Beta Test Asa (1st Eu/Af-Con, 2nd Intercon)

This is the corp list that I and a few other NWE people brought to the Euro/Af Continentals this year. It was a very last minute build and is thus a little, unrefined, since finding a decent corp was a real struggle, by contrast I think everyone was happy with pretty much any runner + boat. But by the end of the day I think it was a reasonable choice to combat the boat-runners, especially shaper ones.

Building this I first toyed around with a Loki/Trieste/Konjin/Ganked! core plus Remote Enforcement and Týr. That was fun. But over time I slowly took out cool cards for good cards, the bane of many an interesting deck. Fast forward to Wednesday one day before decklist submission for the event and full panic mode engaged as I was unhappy with every corp we had tested so far, so we tried a bit of the “Trieste meme deck”. By this time I had swapped out the leftover copy of Konjin for a 1x border control because the former was simply too bad at protecting, well anything, and there was a lack of good barriers in the list. As fate would have it we played one game and Asa out-paced Lat and by the time they had found their boat to contest servers, Fairchild 3.0 + Border Control kept the remote shut. “Huh. That felt pretty good that combo… FC 3 and BC.”…. “What if… we just did that?” Not much was changed after that except for the addition of the 3rd GFI to always score only 3 agendas instead of 4.

Why Asa over [insert any HB ID] ?

Asa’s ability gives you two things in my opinion. Firstly you get to play Fully Operational a strong card that not only provides some much needed economy, along with the campaigns that go so well with it, but also allows you to dig deep for pieces and agendas needed to push that final score before the runner takes over the game. Secondly you get to be fast. In this meta taking your time as corp pretty much equals concession. There isn’t a realistic way to combat a teched runner with 5 drip cards in the late game. So taking extra clicks during set-up is enormous for staying ahead long enough to get to 7 or begin pushing game point before the runner is ready to contest it 3-4-5 times in a row.

I also played this deck at Intercontinentals and was still satisfied with it. For this event I expected a bit more apocalypse players and thus made a few changes to improve that match-up and made some small improvements overall.

-2 vitruvius +2 ADT. Tempo is everything and you’ll gladly trade the extra advancement requirement for the extra install and Asa trigger.

+2 NEXT activation command. This card is better at fighting boat than Hellion Beta Test, though the latter is funnier.

-1 Border Control +2 Crisium. Crisium for Apoc ofc and to add some stargate tax. Losing border control hurts, you can always use them on the scoring remote and they also work well against apocalypse.

+1 ICE wall. You’d play Vanilla in this deck if you could, you can’t, this is close enough and 1 to rez and protect an asset is a good deal. Its like a border control you can’t pop.

-AM -HBT -Skunkworks -Trieste to make room for the changes above.

I’m not entirely happy with the ICE suite and would maybe swap a Magnet for something if you aren’t expecting too many Botuli. Possibly 2nd skunk back or just another piece of ICE.