Better Call Solo Boy: Lets Have a Party - 1st Madison, WI

Killer placing, I've been meaning to sleeve it up and try it, might have to just put it into the internet rotation. My store champs development has been churning full speed, creating a backlog a mile long. I guess you just got Fast Tracked.

As someone who loves Lily, this might seem odd, but is her rush acceleration and mediocre ability worth it over ASI pure hating on 'fuckboi' combo DLR decks?

Typically vs dlr you just want to go faster, so it's a matchup I'm happy to see lily in. Also targeted marketing is your asi. Name wnp and trash stuff normally. And if they are just on Josh b, clear the tag with lily.

This deck also has excellent siphon recovery and avoidance patterns. Ash on HQ. Rezzing sansan before it triggers, popups and paywall get your money back, or hold sweeps to force the bounce back. Plus enough taxing ice that the run itself is rarely profitable.

BTW, looking for a witty name for the deck. Suggestions appreciated.

I ran a couple games with this. Its nuts

Why Breaking news over 15 minutes? The only tag punishment I see is lily, and it would seem clunky to use with Breaking News.

I'm officially taking this to netrunner night at my shop, I'll give it a couple spins. I've secretly always thought Sol was the best of the new 3....with spark being more fun.

@8shanrahan there are plenty of resources you can snipe with a well timed BN, and I'll always enjoy doing that more than shuffling an agenda back into my deck. Playing 15 minutes isn't a bad move, though. I just feel like the peak power of BN is higher, but I'm not ignoring that 15 minutes can self protect.

At some point I hope that NBN stops using Weyland stuff better than Weyland.

@badeesh not gonna happen til green is as good as yellow

@Badeesh Poor Weyland. I didn't even make that connection.

@x3r0h0ur Best is so relative. Right now, I feel like its the most consistant and safe of the 3 identies, but its so hard to brush off spark and/or sync. They're all good identities, but maybe the other two call for more deck slots. This deck isn't good because of its ability. I mean, it is, but its more circumstantial than that since its encouraged to play a lot of already know good cards.

Is Lily Lockwell just for the card draw? Other than the temporary tags of Breaking News and the News Hound subs, you're not running a ton of ways to tag someone.

Start of turn clickless draw is very clutch. Second ability almost doesn't matter. It has some use in the dlr matchup, or if the rubber decides to float tags.

Loved Sol since it was first spoiled, and this seems to be what it needs to thrive.

Also, any name would be better. Winter Solstice, perhaps?

@Lynx Kuroneko Better?

Lily seems interesting, but I'm not certain that she's better than Fast Track. Both can reduce the agenda density in HQ, but often I just want to draw the next Astro. I think that Fast Track is probably better with a SanSan on the table, which is a position I often find myself in, but maybe Lily is more versatile. How have you been using her?

@mittens I suppose there's some philosophy here. You don't always have a rezzed SanSan and a scored Astro. You often do, but sometimes you only have Astro and sometimes you only have SanSan. The best runners are going to keep you from having a rezzed sansan after you've scored off of it, so the best you can usually hope for is an unrezzed one, usually. Games are dirtier than that and sometimes you luck out and you do have both.

When you have both, Fast Track is the best card. You get exactly what you want and you score it. When you don't have both, its a gigantic risk. You have to put the agenda in your hand for a turn and advertise that its there. If you have other agendas at the time, this is really really awful. And in most games, I'm in this situation, without both an astro and a rezzed SanSan. The real situation is that I usually would have to sit on the agenda and encourage a run I don't necessarily want them to make. If they don't run HQ to access, they're at least going to be doing something more drastic than what they'd otherwise do.

Now this deck is usually fine with the runner running HQ in the hope of getting an agenda. Its one of the ways the deck makes money. But, its usually best when that proposition is more blind. And, I don't think it does everything Lily does for us.

Lily lets us find out at the beginning of a turn what our options are and gives us our best chance at FA'ing an agenda if it was there. If it wasn't there, we'll be closer next turn and the runner is going to have giant question marks about what we found. But if it was there, we're going to have 3 full clicks (less 2 creds) to get that agenda scored.

Lily is also something we can install in the remote. This deck loves to NA things. It also loves to IA things. Putting things in the remote and inspiring ?'s in your opponents head and risk calculations is a big part of creating decision fatigue. You can't do this with fast track, but you can with Lily.

A potential weakness of this deck is that you don't see a current. If you don't see a currrent, News Hound (easily one of your best ice) deosn't have an ETR, its just a more expensive Hunter. Its really important to find a current, and while lily is just a 1x, on occassion she (or jackson) will draw you into a current. She can also close the gap, potentially on low ice starts or get your hand filled up if you have a single agenda in it and you are just ready to have more options.

Its for this reason that I picked, and would for most NBN decks pick, Lily Lockwell over fast track. Their functions are different, and its arguable that a biotic list likes fast track more (its not waiting on a sansan to be sitting out uncompromised) as its far easier to protect and use your pieces. This list has too many things it could draw that it would like to, and its much less open about what its doing. Its honest in some respects, but what it has in hand is a secret it wants to keep.

If you can't tell by the wall of text, I'm a huge Lily Lockwell fan.

Six currents seems like such overkill, I played a game with this deck and was just flooded with them the whole game. Why not go down to three or even 4?

That being said, love Paywall in NBN so much, excited to keep trying this!

@weepinggorilla He only plays 5 currents, and his other version of the deck dropped a paywall for another architect. All just personal preference I guess.

Hound Solo?

@weepinggorilla At least the currents cost 0; you can always just play one if you want to change which is active. Otherwise, they drop into your Archives, from where your ID ability can recur them. IOW, I can't imagine ever really feeling “flooded” with currents.

I feel like I keep losing to multi-access from R&D quicker than I can protect it. How would you play around that? Also, Targeted Marketing a Cache against Noise: Hacker Extraordinaire is THE BEST THING EVER.

Hah, happy you found the Cache->TM thing. Yeah, sure, have credits :)

The R&D digging is one of the weaker points of the deck at times. If its really bad, you need to get a strong bump on that server. I usually aim 3 deep either on R&D or on HQ. Newshound on R&D helps a bit, tollbooth only if you have to. Architect/eli are great taxes. Archangel is the nail, though, usually. If you're having a lot of problems, drop the Assassin for a 2nd archangel.

Usually I bleed a lot of accesses on R&D to make money, but as soon as the runner has 4 points you can't do that anymore.

And, the best defense against R&D dig is this: create a remote the runner has to respond to. It doesn't matter what you put in there so long as its taking credits the runner could be using to run R&D.

Deck's a beast, tried it and got second place (tied on points with the winner, lost it due to SoSP) at a GNK with it.

Lost just once to a Reina DLR.

Also, never rezzed the Assassin, could certainly be another Archangel...

@mat Assassin is easily weakest link in the deck. No one likes to see it rezzed, but it often sets you back too far.

So one issue I had is clot is a thing. Targeted marketing on clot works well, but having cvs would probably be really useful. I am not sure what to remove though. Maybe lily

@Vhalantru I rarely find advancing and scoring out of a remote to be a problem. CVS was in the original deck, but I didn't use it much. If you can protect a CVS, you can probably protect an agenda too.

Lily did take the CVS spot, so if that's what you want you could go that direction; but, it may also be worth just playing fastro at that point out of NEH.

I guess the issue was that they could get into my scoring remote if I left something there and they would check. This was against shaper with too much money.

If you can keep the pace of the game moving forward, you can usually install something every single turn, and shaper has a hard time keeping up with that in the long term if you can get the ice 3 deep. 1x News Hound, 1x Tollbooth & something else usually does it.

I don't suppose you have any videos playing the deck? So you are icing the remote more heavily than centrals I take it? What do you typically protect the centrals with?

R&d, hq, and remote usually end up a 3x3. Popups typically between r&d and hq, more towards r&d. Eli for either remote or r&d. Archangel usually for hq, but it floats. Almost always a tollbooth on the remote, but stacked hounds works too in a pinch.

Always build for the expected threat, and make sure you have tax everywhere. Bit like red coats in that respect.

lololol this deck is too funny :D

Solicited Solutions
Solidified Solutions

focusing either on NBN's news theme or the fact that this deck is rock solid.

news/marketing/advertisement theme, though maybe Unsolicited Solutions is more accurate.

Thought about CVS some more, and while yeah it's not so needed when you can defend a remote already, it is better when you're behind to a medium dig, or parasucker decks that can wreck News Hounds. It's not just the clot-counter, it's a couple different things-counter. All bad things that are well designed at killing this kind of deck.

That being said, I've found I never need any other current other than Paywall and have cut the others in favour for News Teams. The trappiest trap that ever did trap (out of yellow at least) and have never looked back. Runners hate it. This deck can tax the hell out of good runner decks, the News Teams take that tax up to 11.

I took this deck to a GNK and it performed admirably. I made 3 changes. 15 Mins for Breaking News I'm 50/50 on whether that was the right call or not.

Interns (which took the place of one Product Placement) in this deck is magnificent in my opinion and won me a game outright when I used it to bring back and Ash on a 7(!!) ICE deep R&D.

Final change was CVS for Lily, which allowed me to score through a Clot. I put it on HQ which was well defended at the time.

The deck is a monster.

Does this deck survive MWL? If so, what changes do you make?

^