Kitted Out (placed 4th/78 in the Dark Sphere 2016 SC)

biologyinoperation 39

This is the runner deck I took to 4th in the 78-player 2016 Dark Sphere Store Championships on January 10th in London. It went 5-1 in swiss and 1-2 in top-8 double elimination. (2-1 against foodcoats overall.)

I've been playing with/working on variations of this deck ever since Kit was first released, so I'm really happy to have been able to take it so close to the top of a big tournament.

The strategy is very roughly:

  • apply early pressure with Cyber-Cypher and Kit's ability
  • build economic advantage while the corp ices up
  • lock down their scoring remote
  • finish off the game with 4-5 card R&D runs

If I were to play this again tomorrow I'd make these changes:

Ichi is prevalent enough now to make Mimic/Femme really painful in certain matchups. The extra tax for getting through Architect is painful, but Shrike is better in pretty much every other case, and Architect is likely to be a lot less prevalent post-MWL anyway. That also frees up the space to add back the third SMC, which is useful for getting set up quickly.

Symmetrical Visage has been replaced by Personal Workshop and does not come out consistently when there's only 1x to be worth it. Getting to replay the powerful events can be worth a lot at the right time.

6 comments
12 Jan 2016 moistloaf

spending 20% of Kit's influence on a Drive-By is interesting. it looks like you wouldn't take it out if you were to play it tomorrow so it must have done a lot of work for you.

12 Jan 2016 biologyinoperation

I kind of hate it, but it does a lot of work against foodcoats, and got reused with SoT several times. This deck really wants to be able to pick cards out of a remote at the right time, and it helps with that.

12 Jan 2016 internet_potato

Any thoughts about how you will adapt this post-MWL?

I've been playing stealth kit a lot recently and I'm thinking about a return to more of a "good stuff" kit with early cy-cy pressure, potentially using Spooned / SoT to keep kit's ability as effective as possible against multi-iced servers. Her early game can be really strong and I am starting to think that the stealth setup slows it down too much.

12 Jan 2016 biologyinoperation

I think it will adapt and survive. It will get worse in some ways but so will some of the decks it hates playing against most. Weyland becoming more prevalent again would be a boost, this deck is pretty good at not getting killed by Weyland. (It has more money even than Blue Sun.)

Now that it has Personal Workshop it doesn't rely on clone chipping things mid-run nearly as much anymore. So it will end up dropping at least one clone chip, but that's not world-ending. Scavenge is a thing I've been meaning to try for a while now anyway and works very nicely with both CyCy and Lady. Sacrificial Construct is easy to include if program trashing comes back in a big way.

It will probably lose Imp because 3 influence is a lot. But it's not implausible it ends up losing Drive By instead if this means less taxing servers/fewer Caprices.

For the barrier breaker I may end up using a Corroder instead, I think in a world with fewer Elis (and where Spiderweb is a thing) it might be better. I might also try a 1x Lady, 1x some other shaper fracter.

I tried Spooned a while ago and was not a fan in this deck. I think Spooned is really good in decks which want to run a lot repeatedly, where the savings from getting rid of that ice ends up being really big. If your goal is to achieve R&D lock, say. But this deck relies on fewer but bigger runs so the savings is less, and also this deck is very happy pushing into the late game where the difference between 3 or 4 ice is not nearly as significant as the difference between 1 and 2 ice.

12 Jan 2016 internet_potato

Cool, here's what I came up with after poking for a few minutes. I think that scavenge is a good choice for replacing clone chip (since it synergizes well with cy-cy, lady, and femme). Since lady eats into influence, I put in another SMC. Might as well throw in test run for rescuing stuff from the heap, cheating out femme, and getting some extra hits off of lady.

Will try something similar to this out and see how it goes. Thanks for posting!

Breaker changes:

  • −1 Mimic
  • −1 Cerberus "Lady" H1

Tutor/recursion

Misc

  • −1 Symmetrical Visage
  • +1 Same Old Thing
12 Jan 2016 biologyinoperation

Cool, let me know how it goes :)

(My suspicion is that you will be sad at the lack of a cheaper sentry breaker.)