Watch Out for Snares (Startup)

Now I know what you're thinking.

Why would you put snares in a deck that has NO tag punishment and basically NO ways to kill/mill the runner? Furthermore, in a fast advance deck that relies on having tons of money to rez SanSan and can barely afford the 4 to trigger it?

Because they're annoying. They're so annoying, in fact, that I regularly use spin doctor to shuffle them back into R&D. Sometimes I even use archived memories to put them back into HQ. And when the runner hits a Snare! for the 4th time in a game, trashing their Creative Commission out of hand, you will understand why Snare! is in this deck. I am convinced that virtually every game I've won with this deck has been because of Snare!.

I could go through all the assets and upgrades and agendas and ICE and whatever else in this deck, and tell you how to play them, but if you've ever played a wide fast-advance deck, you know how to play this. Try to overwhelm the runner with your economic assets, occasionally put down a License Acquisition or two if the runner isn't running your servers (or maybe even a Beale, if you're feeling lucky), and eventually win off the SanSan you installed turn 2 that the runner never bothered to check. Ice on centrals, sometimes on a remote if you see an opportunity to score that way. Reshuffle your Bellona and 4/2s if you can't score them.

But runners are smarter than that. They know how to play around your sneaky tricks. They'll trash some econ early on, and then, when you eventually snowball enough assets that you're rolling in mondo money, they'll just trash your SanSans and Daily Business Shows and go after centrals. Hard. And hey, what do you know? That's where your snares are hanging out! Nothing kills a Conduit or Docklands Pass party more than taking 3 net damage and a tag.

"But what if the runner isn't running centrals, and is instead checking ALL your remotes?" I hear you ask, and once again, Snares are the answer. If the runner isn't running HQ, throw your snare into a remote. If you've read the runner correctly, and they faceplant into it, congratulations! Now they'll have to spend the next turn drawing back up and (sometimes) clearing the tag, which you can use to throw down three more assets on your turn to give them some more fun remotes to run. If they don't run it, you can always install a SanSan in the same server, so that the runner will be forced to either hit a Snare or wait until you score out an agenda in order to clear out the remote.

For the ICE suite, you're going in with only 11 pieces of ICE, which is pretty low for a 49-card size deck. But really, you only need 1 or 2 pieces of ICE for HQ and R&D, respectively, as the constant asset spam provides enough of a distraction early on to disincentivize the runner from going to hard on centrals. Plus, you always have Snares as inherent central protection.

Just make sure you're keeping at least 4 on hand!