2.2 Agenda density

We’ve seen how agendas naturally move from one zone to another during the course of the game. As this happens, zones may become more or less dense with agendas. This is partly the result of randomness: if the Corp doesn’t draw agendas in the first five turns of the game, then they all stay in R&D, which starts becoming dense; conversely, if the Corp is flooded, HQ starts getting dense until the cards leave that zone because of very quick scoring or a Runner who gets in and starts stealing them.

We can talk about the agenda density as a property of a zone, meaning simply “how likely is it that an access from this zone yields an agenda”? This is most often expressed as a ratio. For example, if HQ has 5 cards in it and one of them is an agenda, the agenda density of HQ is 1 in 5. If R&D has 27 cards in it and 4 of them are agendas, it has an agenda density of 4 in 27, which is very close to 1 in 7. It’s generally fine to approximate and fudge the math a little bit (something which is not advisable in other parts of the game, like calculating the cost of getting into a server!).

Agenda density is an important concept because it helps Runners figure out how likely an access is to yield points, and it helps Corps figure out how likely it is that an access from a server will be very detrimental and possibly game-losing. Some related considerations:

• We only talk about agendas in this article because they’re often the most important cards in the game, and figuring out where they are is often fundamental to winning. But all of this can be applied to any set of cards of your choice: we can talk about ice density, and we can use all of the conceptual tools here to figure out how likely a player is to have drawn a piece of ice, or an icebreaker, a piece for your flatline combo, or whatever else.
• There are many situations where only some agendas matter. For example, if both players have 5 points and there is only one 1-pointer left in the game, while all other agendas are 2-pointers, that 1-pointer is largely irrelevant. The 6th point won’t take either player any closer to winning the game, scoring or stealing it doesn’t matter, so we don’t care much about what zone it could be in now. Likewise, if the Runner only has an opportunity to make a run on R&D or HQ, and would like to do agenda density math to figure out which run would be better, but won’t have enough credits to steal a Bellona after breaking ice, then all copies of Bellona that are left in the game shouldn’t be included in your math. You should usually disregard agendas that don’t yield “real points” or meaningful progress towards game completion in the current context.

Determining agenda density#

Calculating agenda density should be easy for the Corp, assuming that you remember what your decklist looks like. Some agendas will be in the score area, sometimes some will be forfeited and removed from the game, and all others will be in the game. Agenda density in HQ and R&D are simply equal to x in y, where x is the number of agendas in the server and y is the total number of cards. Calculating this for HQ is immediate, and for R&D it gets easy with practice. Keeping an eye on how dense R&D is is something you should try to actively do every now and then, so that you have a better idea of how important it is to defend R&D. When you don’t draw many agendas, and therefore R&D gets denser because you keep removing non-agenda cards from it, the risk of leaking points from R&D gets bigger and you should consider protecting it better.

As the Runner, you can usually only make guesses as to how dense servers are. You might have more or less information to help you figure it out, but a lot of it will be from complex inferences related to what you think the Corp’s play patterns indicate. There are some important rules of thumb, though.

First of all, you can assume that in most games, the Corp gets a mostly average draw. Pronounced agenda flood and agenda screw are relatively uncommon compared to games where the Corp just draws an average amount of agendas. Therefore, you can often do some math by looking at how many cards the Corp has drawn at this point in the game (this is the sum of cards in Archives, agendas that have been scored or stolen, cards in HQ, and cards in the root of servers or protecting them). If you know that the Corp’s deck has 44 cards total, that 8 of them are agendas, and that 15 cards have been drawn so far, and no agendas have left the game by being scored or stolen so far, that means that there probably are two or even three agendas in HQ! This is massive information: it means that your opponent is very likely to try and jam an agenda to score it and get it out of their hand, and if they don’t, it means that an HQ access is very likely to be good for you right now. (I used a calculator for this. You can use a calculator when practicing, and even use it in tournaments as long as it doesn’t make you slow play).

Sometimes you do know how many agendas your opponent is running, and you can often make very good guesses by understanding the specific metagame you’re in and more general deck construction principles; but when you’re uncertain, remember that you think more abstractly, not in terms of agendas drawn but in terms of points. If the Corp has a 49-card deck, meaning that their deck contains 20 points, then when they’ve drawn approximately half of their deck that means that they’ve probably drawn somewhere around 10 points. If only 3 points have been scored, that means that HQ likely has somewhere around 7 points now, which is great; if 10 points have been scored or stolen, that means HQ is unlikely to be a good place to run.

Of course, while most games have a close-to-average draw, there is still a significant chance of the Corp being slightly agenda flooded or agenda screwed, and a smaller chance of the situation being more extreme. In those cases, simply assuming that the Corp has drawn an average amount of agendas or of points will lead you to play suboptimally: you need ways to figure out when less common draws happen so that you can adapt to them.

It’s difficult to give something like a method for identifying floods and screws, because there are so many possible hints, more or less subtle: for example, if the Corp installs multiple piece of ice to make a scoring remote but then doesn’t jam anything in it, they’re probably screwed; if they just click for credits rather than putting the cards in HQ to good use, they’re probably flooded; if you see a Sprint on the top of R&D and they don’t immediately play it because they have better things to do, they’re probably not flooded; if they don’t ice HQ, there’s probably nothing worth accessing in there (or are they bluffing?); and so on. The list of tells, and related tricks, keeps growing as you keep internalizing more play patterns, and it never stops.

Manipulating agenda density#

As the Corp, there are many ways you can manipulate agenda densities: basically any effect that helps you move cards from one zone to another can help you do that, and it turns out that most of the things you do in the game end up having that effect. Let’s go through them systematically:

R&D to HQ: also known as drawing. Every time you draw cards, you either draw an agenda (reducing the density of R&D and increasing that of HQ) or a non-agenda (doing the opposite). Effects that let you tutor a card of your choice, like the ability on Project Atlas, can do either, and therefore give you some control over how densities are changing.

It’s very important to notice that if you’re flooded, you will tend to draw more non-agendas, ameliorating your flood; whereas if you’re screwed, you will be more likely to draw agendas, fixing your screw. In other words, seeing more cards leads you towards an average draw; in other words still, you are more likely to be flooded/screwed at turn 2 than you are at turn 8. This is important for Runners to know too: it means that Corps are more likely to have an imbalanced, exploitable draw in the early game, and there is a limited window of opportunity to exploit it before it evens out.

HQ to remotes: also known as installing. Pushing an agenda is the most obvious way to reduce agenda density in HQ, and when flooded or otherwise at risk, you should consider pushing agendas slightly more aggressively than normal. Sometimes, you will put an agenda on the board even with no intent to score it, because it’s safer in a remote than in your hand. Always keep in mind that ultimately, scoring agendas is your only way to make points inaccessible to the Runner, and a Corp that doesn’t score is bound to start leaking points more and more as the game goes on.

Playing non-agenda cards increases your agenda density in HQ. This is obvious, yet people don’t always consider this while playing. Sometimes playing a powerful card such as Hedge Fund is potentially detrimental, because if might lead you to end your turn with four cards in hand rather than five, making your agenda density 2 in 4 rather than 2 in 5. Sometimes installing a piece of ice protecting HQ actually makes runs on HQ worse for you, because while the ice might tax the Runner a little bit, the card could have stayed in HQ as a bad access for them. Keeping cards in HQ just so that they can be useless accesses for the Runner and “protect” agendas this way is known as padding, and knowing how to balance that with just playing your cards for benefits is a very important skill.

HQ to Archives: as you can guess by now, discarding agendas to Archives by overdrawing obviously reduces density in HQ. The agendas are very, very vulnerable in Archives, but sometimes you can take this gamble and bet that the Runner won’t run Archives, and enjoy a safer HQ. This is usually unlikely to work in the long term, as a Runner who keeps wondering where the points are will check your bin at some point, but it can be worthwhile if you think the end of the game is not that far away.

Discarding non-agendas, again, has the opposite effect. Remember that while drawing is supposed to help your flood by likely making you draw non-agendas, it actually doesn’t help at all if you end up losing those cards to hand size. There’s no point drawing extra cards if they aren’t helpful.

HQ to R&D: here we start talking about non-standard types of movement that you need special effects to achieve. You can put cards back into R&D with something like Sprint, which is a decent flow-manipulation card. It draws you three cards, meaning that you’re pretty likely to have both agendas and non-agendas in your hand regardless of what hand you started with, and then it essentially lets you choose whether you want to keep agendas in your hand or not, and whether you want to pad R&D with irrelevant accesses or you prefer to send all the agendas there.

Archives to R&D: this is a very common effect, because most Corp decks play multiple copies of Spin Doctor. Such effects can help you pad R&D by sending non-agenda cards back in there, or they can combine with overdraw to effectively send agendas back to R&D: draw up, discard them to hand size, then shuffle them back.

As we’ve seen, there are many ways to manipulate agenda density: some of them are stuff you can do with the basic action cards, and most of them are relatively common effects that a lot of cards can perform. When evaluating a Corp card, always consider whether it has potential to manipulate densities and help you fix a flood/screw state. Special attention should be given to cards that can move cards between zones during runs: you might end your turn without knowing where the Runner will look for accesses, and then move cards accordingly to lower their chances only when they’ve chosen where they’re going to look for points.

This is also relevant for ice placement sometimes. Consider something like Drafter: the first subroutine allows you to suddenly put a card in HQ to pad it, and the second one can let you get a dangerous card out of HQ right as you need it. This ability to suddenly move cards shortly before the Runner will access means that Drafter has some extra utility when protecting HQ compared to when it’s protecting R&D, because the subroutines don’t just give you value but also have very tangible effects on the consequences of the run. This doesn’t mean that Drafter can’t protect R&D well, just that it has some additional non-obvious benefits on HQ.

Stacks and known cards#

All of this time we have been talking of R&D as an homogenous zone. This is enough in most cases, but it’s technically incorrect: R&D is an ordered zone, and accesses aren’t random at all! You specifically access the card on top, or multiple cards from the top. Of course, it feels random in most cases since both players will have no idea about what the order of cards might look like, but sometimes that is not the case, and that changes everything.

When the Corp fires the first subroutine on Anansi and gets to decide the order of top 5 cards of R&D, reasoning about agenda density becomes way less relevant for a while. As long as the Corp knows what the next few cards are, they know whether an access will lead to a steal, they know when the can click to draw an agenda, and the Runner also knows that whatever card they access has been set up by the Corp. As soon as those cards are drawn, or R&D is reshuffled, regular considerations start applying again.

The case where the bottom of R&D is known to the Corp is even more interesting. A common way for this to happen is with Daily Business Show, a very popular card whose effect can trigger repeatedly. With multiple DBS triggers happening on subsequent turns, the bottom of R&D becomes known to the Corp, assuming that they have a good memory or are keeping note of what is being bottomed. As a consequence, R&D is divided into two “stacks” of cards: an unknown one, that can be accessed from because it’s on top, and a bottom one, known to the corp, that cannot be accessed from.

What does this mean for agenda density? First of all, let’s consider that DBS is very often used in asset decks that don’t want to score until a relatively late point in the game: in fact, for most of the game, DBS is mostly used to avoid drawing agendas that would end up clogging the hand, sending them to the bottom of R&D instead. When playing against a Corp that has had one or more DBS running for several turns, it’s often correct to expect a fairly low agenda density in HQ. What about R&D? The obvious and most immediate answer would be that the density there is very high, because agendas that haven’t been drawn have been sent back there. But this is wrong! Agendas that have been sent back there are in a specific part of R&D (particularly loaded with agendas) that can’t be accessed from. Insofar as the point of thinking about agenda density is to figure out the chances of getting points from accesses, those cards are irrelevant. Therefore, as long as it’s consistently used to bottom agendas, DBS keeps agenda density in HQ low while the density of R&D stays the same, by putting agendas in a safe place where they cannot be found, just as safe as your score area.

You might have already realized that there are a couple of situations where this doesn’t hold up. In practice, if the Corp keeps drawing cards from the top (something that they will do at a high rate, if DBS stays active), at some point the bottom will become the new top. Cards that had been safe from accesses will be at the top of R&D again, and count for density once more. Also, what happens if R&D gets shuffled by a card such as Spin Doctor? In that case, the two parts of R&D get shuffled together, and the agendas that were supposedly safe and inaccessible are suddenly accessible again. If you have bottomed many agendas with DBS, effects that shuffle R&D dramatically increase agenda density.