NEXT Rush: Scoring the Agenda v1.1

This deck is all about leveraging NEXT Design: Guarding the Net’s ability to rush agendas behind gear checking Ice. This deck has a fairly high win rate and can perform against almost any match-up.

How does this deck win the game? Scoring out. Score early and score often. All your Agendas can help you push the momentum and rush 7 points before your opponent can steal 7. Gila Hands Arcology and Corporate Sales Team give you money. Accelerated Beta Test (ABT) gives you free Ice (23/49 is decent odds). Project Vitruvius saves you from Noise Mill, Keyhole, Utopia Shard or a misfired ABT.

With good play you will have a strong early game, great middle game and reasonable endgame. Based on lessons learned from playtesting I have included tech in this deck against the most likely problems.

The major design problem with NEXT design is that it only has 12 influence and 3 of that goes to Jackson Howard, 5 more influence are lost to Eli 1.0 and Architect due to the MWL leaving only 4 influence to import cards with.

Ideally you score two or three agendas in the early game and just fast advance your way to victory with Biotic Labor and oodles of cash in the late game. One of the strengths of this deck is that with only five trashables (3 each) your R&D is not very porous.

Firstly, let’s talk about the Ice:

You’ve got mostly ETR Ice with a mix of hard stops like NEXT Bronze/Silver and porous able ETR like Eli 1.0 and Turing. If I were to say there was a weakness with this deck it is that it could do with more Ice that punishes face-checking.

Unfortunately damaging Ice is either non-ETR, expensive to rez and/or costs influence, which is why there are only 5 pieces of Ice that you could reasonably rez in the early game to punish facechecks.

The Ice mix in this deck is a reasonable compromise between low rez cost and taxation factor. The average rez cost of the Ice is 3.17 (2.71 if you exclude the two NEXT Gold from the calculations).

Used wisely almost all the Ice will give you fair value throughout the game either through letting you score, preventing nasty runs or taxing the runner. Speaking of taxation - everything is D4v1d proof, the runner will need to pay cash, cards or clicks to go through anything you’ve got. How do you deploy the Ice? Centrals and a single scoring server. There is very little reason to open a second remote server and many reasons not to, such as Bank Job and Security Testing.

Architect: The first one should almost invariably go on R&D. Having an indestructible Ice is gold against Ice Destruction decks, although they will still walk through for 2 with Mimic. The second one can go wherever you think appropriate (if you play it at all) although likely HQ or the scoring server If you are facing Ice Destruction.

Cortex Lock: If I could have two of these I would take them in a Heartbeat. These are amazing against early facechecks, setting the runner back an entire turn to refill their hand and it only costs 2 to rez. Even better it is too high for Mimic without Datasucker support.

NEXT Gold: Put it down as a bluff, or even better, leave it in your hand or discard it and install it later with Architect. You can certainly rez it late game, but the ideal situation is to get it rezzed with ABT. On that note it makes a good card to discard and reshuffle with Jackson Howard if you’ve got nothing better to reshuffle.

Rototurret: Great for taking out an early Magnum Opus or Corroder. Rez this only to kill a program, save an installed agenda or prevent an Account Siphon. Very vulnerable to Parasite so only rez it when you will get a big result.

Chimera: either HQ against Criminals or on your scoring server. Ideally as the innermost Ice so you won’t have to rez it very often. It will gear check against all three breaker types and you’ve got Turing for AI breakers. This is a good surprise defense against Account Siphon or an Inside job on your outermost Ice.

Eli 1.0: R&D is the best for this taxing Ice but it can augment the taxation factor of your other Ice on HQ or the scoring server.

NEXT Bronze & NEXT Silver: HQ and the scoring server are the best places for hard ETR.

Paper Wall & Quandary: These are gear checking Ice for your scoring server. Paper Wall is 0$ to rez so you can potentially defend even if you’ve lost all your credits. Once your opponent has breakers out you can use them as bluffing Ice over Archives or a Jackson in a remote. Also great to throw on top of ‘real’ ice if your opponent is using #Inside Job.

Turing: Salvation against Eater, Faust and maybe Yog. Use this anywhere you need it, including centrals.

Econ:

Hedge Fund is great all year round but fantastic in your opening hand, Peak Efficiency is an amazing late game draw and worth holding on to for emergencies. Corporate Sales is fast drip econ and Gila Hands lets you for 3 Accelerated Beta Test and possibly Architect can also help you by giving you free Ice install and/or free Ice rez. Adonis Campaign lets you make efficient use of your scoring server and synergizes well with Gila Hands. Adonis can also be installed in your scoring server as a fake out to provoke a taxing run once the runner has all their breakers out.

Utility Cards:

Biotic Labor will let you fast advance any of your six 3/2 agendas for 7 this card vital for scoring agendas once the runner has a full breaker suite out. Crisium Grid will protect you against Account Siphon/Vamp or other run effects. Cyberdex Virus Suite is protection in your deck from big Medium runs but is mainly a Clot buster to re-enable Biotic Labor. Jackson Howard is great for rescuing Agendas after a bad Accelerated Beta Test. Also useful for drawing that last agenda or Biotic Labor to win the game once you are on 5 points.

Agendas:

Your first priority is to score an econ agenda, either Gila Hands Arcology or Corporate Sales Team, they will be a tremendous speed boost that will help you rez Ice and score you next agenda. The other reason is that Corporate Sales Team is 4/2 and you’ve got the best chance of scoring it early on, when the runner hasn’t built much of a rig. Project Vitruvius is worth over-advancing if you have the money and a safe scoring window in the early or middle game. Vitruvius can give you a Peak Efficiency or Biotic Labor back from archives whenever you need it too. When to fire Accelerated Beta Test is one of the most important judgement calls in this deck. It's always calculating the odds (11 Agendas, 23 Ice) as well as thinking about which pieces of Ice are left in the deck. It's certainly worth firing if you are losing badly and it's also vital to fire if you are facing Leela or Valencia. Being able to force the rez of Ice against certain decks can set their strategy back and give you a chance to take the initiative. Stacking a single server 3-5 Ice deep is often a good use for ABT Ice. Although the Ice in this deck may be individually weak, the cumulative tax effect can be quite intimidating to the runner. One advantage of a runner hitting R&D with multi-access is after they steal Agendas or trash Assets the probability of hitting multiple Ice with ABT goes way up.

Identity ability:

You can get up to six free clicks before your first turn. You get a one click advantage for every piece of Ice installed and then a further one click advantage for every replacement card drawn. To maximise the value of this advantage you should either use it to score early, get early econ (Adonis) or both (Gila Hands/Sales Team). Designing around this identity ability has meant that the Ice count in this deck is quite high. To compensate for this there is a strong emphasis on econ and most of the Ice is quite cheap.

Mulligan:

Always keep any hand with three or more Ice. Mulligan if you have less than two Ice. Keep two Ice unless it’s really bad. An example of a bad hand might be NEXT Gold, Paper Wall and 3 Agendas. Double Turing and 3 Agendas would also be worth a mulligan.

Not included:

• Eden Fragment – hard to score and not as helpful as the other Agendas already in the deck.

• Melange Mining Corp. – Does not work well with Gila Hands Arcology and its 1$ trash cost makes R&D porous.

• Eve Campaign – Too expensive to rez and too slow to pay out.

• Launch Campaign – A possible alternative to Adonis, but does not give the same total profit.

• Aggressive Secretary – This card could be quite useful as a one off inclusion. I have not tested including it yet since the deck seems very successful without it. Slight disadvantage in making your R&D more porous, slight advantage in making the runner more cautious.

• Edge of World – Yes you could potentially do 3-5 brain damage with this from your scoring server but to what purpose? At best it turns off Faust and it's unlikely they will follow up by flatlining on a NEXT Gold. Also there's not enough influence.

• Will-o'-the-Wisp – A potentially useful anti-breaker card. It is expensive to rez, allows the runner to tutor again and also very cheap to trash at 1, which makes R&D porous.

• Successful Demonstration – There are not enough card slots for 3x Hedge Fund and 3x Peak Efficiency, although this is cheaper and more profitable than Hedge Fund and works in the early game too, it is also circumstantial and depends on the runner bouncing off your Ice or choosing to jack out. Some runners don’t run and others don’t fail, it’s better to use econ that is more dependable and fires at your convenience.

• Green Level Clearance – You would almost always rather have more money than card draw in this deck, since almost half your draws will be Ice and you only have 4 places to put it.

• Wall of Static – It would save influence compared to Eli 1.0, but is a lot less taxing.

• Wraparound – It would be a nice inclusion as a barrier effective against AI breakers and Parasite, however this deck doesn’t have the influence to spare.

• Viper – There were originally three in the first version of this deck but they were removed because it was somewhat porous and weak against decks that have high . Also vulnerable to Yog + 1 Datasucker token.

• Pop-up Window – Not enough influence, porous and the money gained will be spent installing additional Ice over the same server to end runs.

• Enigma – Vulnerable to Yog.

• Ichi 1.0 – a lot stronger than Rototurret but porous and breakable with $clicks. A potential alternative to one of the NEXT Gold or Rototurrets.

• Mother Goddess – It would help the NEXT Ice but will quickly become useless for keeping the runner out of servers.