Sexy Robot Factory: A Modern HB Glacier List

The other day, I did a search on the site for an HB list featuring Eliza’s Toybox. I think the card is ridiculous in the right deck and had played a glacier deck for about a month when the card came out before getting distracted by something else. The only solid deck I found was friend of the Atlanta meta Weezeface’s Wotub list. While I think that deck is really solid, my list was much more of a straight glacier/control deck along the lines of Red Coats. With that, I realized that the HB glacier archetype was in need of a refresh given that new cards have been released in the past several months that make that deck even better. I present to the community a modern version of what I believe to be a strong glacier deck with long game inevitability that can survive the early runner aggression to get you there - I present to you: Sexy Robot Factory…

Win Condition:

You will typically install two 2 point agendas and one of your two 3 point agendas behind your glacier remote server. Most of the time, the scoring windows will be obvious and you just jam an agenda when the runner has gone low on money trying to run centrals or trash your army of sexy robot assets. If you have Ash (which you don’t usually need as I will explain later), you have that much more certainty that the runner can’t get into your crazy server twice.

You Should Play This Deck If:

-You like glacier/control archetypes: I have won quickly with this deck, but it is not necessarily designed to do so. I played the deck recently and had an end game remote server of Wotan, Archer, Janus 1.0 and 2 Tollbooths topped off by Ash. If that sounds awesome, you will enjoy this deck.

-You like playing the biggest, baddest ice around: Eliza’s Toybox, Accelerated Beta Test and piles of money lets you quickly and cheaply rez what I consider to be the most powerful ice in the game. You have ice in here to get you through the early game, but let’s face it - anyone can rez a NEXT Bronze or a Lotus Field. You picked this deck because you want Wotan and Archer and Wotan and Archer you shall receive.

-You enjoy watching the runner go broke trying to keep up trashing assets: Bottom line, this deck jams out so many high trash cost cards that can snowball out of control that almost every runner simply can’t keep up. If they try to trash everything, they will likely go broke and create easy scoring windows for you. If you have fun watching the runner give up and let you have assets like Daily Business Show and even Eliza’s Toybox, this is for you.

-You enjoy seeing the look of hopelessness on the runner’s face when your Accelerated Beta Test or Eliza’s Toybox rezzes enough free ice to lock them out of your servers: As I will discuss later, this deck takes full advantage of ABT and produces some pretty ridiculous results. I’ve hit plenty of free Wotan’s and Janus’s and most runner decks just can’t deal with multiple runs through a server with that kind of protection.

-You enjoy looking down at a board full of sexy robots: Adonis, Eve, Ash, the PAD Campaign girl, Eliza (or her virtual image) - they’re all here! We can debate about whether this deck is the best or not, but there is no doubt that it is the sexiest. Luckily, these also happen to be great cards, so you don’t even have to apologize for trying to accomodate the theme.

Overview and General Strategy:

You have enough early game ice to protect your central servers. All your ice is binary, meaning there will be no clicking through any bioroids to get accesses from a Maker’s Eye or whatever. If the runner doesn’t have the breaker, the run ends or Architect gains you advantage. All of the early game ice is also great because it stays relevant and taxing over the whole game. It the case of the NEXT ice and Mother Goddess, it actually gets better the longer the game goes. Get your centrals ice’d up, play a Hedge Fund or click for a credit and then start to step 2.

You want to jam out assets and keep gaining your free install credit. As I describe below, the runner will either make the decision to try and trash your stuff or not. Either way, you can play accordingly to yourself in a position to win either by tempo installing an agenda when they are broke or sneaking an Eliza’s Toybox behind your protected remote to start the free huge ice train. You are generally happy either way, but you do need to play the deck some to get a feel for how to react and put pressure on the runner to quickly respond to what you are doing. Keep putting down ice as needed and look for an opportunity to score an ABT or get Eliza’s Toybox online.

If you have Daily Business Show up and running, just keep putting extra agendas to the bottom of the deck. This card is the biggest boost to glacier decks in recent memory as it allows you to control agenda density in your hand, which is the biggest way I used to lose with glacier decks.

As long as you don’t lose a bunch of agendas in the early game, you will be in the driver’s seat. Just keep building your servers to crazy proportions and score when you know you are able to. If you need to drain credits from the runner, just start install double advancing an NAPD Contacts in your remote. They either give you points or go broke trying to deny you the score. This opens the path for you to score a Hades Fragment, Eden Fragment or Accelerated Beta Test the next turn.

Card Choices/Detailed Explanations

Agendas:

I used to play 8 agendas in this deck. After enough plays, I concluded that 9 is the right number as it protects you from losing the early 3 pointer that guarantees that the runner only needs three total agendas to win the game. This seems small, but I have played this deck enough to tell you that it makes a big difference since your goal is to keep from losing early and get to the long game where it is tough to lose.

Accelerated Beta Test: This is Haas-Bioroid’s best agenda in my mind and only made better in a deck like this where the free ice you get is so strong. There is no reason not to play 3 copies. You can tempo install these in your remote early and create a huge advantage with a successful Beta test, so you should be looking to make these types of plays as early and often as possible. It becomes less good as the game goes long since there will be less ice on the board, so don’t be afraid to be aggressive.

NAPD Contracts: In a taxing deck like this, NAPD is huge. There are so many times where the runner may be able to barely afford and access, but can’t pay to steal the NAPD at the end. Good runners know this and usually just walk away from making the run altogether. I usually install and double advance these to make it look like every other agenda. If you can bait a run through a taxing remote only to have the runner come up short, you usually are in a huge lead and in a great position to quickly score out and win from that point. This agenda is key because it makes the runner think twice about running remotes, which helps score your 3 pointers.

Eden Fragment/Hades Fragment: These two cards are huge upgrades over the Priority Requisitions and Project Wotans that used to occupy this slot. Eden Fragment allows you to continue to build your servers 4 or 5 ice deep while gaining your free install credit the whole time. Hades Fragment can just be broken with Daily Business Show as you just keep cycling assets back into the deck and then pushing extra agendas to the bottom of your deck where the runner can’t get them. A scored Hades Fragment is almost always game over if you have half decent servers built up when you score it.

Project Vitruvius: This is just an extra piece of recursion to keep getting back things like Ash, Eve, Adonis, Daily Business Show, etc. It is very easy to overscore in this deck and I rarely just install without trying to overscore unless it is the game winning agenda.

Economy/Asset Package:

This deck is designed to take full advantage of Engineering the Future’s ability by giving you more than enough to keep installing every turn. The volume of high trash cost cards gives the runner a choice. If they play the game of trying to trash everything you put down, the corp will basically break even or lose a credit on the deal while the runner has spent at least whole turn (combination of clicks and credits). This will in turn open the door for you to tempo install an agenda when they are low on money and get points. If they let you have the assets and focus on running centrals instead or building up to challenge your remote, you will quickly gain so much advantage in the form of credits, huge rezzed ice and card selection from Daily Business Show that the runner will most often lose the long game. With that in mind, you need to have the mindset of jamming out assets unprotected at a steady rate. Yes, they will trash Eliza’s Toybox occasionally - you have more of them where that came from. Yes, they will trash Eve Campaign - Architect and Jackson Howard will bring them back. Against basically every runner except Whizzard and Valencia, you just need to keep throwing down the sexy robots and break the runner.

While the deck may look vulnerable to econ denial if your assets get trashed, I can assure you that you will have plenty of money even if that happens. Most of your ice is less than five credits to rez and even your big ice is cheap to the extent you get a single use out of Eliza’s Toybox. I’ve never had long term economy problems, but you can’t be stingy with the asset installs. If you are afraid of installing an Adonis, Eve or Toybox for fear of it being trashed, you are giving up a big advantage of the deck in that it forces the runner to drain their economy to deal with yours. It is not uncommon to get to 30+ credits at certain points as the runner will often get desperate and just focus on trying to put together enough money to deal with your servers.

Daily Business Show is also MVP with this deck. If the runner doesn’t trash these, you just bottom agendas and pull assets back into hand that get shuffled back into the deck with Jackson Howard. This card is the biggest boost to the archetype in my mind as it functions like Jackson Howard in that it keeps you from losing and gets you the cards you need faster. It is so important that I will usually protect it with something like an Architect just to make the runner think twice about trashing. I will almost always put a trashed Daily Business Show back into the deck when I use Jackson Howard - it is just that good.

Accelerated Beta Test is also the single best economy card in your deck. You hit a good Beta test and you get points and huge ice for a mere three credits (really two since you got paid to install it). There is no runner card that produces the potential advantage of Accelerated Beta Test and winning control matchups is all about producing that incremental advantage.

Ice/Server Protection:

NEXT Bronze/NEXT Silver/Mother Goddess - This is a very powerful early game ice suite. They are all hard end run ice that get stronger as the game goes on and more ice gets rezzed. Wall of Static doesn’t do that, Eli doesn’t do that, Quandary doesn’t do that. Again, these are all great cards, but a glacier deck needs to get better the longer the game goes.

Architect/Lotus Field - These are great in that they can be rezzed first turn if you draw them in your opening hand, but stay moderately taxing (or extremely taxing without the right breakers) all game. They also can’t be Parasited away, which is a huge boost for this deck against Anarch lists going heavy on the card. It is no secret that Lotus Field is also massive against Criminal decks still trying to run Datasucker/Yog. I have been extremely happy with 3 copies of Architect. It is great on all central servers and especially on Archives as a way to tax Security Testing runs. If you draw extras, you can use them to protect Daily Business Show or Adonis Campaigns. If the runner isn’t playing Mimic, this card is a long game nightmare with no other great answers. If they let Architect fire, you gain so much advantage that the game can get out of control since the runner is basically letting you build your servers on their turn for free. Definitely one of the cards I most want to see in my opening hand.

Bastion - I feel like 20 ice is the sweet spot for any glacier list. More than that and you draw too much ice and not enough economy. Less than that and you don’t hit on your Accelerated Beta Tests and can’t build big servers quickly enough. I know most people would go for Eli in this spot, but I’ve tried that and wanted all of my ice to be binary. In a prior version of this deck that ran Eli, my most common way to lose was to rez a first turn Eli only to have Maker’s Eye or R&D Interface used on the second turn to click through and get points. Bastion is taxing and makes sure that the runner has to find and pay for a barrier breaker.

Wotan/Janus/Archer/Tollbooth - Let’s face it. THESE are the ice you really want. I’ve put this deck up against the biggest of big rig decks. Massive Sages, Stealth Rigs, AI RIgs, you name it. This ice is just a pain to deal with and can only be run so many times before the runner goes broke. I’ve messed around with the quantities and feel like this is the right density of late game ice and targets for Eliza’s Toybox. Too much and you get killed in the early game. Too little and why did you play Eliza’s Toybox to begin with.

Recursion Package:

Part of the power and fun of this deck is that you have cards that keep your high trash cost assets coming back onto the board or in the deck. Over a long game, the runner simply can’t deal with an army of sexy robots (Adonis, Eve, Eliza namely) if you keep cycling them back after they have been trashed or used up.

Jackson Howard/Archived Memories - I don’t need to really explain Jackson, but I mainly use him for cycling assets back into the deck and protecting against agenda flood. Archived Memories is basically the 2nd copy of Ash that can get any other card if I don’t need Ash. Old glacier decks played 3 copies of Ash, but I always felt it was overkill. Half the time, the runner can’t get into your massive server anyway, so Ash doesn’t even do anything. You absolutely want access to the card in the long game, but Archived Memories allows you to get it in hand and put it into your protected remote. This helps protect against a runner that trashes all copies to the point where you lose access to the card altogether. With Daily Business Show, you can always get to your one copy faster or get to your Archived Memories if it is trashed and you need it.

Project Vitruvius - Basically a better version of Archived Memories that gives you points as well.

Architect - As I mentioned, if the runner lets you have this effect, you are winning. This is super powerful and will accelerate you out of the early game if the runner can’t deal with it.

Hades Fragment - Other than Accelerated Beta Test, this is the card I want to score the most. It constantly thins the agendas density while putting great cards back in your deck. Truly a long game card that will produce huge advantage if you get it scored.

All comments, questions and suggestions are welcomed and hope you enjoy building ridiculous glacier servers and jamming out the all the sexy robots!