2.1 Flow and locks

Agenda flow#

Agendas have a natural ideal lifecycle. They all start the game in R&D; slowly but surely, they are drawn, and enter HQ. From that point, they are installed in servers, and then they end up in the Corp’s score area. Of course, this process involves an element of chance: sometimes, the Corp will draw more agendas than average, resulting in an agenda flood; sometimes, they won’t find enough, which is referred to as an agenda screw.

As the Corp, you must be aware that this flow is more or less the way you want things to go in most decks, that if things go wrong there will be bad consequences for you, and that you probably have options to manipulate agenda flow and let it work in different ways. For example, Daily Business Show can prevent agendas from being drawn, or help you draw them at a faster rate; Spin Doctor can send agendas from HQ back into R&D; Biotic Labor allows you to send agendas from HQ to your score area without the risks that a scoring remote entails. These tricks help you respond to the way the Runner threatens you, and also deal with unlucky situations where you are more flooded/screwed than you’d want.

Locking#

The Runner’s mission is essentially to stop the agenda flow at some point: by getting agendas from remotes before they are scored, by getting them from HQ before they are installed, or by finding them in R&D before they are drawn. A lot of factors go into which of these plans is the best at the moment, and attention to the way the agendas are flowing is crucial to figuring out what you should do now.

You want to prevent the Corp from making agendas flow all the way from R&D into their score area. A surefire way to do this usually entails “locking” a server, in such a way that you can inspect all cards and make sure that no agendas escape your control. Although it can be hard to achieve, there are two big benefits of being able to properly lock a server: one is that you can guarantee no agendas will be scored at all; the other is that you won’t really need to run other servers.

People tend to think of two specific kinds of lock: remote lock, where you keep patrolling a scoring remote so that the Corp cannot score anything, and R&D lock, where you keep checking R&D so that the Corp cannot draw any agendas.

Remote lock is fairly straightforward: the Corp installs something, and you go have a look at it. How doable this is depends on how much money you have, how long you can expect to keep making money to keep the lock up, how well defended the remote is, how many assets and upgrades the Corp can use to bait you into expensive, fruitless runs, and many other factors.

The positive outcome of a remote lock is that, as the Corp is unable to score any of the agendas that they draw, they will either pile up in HQ or eventually be discarded to Archives. Therefore, in the ideal case where you can keep a lock on the remote for the whole game, winning is inevitable! Simply prevent the Corp from scoring, and eventually you will be able to run HQ with very high chances of getting points. Of course, cases where you can maintain control throughout the whole game are rare, but it’s always true that keeping a remote lock for a while will improve your accesses on HQ, and this benefit will increase with the number of cards the Corp draws as you keep locking the remote.

Note that remote locking can be useless when the Corp has the ability to fast advance agendas, because that doesn’t require a scoring remote. This is proof of how the way that you approach different servers has to be tuned to the opponent you are facing.

An R&D lock is a little trickier. When you run R&D, by default you access the top card of it. If you do it every turn, and the Corp draws a mandatory card every turn, then you are able to effectively patrol all of the Corp’s draws, stealing all agendas they would otherwise drawn, and preventing them from scoring any.

But this description is a little simplistic. An obvious problem with this is that if you trash or steal a card from the top of R&D, the Corp will then draw a different card that you haven’t seen, unless you run again to check the next card. This need to sometimes run multiple times can make R&D locks more costly than you’d normally think, and also lead to mistakes where a Runner accidentally lets an agenda slide.

An even more obvious problem is that Corps can simply choose to draw multiple cards per turn, thus “breaking” the lock. It’s true that doing so has a cost in terms of tempo, but it’s often worth it. As the Runner, if the Corp breaks R&D lock, you have a few possibilities:

• Bet that the unseen card the Corp drew isn’t an agenda
• Prepare to run the remote, or run it immediately if the Corp installed something there
• Run HQ to try and steal a potential drawn agenda before it is installed.

Given that the aim of an R&D lock is to avoid both uncertainty and having to run other servers, all of these outcomes are undesirable. However, the cost in terms of tempo you put on the Corp by asking them to constantly click to draw to break the lock can sometimes worth the tempo it costs you to maintain a soft R&D lock, especially if R&D is unprotected or lightly protected.

Sometimes, you aren’t content with a soft lock, and want to lock R&D a little tighter. To do that, you typically need multi-access or some other effect that allows you to look at multiple cards from the top of R&D. Conduit is an obvious example of such an effect: you can look at multiple cards off the top of R&D, and if the Corp purges virus counters and R&D isn’t protected well enough, you can immediately start locking again and rebuilding counters. In a situation where you’re consistently multi-accessing from R&D, a Corp needs to draw as many cards as you are seeing in addition to its mandatory draw at the start of turn. This may sometimes require spending their whole turn on it, or using a draw effect from cards such as Spin Doctor or Predictive Planogram.

Note that a well-timed shuffle, provided by cards like Spin Doctor or Marilyn Campaign, also breaks R&D lock by making so that the cards you draw aren’t the ones that the Runner saw. (Yes, Spin Doctor can break an R&D lock twice. That’s just one of the many things that make it an exceptional card).

You could conceive of other kinds of locks. For example, keeping a copy of Clot on the board while using cards like Simulchip to return it to play whenever virus counters are purged is often called “clot-lock”, and consistently prevents the Corp from fast advancing agendas, again impeding their agenda flow.

It’s important to notice that there isn’t really such a thing as an “HQ lock” in the same way that you can lock R&D or the remote. This is because a Corp with a well-protected R&D and a well-protected remote can simply install and start advancing agendas in the same turn as they draw them. Agendas don’t really have to necessarily spend time in the Corporation’s hand after being drawn, therefore a strategy where you only run HQ to prevent scores looks unfeasible: if you run HQ a lot, you will usually need to complement it with the ability to run other servers to prevent scores.