Chessrunner

Pretty straightforward build, been teching a lot of other decks as well, but I'll put this up first since releasing this decklist requires by far the least work for me at the moment. The pawn idea originally derived from db0s Homeless Kasparov, though this deck has shifted quite a lot from his ideas.

• The main point and game plan of this deck is steady aggressive tempo-play. You should focus on maintaining a steady flow of cash and made runs. If you can't, set your rig up up until you see a possibility to continue steady runs.
  • If in matchups that just spike their icing out of your game pace, you'll have to switch to calculated turtling and strike at right moments whenever you can.
  • If you have the game pace for it, two runs per turn is usually your optimal amount for you. (Thus, I chose the interfaces as your long term agenda stealing cards. As you'll be pushing for a steady flow of runs instead of single, more disastrous runs, they'll give you more bang for your buck than if using event runs. I run both interfaces due to the fact that I'll want to pressure both HQ and R&D, and keep their icing even.)
  • That means, in general, that you should avoid making a lot of plays that cost you most of your game pace.
  • Keep in mind that your breaker suite gives a lot of freedom to catch corps when they try to get an agenda out. In general, I chose this breaker suite due to it's flexibility, speed, and not being reliant on several draws and tutors (plus both breakers being breakers that heavily require the recursion-oriented cards that exile always wants to play, plus e3 is a godsend that gives you even more credit-efficient breaking, especially with D4v1d). If you have the cash, you most of the time have the option to roll out and get through with one card alone, rig up or not... You shouldn't be afraid of playing Overmind if you really need it, even if you don't have your Deep Red up yet. Having a breaker base that is both flexible and fast mitigates a lot of the clunkyness of exile and your bread and butter Pawning in my experience. D4v1d is there to soften otherwise disastrous match ups such as Blue Sun, and to otherwise soften the credit cost of your aggressive plays. Even as you're not running the Cerberus suite that requires a lot more tutoring, you'll still be using SMCs usually whenever you can, as if you have your breakers up you'll be getting Pawns. I favor this suite to that for this deck due to the Cerberus suite having a clunkier nature.
• Pawn + Scheherazade + Deep Red is your bread and butter. The reason I chose this economy is it's continuous strength and longevity.
  • At it's worst pawn is a sub-par ice trashing card (since getting rid of it will require trashing hosted ice,) which is okay, since you should usually be able to keep it on the right ice as long as you can balance the amount of runs you make each turn with your opponents ice basing and rez pace.
  • This is kind of obvious, but don't start fooling around with Pawns until you get your Deep Red. The only exceptions are against damage heavy decks, if you have to run or risk damage, and when you'd have to discard them otherwise at end of turn.
  • As other general rules of thumb, your first SMC will usually burn up for your Scheherazade unless you're against a super fast advance and haven't naturally drawn Overmind (and D4v1d if they have Wraparound/Turing et cetera). Also, don't go digging for your pawns like a madman unless you really see no rational loss to do so. Usually you should draw a few cards each turn and try to keep up your general tempo up.
  • When you have Exile and Masanori doing all the card draws for you, you should just focus on running and and playing the few floating cards out of your hand.
  • Remember to actively reposition your Pawns when necessary. I can not stress this enough.

Explaining my splash and other choices:

• I chose Tyson Observatory for consistency. I'm able to run one copy of every hardware I need as either a part of my core rig or as answers to certain decks, and still be able to get them consistently into play. This also saves me a lot of card slots and influence (adding up to being able to play D4v1d, as this breaker base let's me run 1x Scheherazade as I can spare a SMC for it).
• Levy AR to let me keep my game pace up in longer games, and to recover from too many successful trash programs and forced early damages.
• Modded synergizes with my pace of drawing and wanting to play things from my hand until at 5 when I have my bread and butter up. It also lets me get an interface up for early runs without losing a lot of credits I could use for runs.
• Swordsman isn't currently very popular in my countries tournament meta, but if you need an answer for it, I'd say even pipeline is okay, due to it not costing influence (that you need). If your meta, for example, is fast enough and not super trash heavy for you to not need Levy AR, take it out.

Tips for beginners and the like:

• Your main focus should be learning how to keep up your game pace. You'll probably lose some games due to the fact that you've been too passive or aggressive with your runs, or due to not drawing and playing cards with a steady pace, instead solely focusing on hunting cards out of your deck with draws or clicking money turn after turn and only starting to draw cards when you already need to have the option for plays at hand.
• Don't understand your bread and butter? You have a Pawn in your heap, and a Pawn in play, plus Deep Red and Scheherazade. You make a successful run, and Pawn is installed on the innermost ice, so it trashes itself and installs the pawn in your heap. You install it on to Scheherazade, and then move it immediately due to Deep Red. This nets you a card from Exiles ability, and a credit from installing onto Scheherazade. Having two Pawns installed at once and John Masanori further increase the efficiency of this bread and butter synergy.
• Until you learn this deck inside out and can analyze your hands by more than a few thumb rules, you should prioritize to have at least two of the following in a good starting hand:
  • A card that gives you credits.
  • Diesel.
  • Pawn.
  • Scheherazade. (Especially if you get Diesel or some other credit giving cards with it, or your sure you can manage being a bit more dependent on draws)

Anything I forgot to add in these notes? Drop a comment below! I'd love to hear feedback and ideas. I'll be putting up more decks later, but seeing as I want to release a lot of briefing, strategy and thoughts with each deck, it'll be more about my schedule than anything else. I actively test and tech decks almost every day, though. Thanks for reading, and I hope you like this deck. :)