Fourteen Decks in Fourteen Weeks, Pt2
Welcome back to the new series of articles about the decks that I’m tooling around with for the Adelaide City Grid’s Spin League. This round I went with a new Exile build, after rejecting the early attempt of the Pawn cycle, and a new NBN deck that I’d latched on to the concept of a week or two after my HB code gate deck started getting smashed by a Kit build my wife started to run. So, on to the decks…
Round 2 (Sunday 20 October - Saturday 2 November)
Corporation: NBN The World is Yours* “Jackson’s Magnificent Engine”
In philosophy a position is sometimes best explained by detailing the ideas that it is a reaction to. For my Corp deck this round, that also holds true. “Jackson’s Magnificent Engine” was spawned by a comment from Isawa Steve on the Strange Assembly blog, contrasting schemes of economy, whereby the Operations-based economy was characterised as “nigh-invulnerable to Runner attacks, but with no recurring actions”. It got me thinking that with the string recursion available in Jackson Howard (Opening Moves), the one-shot nature of the Operations-based Economy could be overcome by cycling those cards back into R&D.
Given that the plan was to recurse Operations, not Agendas (as seems to be the usual plan of using JH) from the Archives, I wanted to minimise the number of Agenda in the deck. This led me to the idea of an NBN TWiY* deck running only 18 points of Agenda, in six 5/3s; in a 44-card deck this means that any one single-card access of R&D has only a 0.136 chance of being an agenda, so ~13.6%. If I’m holding only one Agenda in a full hand in TWiY* the chance of the Runner hitting it with a single card access is still only 0.167, or ~16.7%.
A 44-card deck could conceivably get by with only eleven economic Operations: 3× Beanstalk Royalties (• ea.), 3× Green Level Clearance (• ea.), 3× Hedge Fund, and 2× Successful Demonstrations (• ea.) chews up eight Influence. A Melange Mining Corp can serve as a decent burst supplementing this, so that was added. With eight influence spent on the economy Ops, a single Scorched Earth (••••) fills out the cap, and makes for an unexpected inclusion in the Influence poor TWiY* deck.
Over testing, one SEA Source morphed into a second Midseason Replacements. The initial Agenda suite of 3× Priority Requisition and 3× Restructured Datapool became two of each, and 2× Executive Retreat (“The Betrayer”) for eighteen points of hopefully hard to find Agenda. Restructured is able to lay on a ton of tags as well - prompting me to formulate the notion that tags, like cards and credits, are a resource that the Corp might seek to manage. At four tags down, this enables you to install, advance and then Psychographics to score a 5/3 (or Jackson Howard’s double draw on 1, install and Psycho-advance if they’re on five tags). Obviously a couple of those go in…
Add Ice and the deck has pretty much built itself. Of course, that is easier said than done in an environment where I fear Atman, and so more careful attention could have been paid to the Ice structure to get varying strengths of Ice, to better counter Atman.
What worked: It is a joy for someone of my bent to not feel obligated to rez every piece of Ice on R&D the first time that the Runner hits it. Even with repeated runs with R&D Interface (Jackson draws past the “R&D lock”) or Medium for big digs can at the right time be ignored somewhat. Eventually you’ll need to stop them and there’s expensive enough Ice in the deck that can make attacking constantly somewhat difficult; Data Raven laying on extra tags can also speed up the fast advance combo as well if they don’t bother to clear them, saving you from pushing the Restructured Datapool button too often.
That Agenda is core to the engine of the deck laying on tags, and so pushing one through early if you can is crucial, even at the cost of losing another Agenda off the top of R&D. If the Runner lucks into lifting two, moving to match point, then things can become tense, and I’ve experienced what I think was an unlucky loss in one game where two Priority Requisitions were clumped together for my opponent to steal when I decided to trust R&D to not cough it up on the second run. In general though, when the spread of Agenda through the deck is more uniform, if I’m hiding one Agenda in the Archives, I’ve scored one, and they’ve stolen one, and I have one concealed in HQ then there’s only two left in the deck and that’s not good odds for the Runner to be able to find one.
The one-of’s of Closed Accounts and Freelancer might seem like they are slots that will never come up, and could be better spent making something else less variable, like another Midseason or even back to one-of SEA Source. They’re too valuable to drop and the number of games where I have been able to crack both a Kati Jones and a Professional Contacts after the one tag sinks in from the Datapool have convinced me that it is worthwhile. If there was a card like Freelancer that would wipe a program from memory, to clear off a Magnum Opus, I would seriously consider a one-of of this as well!
What didn’t: TWiY* lacks the ability to make a lot of traces stick by not having the recurring credits of the Making News Identity. This makes TMI weak against Runners with even 1 link (Kate, esp.) The Ice overall I think needs to be revisited to be more effective and more widely spread in strength (while awaiting Wraparound) vs AI breakers, but especially Atman. Restructured Datapool, in these situations, isn’t very good either, at only trace2.
This became especially bad in one game that I played against Kate with The Toolbox (extra link) and Magnum Opus to pay for trace avoidance, and when investing credits into the traces, the weakness of the economic engine becomes exposed. The Runner in that game had lucked into two Agenda, so then Midseason also became useless at this point. A big SEA Source followed by Closed Accounts and repeated hammering of the Datapool “stupid button” might have made a difference, but it isn’t likely. The only option was to race to Agenda and then somehow protect it behind deep Ice, but the deck isn’t designed for that.
Overall, clumping Agenda with repeat runs tends to put you into a very tight place, wihc can make for extremely tense games. This isn’t a bad thing in general, but when you’re fighting hard each round in a tournament, and it feels like you’re fighting your own deck instead of the opponent’s deck, it isn’t a good sign. The success that I did have with it was certainly down to the environment not being loaded with high link Runners, I think. With Criminal players leaning away from poor schemes like Dyson/Globalsec and Underworld Contacts schemes, that opens up a window for a JME type build, but the resurgence of Shapers (esp. Kate) who natively have access to link the window is a bit narrow for great success. A shame, as I think this deck is excellent on paper, and is something a little different from the NBN FAdv schemes that seem to be proliferating around right now.
Runner: Exile, Streethawk “Hot Mess”
The name is gleefully stolen from Geoff Hollis’ characterisation of Jinteki as a Corporation in general, and given that this one was thrown together on the train from work to town just before the League match was played, I guess what success it had was due to the fact that this was about the third or fourth Exile design I have built, and was able to riff off of a couple of things I knew worked in his decks and still included some pieces that I’d not tried, while still being playable. Still, “Hot Mess” reflects well the fact that this is far from my ideal deck building process (i.e. little time spent in the design phase).
I’d been tinkering previously with a build that was looking to exploit the potential for EBA of combining both Compromised Employee and Ice Analyzer to get a mess of credits whenever the Corp rezzed any Ice, but the scheme was slow to build, despite the 0-cost install for the latter Resource. Compromised Employee worked well though, so that stayed.
Exile’s core set of cards, Test Run, Scavenge and Clone Chips all came in, but no Retrieval Run and no Pawn (see the previous post in the series).
The main concern in throwing it together was that Shaper, in faction, has crap killers; neither Pipeline nor Creeper are much good without some kind of support. I hit on trying to use Dagger in Dinosaurus as a means of countering the plethora of Shadows I had been face-checking on T1 recently, but couldn’t find room for the ideal setup for this, which would be adding in Personal Touch and Replicator. Memory had been an issue in a prior Exile build using Magnum Opus and Self-modifying Code, so in addition to Dinosaurus, I populated the deck with two Omni-Drives.
The rest of the breaker suite is kind of interesting so a few words on that. The idea was to kind of follow the scheme of various O:NR decks, having an early phase breaker that would work well against the cheap Ice that the Corp was likely to rez in the opening few turns, such as Ice Wall, Enigma, etc. and then a more expensive but more efficient suite of breakers that could be cycled in using cards that would trigger Exile’s ability (possibly getting a discount for the replaced breaker if I could Scavenge them in).
So Inti, while an unusual option, would be an excellent choice in turns 1-2, when a SMC could fetch it, install for only 2, and bust through an Ice wall repeatedly until the Corp replaced it or advanced it out of feasible range. Shaper’s excellent Decoders could “trade up” from ZU.13 Key Master into a Gordian Blade, or link might elevate the ZU into the cloud and allow it to sit alongside the GB. Femme Fatale would serve to deal with front-load NBN Ice, or annoying high strength Sentries/Barriers like Archer/Heimdall. Mimic would also serve as an early option for busting through Neural Katanas, Shadows, etc.
Stimhack and Same Old Thing worked well in a Creation and Control sealed deck event; The Professor build that I had tried out expended his one precious Influence on a superb card, giving me burst economy whenever it came up, and being repeatedly available from trash thereafter, so that ported in.
What worked: Test Run into Magnum Opus used to be a bad plan, costing you 1½ turns to get back your costs and get the Opus installed. In Exile, Test Run into Opus and Scavenge it for a card draw and “making it real” seems far better. Dagger in a Dinosaurus is a bit of a beast, saving you the need for Cloak here and there.
Self-modifying Code into the early, cheap breakers is quite good at times. SMC into Mimic for Shadow, or Inti for Ice Wall can make for a decent turn 1-2 run; one game that went to time with this deck in a local tournament turned out to be a win because Inti busted through the expected Ice Wall to let me steal a Character Assassination when the Corp was holding only a Breaking News, so timed win 2-1 a.p.
What didn’t: Dagger is good, and Dinodagger is fairly effective, but there are enough commonly played strength 3 sentries out there that it really needs a Personal Touch to be able to Cloak-free handle Neural Katana, Caduceus, etc. Two brings you into range of Ichi 1.0 which is nice, but the investment is now starting to look pretty huge: 5 for the Dino, 3 for Dagger, +4 for two Personal Touches is now three more than Femme Fatale invested.
Despite the additional memory, this build still seemed to suffer from an MU clog; the deck economically tends to rely upon the presence of Magnum Opus, and when you have that and a Self-Modifying out, with only a Dinosaurus as a console, you’re out of MU. Battering Ram on top of that means a real squeeze on MU as that breaker won’t sit on an Omni Drive. So instead of “Dinodagger”, I find I’m doing “DinoRam” (great vs. Hadrian’s Wall that this is) and Omni-Dagger. Tuning it down and replacing the Omni-Drives with Dyson Mem Chips might assist with the performance and avoid the need for Scavenging programs around just to get the memory configuration right (which serves well with Exile for draw, but adding extra steps when you’re preparing for a run can cost valuable turns).