In the games I've played so far, when the corp ends up with 3 or 4 agendas in their starting hand (after mulligan), it seems to pretty much make the match a write-off for them.

I'd be curious to know how others have dealt with this situation, beyond just concentrating ice on your HQ.

1) Draw more cards. Probably have to do this no matter what, since you only have 2-3 cards that actually do something. If you hit even one piece of ice, you can at least complicate things for the runner. Ice the hand and make him find the right breaker, or non-chalantly ice the deck and leave the hand open. 

2) Put Agenda in remote servers and don't advance them (or advance them… suspiciously). Runners often aren't going to run a remote server on the first turn because chances are it will be something expensive to trash.

3) Discard them face-down if you have an enormous set. 

Four agenda in the opnener is certainly playing from behind the eight-ball unless your other two are really, really good. But, sometimes, you can eke your way into the midgame and turn things into a route because you can win before the runner gets completely set up. 

You have the right idea draw to get ice and place on HQ first. Then draw to get ice on a data fort and place agendas there too. If desperate you could even throw it away in the trash. Some runners forget to check the garbage, but that is realy risky.

 Perhaps the best thing to do would be diversify. Install in one in a remote, install another in other remote and advance. This way, runner will probably get an agenda, but probably not two. Giving away an early game agenda is par for the course really. Of the two you laid down, he's inclined to believe one is a trap and the other in an agenda, so even if he scores one, he is then unlikely to run the other. This also leaves 4 credits, no more, no less, in your pool. So that he suspects the unadvanced card could be snare! The advanced card is the obvious choice for the runner: 2 net damage or 1 tag isn't so bad, and runner is unlikely to have any programs yet, therefore advanced ambushes aren't that scary first turn, so advance the lower-point one. Try and make the other one 3 difficulty too, so you can snatch it up hopefully 2nd turn.

 If you're playing against Gabriel, you might want to draw a bunch of cards and then discard your agendas into Archives (if you have a way to recurse them).  More than likely, Gabriel will drop Sneakdoor Beta and won't ever access cards in Archives again. :)

 Another option is that if your opponent knows you play a lot of ambush cards, you might be able to place an agenda or two and then bluff them into thinking one (or both) are traps. In general though, you're probably better off just spending a good chunk of your clicks on simply drawing cards.

Drawing a bunch of cards basically says to the Runner, "Hey, I drew nothing but agendas, come on in and party in HQ".

I would draw one card, or at most two, per turn, and do some of the other things suggested above (discard to archives, set up subsidiary data forts) to diversify and distract.

prune said:

But if you've got no Ice on HQ, isn't that just inviting a run in the first place?  If you draw up in that scenario, you're at least thinning HQ out so the odds of drawing an agenda can be minimized.

Then again, if you've got a hand full of agendas, R&D is going to be exposed as well.  Sometimes the cards just aren't your friends, eh? :)

mothchoir said:

Unless you _also_ had four Agendas on your hand _before_ the mulligan, it's your own fault. That's the risk that comes with a mulligan: You may end up with a worse hand than before.

Anyway, I actually had a game recently (we've playing the CCG, though) where I had drawn 4 Agendas and after drawing my sixth card, the two top cards of my R&D were Agendas as well. Let's just say it was a very quick game and we had lots of time for the revenge…

jhaelen said:

Well, I inserted the 'after mulligan' clause in my question in order to avoid receiving terribly useful advice such as, er, take a mulligan. Just trying to start a discussion of tactics here. Do you have any thoughts on the matter other than "suck it up"?

P.S. Thanks for all the previous posts, some interesting points to consider. Incidentally, this scenario has not yet landed on me, but having seen it happen as the runner player, I want to be prepared for the worst when I next play corp!

The archives is a decent place to hide some agendas if you have to. Though I think that deck building should make tis really a very rare issue. I personally think that the starter decks are way to agenda heavy. I like to focus on tagging and doing dmg and having tons of ice. The game are slightly slower, but I do not think there is much to be gained by having high draw percentages for agendas as they are pretty much useless in the initial turns.

I think the best suggestion in the thread is to simply draw more cards and possible hide something in archive.. though I think archives is completely under used at the mo, i hope to see much more cards that can interact with it. There is this entire mechanic for putting in face down cards but as far as I remember there is only 2 card that can interact with it at all… so at the moment there is little point in archiving agendas, but I would suspect that as we get more archive card for corp this might become a stronger tactic.

Except for Weyland, the core set decks could only ditch 1 agenda point according to the rules (and it is only possible for NBN, because neither HB nor Jinteki has 1 point agendas). They're also the maximum size (49 cards) for the number of agenda points they contain (only NBN can add cards, because the others can't add enough agenda points).

mothchoir said:

What are the agendas, and what is the 6th card you draw for starting your turn? IMO, this is too situational to give a good answer in the abstract. Your strategy is going to depend on the powers and values of the agendas.

wait what? you need a minimum of agenda points in a deck? 

Yes. Page 24 of the rulebook.

Basically, a corp deck of 45-49 cards must include 20-21 points of agendas. For every 5 cards over this, add another 2 agenda points.

Of the 4 corps, only NBN gets any choice at all about how many agenda they can put in their deck (using the core set that is).

Page 24 of the rules. Deckbuilding section.

- 40 to 44 cards requires 18 or 19 agenda points.
(Note: Identities in this set have a 45 card minimum)
- 45 to 49 cards requires 20 or 21 agenda points.
- 50 to 54 cards requires 22 or 23 agenda points.