Chakana Theory

magikot 1992

This is my take on a deck that I saw played recently on Jinteki. My apologies to whomever it was that was playing it originally, I don't remember your user name to properly credit you. The deck is great for trolling your next GNK.

Once set up, this deck can be an NPE for the corp. There are only so many times the corp can fire a CVS to score out before the oppressive combo takes over the game.

By combining a Hivemind on Progenitor and two copies of Virus Breeding Ground, you can ensure that as soon as the corp purges, your next turn you can get Hivemind back to three counters to turn back on Chakana and Deep Thought.

With Chakana in play the corporation is forced to either telegraph their desire to score out, start flooding their hand, or dumping everything into archives. With Deep Thought, you're sniping agendas off the top and digging into R&D with R&D Interface for more.

Corporate Scandal powered Blackmail runs get you into servers that don't have a pre-rezzed Ash, Caprice, or other defensive upgrades.

Power Shutdown decks can halt your combo if you don't have an SMC to protect progenitor or if you haven't found all of your Clone Chips yet. Crypsis is your answer to ice in order to get into servers that are protected by a successful early firing of ABT or against decks that use Executive Boot Camp. Beth Kilrain-Chang guarantees you have 5 clicks per turn because the corp will have infinite money all game. With this you can play a scandal, blackmail and click through a single rezzed Turing on the scoring remote. Plascrete helps you not go BOOM!

12 comments
15 Nov 2016 Cluster Fox

This is hilarious.

15 Nov 2016 FreqKing

Cool take on the old archetype. Seems like it has no response to the ever popular The All-Seeing I however. Foxfire is seeing play, Scarcity of Resources and Hellion Beta Test also present potential problems . It's hard times for resource based strategies these days.

15 Nov 2016 magikot

I've been informed on facebook that the creator of the original version of this is likely @emilyspine on Jinteki. If so, thank you for inspiring this fun deck!

15 Nov 2016 MikeJS

Noooooooo. Why did you publish this? I played against @emilyspine playing this out of Quetzal (sans Corporate Scandal/BM) and I fell in love with it. Now everyone is going to be playing it :(

Now that my whinging is out of the way, talk to me about card choices? The version I play is Anarch, and thus quite different. I think I'd miss Grimoire, but of course I'm happy to test. I also slotted Freedom Through Equality, which is just magic when you want to steal the agenda that Deep Thought reveals to you :) I'm using Darwin as my breaker because when it never drops below 3 strength, it's not utterly terrible.

15 Nov 2016 magikot

The match I was spectating the runner was playing it out of CT and the changes I made here were adding Beth, the second clone chip and third chakana, and (I think) the same old things.

The player I saw had a scavenge for when you get an early hive mind and want to get it out, then scavenging it onto progenitor later in the game. They also had a 3rd scandal but only 1 chip. Lastly, I remember three modded and only two chakana and no Beths.

Like @FreqKing said, this is an update to an old Chakana Noise shell that I saw played occasionally during creation and control. After the anarch cards of Order and Chaos came out I saw a few others update the deck out of Noise but it still wasn't enough to really make it click (though I like the Darwin idea). Now with all the anti-ai tech running around you need something more to make it work. That's where the Scandal/Blackmail combo comes in. By combining that with the chakana shell you get a powerful combo deck that takes a long time to set up. Thankfully, the meta still likes to go wide so you have a good chance of getting a lot of card draw off an early Astrolabe to dig you into your economy and combo pieces.

An anarch core would have more ways to work around some of the anti-ai cards with their amazing breakers, but that's a lot of deck slots dedicated to doing so. I'd rather the corp be rich and give me 5 clicks a turn to set up and then just ignore their ice all together.

15 Nov 2016 PRFogarty

Has minor issues with 5 advanced Aggressive Secretary.

15 Nov 2016 magikot

@PRFogarty LOL very minor. :P But that was a great play.

15 Nov 2016 emilyspine

Thanks for the shout out. If you're Magikarp on j.net, then I played this deck against you a few days ago, according to my games log!

This is by no means a competitive deck: it started life as an idea for a jank tournament and seemed slow but strong. I've been testing it in a couple of different IDs to see which is the most robust build before publishing it. This isn't quite the version I've been playing - I've been tweaking it to try and improve some of the deficiencies it has in the current competitive meta. But ultimately it is probably not viable as it's extremely slow. Beth is an interesting include as the corp is often rich, but may not be the best use of a slot in 40 cards. I might give her a try.

15 Nov 2016 emilyspine

@magikotjust saw the newer comments. Scavenge was in a very old version, in fact I think I loaded that one in jnet by accident. It's a hangover from when the virus counters came from Scavenge/Surge which was the game plan until someone suggested VBG.

@MikeJSI am still running the Quetzal version in parallel with the Shaper builds, unfortunately the Blackmail build is just much stronger, as much as I love the old whalebear. The Quetzal version has many more fun cards - this one is much more focused.

I'm planning to do a longer write up once I've tested it some more.

15 Nov 2016 magikot

I am magikot on jnet as well, but I was just spectating your game while I was working. I took this to a casual game night at my local store last night and had a lot of fun with it and lots of laughs were had (like losing my rig to a 5 advance Aggressive Secretary). I look forward to seeing what you finally settle on. It definitely reminds me of this deck (https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/14677/can-o-whupass) from almost two years ago. When you do publish, let me know so I can try to link back to yours as my "derived from" link.

16 Nov 2016 whirrun

@emilyspine I mucked about with the Valencia version of the deck a while ago, and have always wanted to go back to it. This is where I eventually landed. netrunnerdb.com It's one of my favourite all time decks, so I'm very glad to see the idea get more attention and potentially offer what little advice I can give about my list.

16 Nov 2016 emilyspine

@magikot @whirrun I wrote up my experiences with the deck so far here netrunnerdb.com