Nasir, version n + 1

I’d been doing worse and worse with my Valencia deck, so with Regionals coming up, I figured I’d pull out my Nasir deck again, to see if I thought I’d do better with it. And, playing the deck against my coworkers, I decided that Nasir was definitely the right choice: the deck can build up quite quickly to an amazing level of strength.

Looking at cards that had come out since I last played the deck, the main one that caught my eye was Study Guide: I have access to not only the credits that disappear when I hit ice but also tons of recurring icebreaker credits (up to 6 a turn!), so it seemed like I should be able to level it up quickly for free. So I tried using it in place of Gordian Blade.

And it worked pretty well: my favorite times involved seeing Orion come out, and then a few turns later I’d upped my Study Guide to strength 8, at which point Orion only costs 3 credits to break. (On which note, though: Nasir really does not like galactic ice in general! Strong ice with a rez cost of 3 or 0 is not good.)

The flip side, though, is that, if Study Guide came out late, it was too slow to level up, and even if it came out early, it could be stopped by medium-strength code gates, because it would be too expensive to level up immediately.

The other problem I noticed is that one barrier breaker and one code gate breaker meant that sometimes it took a while to get my full suite out. Test Run helped a lot, but it wasn’t quite enough.

So I decided to attack both problems: I ended up including both code gate breakers, dropping one Clone Chip to make room. That way, I had a pretty good chance of getting a sentry breaker and a code gate breaker out naturally (especially given the amount of draw I had), and two Test Runs meant that having only one barrier breaker was fine.

Changes since version n:

• -1 Clone Chip
• +1 Study Guide

The full deck:

Nasir (45 cards)

Nasir Meidan: Cyber Explorer

Event (9)

• 1 Diesel
• 2 Net Celebrity
• 2 Quality Time
• 2 Sure Gamble
• 2 Test Run

Hardware (12)

• 2 Clone Chip
• 3 Cyberfeeder * * *
• 3 Dyson Mem Chip
• 2 Plascrete Carapace
• 2 The Toolbox

Resource (13)

• 2 Armitage Codebusting
• 3 Order of Sol
• 3 Personal Workshop
• 3 Underworld Contact
• 2 Xanadu ** **

Icebreaker (7)

• 1 Battering Ram
• 1 Crypsis
• 1 Deus X
• 1 Femme Fatale *
• 1 Garrote ***
• 1 Gordian Blade
• 1 Study Guide

Program (4)

• 1 Cloak
• 2 Parasite ** **
• 1 Paricia

So that’s what I brought to Regionals. I figured Nasir is weird enough that there would be matchups where it just wouldn’t work, so I expected my Industrial Genomics deck (evolved from this version, I’ll blog about that next) to be the workhorse. But I’d seen enough at work to make me believe that this deck wasn’t awful, either, so maybe the two decks would combine to go 50-50?

I was a lot more optimistic after Nasir won during my first two games as runner! But then I dropped the other five; fortunately, I did go 5-2 with the IG deck, so I ended up with 50%, but yeah, Nasir is vulnerable. In particular, at work, we’re playing a lot of power corp decks right now (well, I’m not, but my coworkers are!), which Nasir can reflect back and amplify; but against NBN or Jinteki decks with tags and weak ice, he has a lot more problems.

So if I want to be serious with this deck, I’ll need to adapt to that. But there were also some situations where a bad draw led to problems that had nothing to d I needed to be a little lucky with the draw. I need to get my Personal Workshop quickly: I’d assumed that three of those plus one Diesel and two Quality Time was good enough, but I ran into situations where even that isn’t enough. Which is fine, you can’t plan for everything: but if Quality Time doesn’t get me my Personal Workshop on the first turn then I end up with a fistful of cards and only two credits, and that is super hard to recover from. So I think I want to replace at least one Quality Time with Diesel, probably both.

The other issue is money. Not that money was exactly bad in the deck, but I’ve never discarded as many Sure Gambles in any other deck: I just don’t normally have 5 credits lying around, or for that matter have any real need for 9! Whereas there were several situations where Armitage Codebusting was exactly what I wanted, giving me access to just a few more credits at key moments. So I’d definitely want to trade one Sure Gamble for a third Armitage; maybe I’d keep around the other Sure Gamble, maybe I’d find another money card to trade it for, or maybe I’d see if I can trade it for something that can protect me against tags or damage.

That’s all hypothetical right now: Regionals are over, it’s time to experiment. But I like this deck a lot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I decided to return to it later…