Shadow BOX-ing

It looks like a storm's a brewin'...

With Hostile Infrastructure out and Industrial Genomics and Jinteki Biotech on the way, it's time to get serious and start suiting up against the zaps. For whatever reason, PE has always been one of my weakest match ups, but it's also been the one people in my meta play the least, so I could get away with writing it off. No such luck anymore.

I won't go too in-depth into the workings of how this deck plays; it's the next evolution of my "Chart Harder- Indexing Variant" and I go into the nitty gritty in that write-up. So let's look at the changes here.

The biggest change is my least favorite, and it's dropping Astrolabe for two copies of BOX-E. Astrolabe is bar none one of the best Shaper consoles - an Akamatsu that gives you draw power - so you'd need a good reason to cut it for something out of faction. But BOX-E gives us two excellent perks: +2MU is good across the board, and completely eliminates the need to pack extra memory; and most importantly +2 hand size. Not only is this custom tailored to help against the PE matchup where your cards are your hit points, but it also lowers the chance your Levy or Scavenge will be sniped while letting you hold them longer since your max hand size bumps up to 7.

To make room for the two BOX-E's though, we had to cut at least one Legwork, and that just doesn't feel like a card worth running as a one-of. So instead, we've added Nerve Agent. Yes, it's slower, and yes it takes up 1MU, but the same mentality of R&D digging applies here: seeing two cards is the sweet spot, any more and you run the risk of accessing something really nasty. Nerve Agent allows you to do just this while building tokens for more accesses later in case you need to make an emergency HQ dig.

And lastly, we've added Deus X. I used to think of this card as a silver bullet, but in a deck too low-econ to rely on Net Shield (and way too poor to even think about Feedback Filter), DX is the way you stay alive against heavy zappers. And to feel better about adding it to your deck, take a look at sneakdoor.com, and look at just how many pieces of ice it breaks.

This is still in testing, so I encourage you to sleeve it up and give it a go! Let me know what works, and what you think needs tweaking!