, that's not a great sign! But there are of course exceptions to the rule). Nothing else jumps out here as a must-include, so we'll save our remaining 4 influence for the remaining pieces of the deck.

How much ICE to play is a tricky question. You don't have to get it right the first time you build a list, but pay attention to how often you feel like you're drawing too little or too much ice and adjust and you'll get a feel for it. I settled on 14 here: a mix of big taxing ice and cheaper gearchecks, plus Tithe which is just taxing enough to protect your centrals while you go fast for the cost. We're expecting runners to be using Cleaver, Carmen, and Leech, so stacking big strength ICE on the scoring remote really helps make it too taxing for them to run every turn, or to run multiple times in a turn if you hit them with the SkunkVoid. We don't care about the tag, but the runner not being able to click through a Pharos seems worth it for another big barrier - and for another Send a Message target if one gets stolen or scored!

This accounts for 33 cards, leaving 11 slots. Most of this should be econ and draw: 3 Hedge Fund, 3 Regolith, a Predictive Planogram, and a Nico Campaign round out the econ, and 3 sprint solves our draw. Offworld Office also counts here! I'm choosing 3 Regolith Mining License over the Nico campaigns because we can get it out of the remote faster, and because it's easier to jam into the remote to ask the runner to run it. If they don't, you just rez it next turn, click it two or three times, and if you have the next thing to jam, overinstall it. If you need the money taking a turn off to take 3 clicks of a Regolith, then next turn emptying it and and pushing is a good option too! Nico Campaign, on the other hand, is great, but will clog up the scoring remote if you rez it there.

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