A lesson in Fast Advance

"Come here child, let me tell you a story about an old deck of mine..."
wowarlok, trying his hardest not to sounds like a netrunner boomer.

Among the old heads here in Italy I'm forever known as the Titan player, since I've played the deck religiously for over a year. It was only logical that when Clot finally left and Nebula showed up I'd immediately jump on it at the first chance.

I've tinkered with this list a lot, trying at first to figure out which influence spread worked the best:

• I initially tested Kakurenbo, which is a cheap FA operation that works wonders with Stoke the Embers. Unfortunately that build relied way too hard on Nebula being flipped and I quickly realized getting there in the late game is very hard.
• After that I moved onto Nanomanagement, just like Sokka did with his version: this gives you outs even when you're not flipped and opens up the 4/2 slot to any agenda. The downside is that scoring is waaaay more expensive and your influence is much tighter. In the end I couldn't make this work as often as I liked and prepared runners felt like a nightmare.
• I finally landed on the influence spread that ManInTheMoon and the rest of the Bost crew posted just a couple of days after the set dropped: Moon Pool does a paramount job at controlling the agenda flow, something the other decks struggled to achieve, and can FA agendas without the help of the id. Red Level Clearance is a cheap FA with Nebula, but works in conjunction with Moon Pool to create even more lines and Sudden Commandment rounds up the FA squad by becoming a click generator in the late game, when we need more help to sneak our point by the runner.

As I was playing that deck I realized 3 things:

1. Superconducting Hub's effect is amazing at managing your HQ and facilitating combos. Your Digital Life and Piranhas get so much better after SC is scored and in general playing the deck changes a lot with 7 hand size. This changed my play patterns a lot, trying to score our 3/1 first as often as I could.
2. Sebastião is impossibly good right now and our matchup against it is abysmal: protecting both centrals becomes a nightmare when they can punch a hole in one of them, most of our ice isn't great when they actively want to get tagged once a turn and between Gourmand killing our FA operations and Fermenter generating more credits to contest centrals than any other runner, we need some help. Greasing the Palm the palm comes in handy here, taking the slot of out third Moon Pool the HB operation is great at punishing the only small weakspot that the organizer has: passing the turn tagged sometimes. Greasing FAs agendas with Nebula or by using a tag and removing the tag slows them down just enough for us to have a slim chance of victory. Don't worry though, this won't be necessary when the deck eventually eats a crippling ban in July.
3. Kingmaking sucks, especially with our scoring patterns. Since most of our 4/2 score lines involve Moon Pool we often need 3 or even 4 agendas in hand to ensure we reach the highest value Kingmaking offers, I found this to be too much of a downside, as scoring a somewhat blank Kingmaking was often too much of a setback. On the other hand Remastered Edition is the solid rock we want: we score it the same way we'd score a kingmaking, but instead of maybe getting a third point we definitely* score 2 more points with a 3/2 in the late game. Ok the statement is obviously a little hyperbolic, but the point still stands: Remastered gives us a new way to score agendas without the need to use Nebula that is impossible to contest; the amount of safety a Remastered score gives us is so massive that often scoring one is enough to propel the deck to victory.

At this point it should be obvious that I don't strongly believe in Nebula's late game: we're quick out of the gate and we score agendas like no one else, but when the runner is set up we can't rely on our id to do all the work.
The same was true with Titan though, nothing changed. Back then we had to go through clot locks and runner getting a hold of R&D, here don't have to fear clot, but the central lock still stands as a roadblock to our success.
This is why I think "reach" is one of the most important concepts for FA decks.
Reach is how far can your deck still score and agenda despite the obstacles that the runner can put up (including accessing cards). This deck, between the influence spread and the curated agenda suite, has a lot of reach being able to score a 5/3 hidden several cards in R&D without the need for Nebula. Reach is how you win games against prepared runners that know they'll have to face you and despite all that preparation you still get by them, pull out the proverbial rabbit from the hat and win with flare through all the locks the runner thought they put on the game.

I could go on about the lines that this deck offers for hours, talk about the pros and cons of the ice suite and how to adjust it to the metagame you expect to play against or discuss the different changes in the agenda department, but I'll leave the pleasure of discovering most of it to the players, let this be a stepping stone to an even stronger Nebula that can terrorize the metas to come!