Hello, and welcome to another installment of Hack the Planet.

So, I recently listened to some people discussing fast advance decks for the corp (they were against. I disagree, but that’s not my point today), and maybe it’s just me but their definition of fast advance did not jive with mine. As such, I figured I’d give my idea of what is a fast advance deck to hopefully get everyone on the same page as far as our jargon. And please, if you disagree with how I’ve laid out fast advance here feel free to disagree with me here in the comments.

They seemed to be treating fast advance as a deck that tries to win in phase 1. To my experience, however – having played a lot of NBN fast advance – the point of fast advance is to force the runner to go against R&D (one of the least successful place to run against without Medium/ R&D Interface) during phase 3 as no other location will have agenda available to steal – you’ll score them as soon as you see them. You then build out R&D such that running it is as expensive as possible so they can’t hit it that often. Often when I play fast advance all agenda seen are scored by one side or the other (hopefully me.)

As you see, the fast here is not in the deck as a whole, but rather in the agendas – you score them so fast that they aren’t on the board long enough for the runner to steal them. In fact, unless you’re using SanSan you often don’t even need to bother with a remote fort for the Agendas, just drop them and pop them.

Of course, a fast advance deck has the tools to score a few early agenda, but a well built one really shines once it gets it’s economy under it and is able to afford the serious advance cards like Trick of Light, SanSan City Grid and Biotic Labor.

Hopefully that gives you a better idea of what constitutes a fast advance deck, and why it’s not the same as a blitz deck you might see in other games.