HB NEXT Design Click Ice Deck

This deck has a lot of cards that experienced players sneer at. I'd strongly encourage you to improve on it iteratively rather than throw all the cards that people tell you are bad. There are loads of interesting ideas here that I would love to see work. A lot of them won't if you play this deck against strong players though.

Play this deck, lose, win, find out what works first hand. I'm sure a bunch of people will queue up to tell you what's wrong with it. I'm routing for you to prove at least one of them wrong.

For the record, I think the cards that most people will question are Wotan, Hourglass, Zed, Howler, Levy University and both of your influence spends. I'd also recommend trying the same deck in the core HB identity, just to get a sense of how much beautiful filthy money you're passing up on with NEXT design.

Thanks for your comments. I am relatively new to the game, and still learning some of the finer points. Its nice to hear some solid pointers on cards that might not be effective.

I decided to remove the Tenma Lines and added two copies of Archer to bump up the ice so I can further gurantee a good ice drop via NEXT Design: Guarding the Net. Also removed the Awakening Center and added another copy of Eliza's Toybox to help make sure I can rez the Archers early and more confidently. I'd like to maybe rework the ice to include NEXT Bronze, NEXT Silver, and NEXT Gold, but I haven't picked up those datapacks yet.

Tenma Line is legit, IMO. It's just too bad the influence is so high on it. The ability to swap around ICE pretty much at your will mid-game is actually quite powerful. You could have an unrezzed Heimdall 2.0, for example, just sitting on HQ cuz they didn't run it early when you had the money to rez it...and then when you get your econ back up to snuff again, swap out an Eli on the bottom of a remote for it. You just made your remote almost impenetrable...all for the low price of a click.

I've played NEXT design a fair bit, but I gave up on it when I realised that the counter to my deck was 'enough money and some multi-access' - quite a lot of runners make a point of having those things. It's definitely tough to make it as good as EtF - that ID is just a brutal leviathan. I think that to make it good you have to come out of the gate swinging. You need loads of early pace to make the best of your ID ability. I think the second Toybox is good because it gives you something you can throw in a server to do early work, which is what you need. If the toybox is your plan, I might consider going up to three. That said, melange is another good staple for the NEXT ID.

To me NEXT design + Toybox is a combination that strongly suggests playing two distinct flavours of Ice: Cheap gear checks like Quandary and Icewall that you can rez the old fasioned way to keep the runner out early; Huge monsters like your Heimdall that maximise the payoff of toy box. NEXT ice is good because it does the gear checking job but can be taxing later on. I think Archer is an excellent plan for inclusion in the second group. Archer is awesome.

For a taxing deck (and the majority of HB decks are about taxation - you can get in, but it costs you a pile of clicks and creds) bad publicity is really, really bad. Reducing the cost of every run works directly against your main strength. For that reason, I might reconsider Profiteering. Gila Hands is good if you want a money agenda, or you could pack a Vitruvius or another Efficiency Committee and free yourself up a card slot. If you're playing Archer, that pushes you towards including Domestic Sleepers which is good if you can find room for it (although that opens up a whole can of worms when considering your agenda spread).