Fisky Business (Reading SC 2017)

FragSpider 87

This is the deck I decided to take to the 2017 Reading Store Championships. Essentially, the core strategy for this deck is to hyper-capitalise on Fisk Investment Seminar and Laramy Fisk: Savvy Investor's ability to catastrophic effect by forcing the Corporation to trash cards, as well as trying to find an appropriate place to store any agendas you've saturated them with. This is where Information Sifting comes in; after a Fisk Investment Seminar (and possibly getting a sucessful deploy of Eden Shard); running thier hand with Information Sifting usually means you can draw 2 to 3 agendas in a single access.

Same Old Thing and Déjà Vu are key for recurring FIS as much as possible, whilst also offering some slightly bad recursion of other key components that have been lost, or pulling back Levy AR Lab Access if necessary.

Logos is a key component for tutoring things to complete the flooding system or missing components for keeping the pressure on.

Admitedly the icebreakers are a weird choice, and there were cases where influence was reshuffled for Faust or Gordian Blade, but ultimately these listed here were the ones selected for the task at hand. Cyber-Cypher is great for ruining a single server, and Corroder is just better in my opinion in Criminal. Gingerbread was there for a counter to NBN ice (which ironically, I fought none over the course of the tourney...!).

The other important pieces in the deck are Data Dealer; there to destroy stolen GFI's to prevent Exchange of Information, and to enable Populist Rally which is a great way of slowing a scoring window down, or for its more insidious pupose; cutting thier clicks after flooding so they trash far more cards from HQ. Earlier variations of the deck ran 3 of them to quite aggravating effect, but was cut down more for a simple 'silver bullet' choice due to economy and limited deck space.

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Alas; this deck didn't do too well at the tourney with a single win during 5 rounds of Swiss, and didn't match up too well against BOOM!-kill-deck types (at one point, I was Midseason'd for 21 tags, and then my Plascrete Carapace was Best Defence'd to nothing). Also the extreme variance in getting the necessary components did not help matters, despite my best efforts to play around very poor opening hands (FIS is a definite muligan-for with few exceptions).

In hindsight, I think I think I should of kept the Faust's from a previous incarnation; it would of assisted with the pressure, and turn 'dead cards' in hand at that point into at least something more than additional HP against damage.

That being said; I think it certainly raised some eyebrows in the games played, and was certainly a very fun experience to develop from the ground-up and generated many a memorable game with my usual NR players!

6 comments
8 Jan 2017 Horse85

Same Old Thing can't recur FIS.

8 Jan 2017 FragSpider

@Horse85; Possibly should of worded it better in my description; you use Deja Vu to recur FIS, and if the DV is in the heap you use it via Same Old Thing to pull FIS back to hand. Not partciularly efficient, admittedly, but works.

9 Jan 2017 Arameas

Do you want more cards? there are always more cards. Shame about the variance because in practise this deck just made the corps panic over what to do! There are no good choices.

9 Jan 2017 Pantacruel

Hey, nice concept but in general I feel like the corp benefits greatly of the added draw speed in the beginning of the game, allowing them to set up quickly a scoring remote while the runner scrambles to get the needed breakers out. Have you considered both a draw and mill engine, thereby adding more cards to the corps hand with Fisk and his crazy seminars, and milling RND with some good old anarch shenanigans. Hacktivist Meeting; Bhagat.

Or more draw with Equivocation?

Or maybe play around with The Source and Fall Guy guys, This would slow down the scoring ability of the corp, adding pressure as you force them to draw like crazy. Maybe back it up with New Angeles City Hall

As one of, I would definitely recommend Citadel Sanctuary and Beth Kilrain-Chang.

9 Jan 2017 FragSpider

@Pantacruel; thanks for the comment!

When the deck was first concepted, I was running a very Anarch styled 'tag-me' system and using Data Leak Reversal and Bhagat to keep the pressure on. Unfortunately, it was somewhat of a janky mess and didn't work as well as it should. Trying to get the deck to 'have its cake and eat it' was proving a nightmarish exercise.

Equivocation was a consideration also, but the influence and no decent in-faction tutoring (although I guess you could play the numbers game with mass-drawing with the Seminars...)... it sort of became a moot idea.

Citadel Sanctuary though; certainly a very nice idea. Combined with the Plascrete it would at least 'delay' the BOOM! strikes suffered. That and I had not considered the NACH-TheSource combo. Hnm...

You've certainly given me ideas, and some inspiration for peculiar ways to deal with counter-strike systems like Scorch, BOOM! and Punitive. (I'm a big fan of taking cards that are not often seen, hence taking Fisk in the first place!).

Thanks for the suggestions! :) I think I might go and refine this...

9 Jan 2017 FragSpider

@Arameas; Indeedy! Test games were certainly somewhat hilarious and brutal at the same time; however possibly spec'd too much in regards of doing its one thing without dealing with the 'What If....?' scenarios.

Although, there was a certainly joy to be had watching Corp players faces contort into pained expressions as Fisk made them deal with an odd form of attack! Every game I scored at least 4pts of agendas, so it's not like the deck was a pushover.