NapX

Amazingly scary to play against. The pressure is palpable when you see the huge amount of credits floated and a Vamp coming.

With 15 doubles and the ID ability, every turn Power Nap's value increases by 1 . When the deck is more or less milled, you're getting 14 or more out of each Power Nap/SOT/Deja Vu. The subsequent Vamp is impossible to stop when the Runner is floating 70+.

One other thing as Corp is that if you don't ice up both HQ and R&D on turn 1, be prepared to either face Keyhole or Wanton Destruction. It's punishing against an already weak start where you're lacking ice.

Hades Shard plays its usual role of accessing Archives before Jackson Howard and against an iced up Archives. Inject is also great draw in a deck with only 7 programs.

10/10. Saw this deck in action, will not want at my server's door.

i made this with Reina Roja: Freedom Fighter but with 3 Account Siphon.

No offense to all the people winning Champs with MaxX, but I don't think Corp players know what the hell they are doing. Majority of these MaxX decks can't do anything about a Corp pushing out Agendas through a single ICE remote, much less a double ICE remote. What is your game plan against smart Corporations? Please don't take my comments personally; honestly this is one of my favorite MaxX lists I've seen. This first month of Store Championships is seeing some MaxX success, but I sincerely doubt she will be a strong ID in the long run. This deck should have serious problems versus Blue Sun, and if it isn't, I'd challenge the strength of the Blue Sun pilots.

@moistloaf

I agree with you. I can't speak for other MaxX decks like SlySquid's as I haven't played them myself, but against NapX, corps can do many things to fight against the deck better. Putting specific ice(pop-up, wraparound, archer, pup) on R&D can help reduce the number of keyhole runs; scoring geothermal helps recover from the vamp; putting big ice on HQ as blue sun to bounce after the vamp also helps recover from the vamp; putting extra emphasis on scoring and triggering ABT(icing R&D) helps defend against keyhole runs, and an infinite number of other things that are so specific that it's impossible for me to adequately describe them all here DO help to fight this deck.

With that said, I do think this deck can be piloted to be resilient to a lot of that counterplay. Vamp lets you run and access with impunity as long as you haven't run that server beforehand. Wanton acts as the usual legwork. Singularity lets you snipe IAA(bonus efficiency points if you time the vamp turn with corp's IAA, so click 1 vamp, click 2 steal IAA(or click 3 if click 2 has to break oversighted ice firs, before proceeding with the keyholes). Retrieval femme helps accesses. If the corp is piling ice on centrals early, they are not advancing agendas early, agendas are likely to pool in HQ, so you can snipe them with wanton.

With reference to blue sun (with the standard keystone agenda spread) is relatively slow to win if it's unable to IAA(you snipe IAA with any of singularity, vamp/run, retrieval-femme and they are helpless, you might miss the first one for lack of the right cards if they corp happens to draw lots of ice and econ and an IAA agenda too, but you won't miss the second).

Like most go-big-or-go-home R&D decks, one of the key tricks here is to pull off the big dig just before corp can win, to maximize your money advantage while they waste their money and clicks advancing agendas and installing ice.

One blue sun trick deserving mention is to place the expensive ice on HQ and the most efficiently taxing ice against eater on R&D, so that you can bounce the HQ ice and rez the R&D ice on the second turn, again making it more expensive to make those keyhole runs. Crescentus is a possible tech for the deck depending on the evolving meta.

Thing is, if you're durdling building up money, Blue Sun is doing the same thing. I don't consider Keystone to be the best Blue Sun deck, but rather @bblum's Bootcamp Glacier, which smashed up the Stimhack League, a hell of a feat. I don't see you having much of any money left if you Vamp a Corp with 40+ credits. Hive taxes Eater as much as Wraparound until an Agenda is scored. Blue Sun should be slam Crisium on HQ before RND; how do you deal with Crisium on HQ? It's not even unique, meaning one might show up on RND as well. Titan Supermodernism should be able to give this and any Anarch deck issues too, pounding out Agendas behind 1 or 2 pieces of ICE. HB has Eli; 2 Eli on RND makes every Keyhole run cost 8 credits, which is far from sustainable, especially after planning to Vamp. NEH can Biotic the first Astro, Wraparound RND and then race you, maybe even with an ICE'd DBS. The issue with relying on Vamp is that I can't imagine you will always be able to bring the Corp to zero, and even if you can, they are probably already on 4 or 5 points.

@moistloaf

The deck is built with a certain meta in mind. If you are in a meta where decks commonly play multiple crisium grids, constellation ice (and/or random swordsmen), then you should not play this deck in that meta. Just play something regular like kate where crisium doesn't affect you much.

With regards to s, Against the one blue sun I played in the SC, I had 75 credits against his 30 somewhere around turn 9 cause he was trying to just build up money. I let him score atlas to reduce his creds, and then vamped.

You need to understand that ice only needs to be broken once(on the vamp run) if you don't have to wanton. That's why ice doesn't really pose a problem unless corp can rez it themselves through ABT/bootcamp.

In the description, I mentioned the play against crisium on HQ.

Very cool deck. I've been working on similar versions of this deck for a while - here's my latest effort. (Short version: it uses Amped Up and I've Had Worse rather than Vamp and the extra Wantons, essentially - sacrificing the flexibility of the latter and the utility of the former to manually dig up the deck and hit the Keyhole window a few turns earlier.)

Question for you: one of my biggest concerns when working on this deck was simply the feeling that waiting until turn 9 was too long - the runner might just get wise to what you're doing and start throwing down sparingly-protected scoring servers, trying to get agendas out the door as fast as possible. Have you experienced any of that with NapX?

@greyfield

For anything that isn't NBN(or the new atlastrain), they take two turns to score any agenda. After they advance, you can choose to leave it or you can choose to get it via 1. singularity it, or 2. do a vamp and run it, or 3. retrieval run femme to get in(you can often get through 2 ice by femme-ing the inside one). You can always let the first few agendas score if they are of little importance(indeed, this is often the optimal play). Agendas you prefer them not to score include astro, geothermal(recover from vamp), high risk investment(recover from vamp), ABT(self-rez on R&D), overscored vitruvius(return jacksons to reshuffle keyholed agendas), nisei(interrupts the vamp run). Other than these, it's usually fine to let them score until match point where you crush their fragile dreams of winning. It's important to have the option to stop the agenda if you need to though, that's why I have 3 eaters, because you want to have to option to stop any IAA agenda.