New Vegas Speedrun (3 Government Takeovers scored at GNK)

So, I've been playing a lot of Fallout: New Vegas lately. For the uninitiated, in that game you play as a courier in a dystopian future who ends up destabilizing the government and replacing it with their preferred flavour of totalitarianism. This deck is an experiment in speedrunning to that exact same win condition.

The combo, plain and simple, is to somehow get 9 advancement tokens onto the board, install Government Takeover, and then play Biotic Labor and Red Planet Couriers for six points. But, I usually find that the runner tries to stop me from doing that, so the rest of this deck is designed to handle a variety of matchups and create scoring windows, without slotting narrow tech cards that would slow the deck down.

I could probably say something about every card I chose to put in this deck, and why I chose it, but that'll get old quick. I do like to write, though. Tell you what, I'll just write a lot of stuff down here and you can read what you want.

Identity:

Weyland Consortium: Builder of Nations is perfect for this combo. The small deck size concentrates your draws, and the threat of meat damage pings is surprisingly effective in discouraging early aggression.

Agendas:

If the runner never sees Government Takeover, they have to steal 4 out of your 6 agendas to win, which is a pain in the butt for them. Plus, the odds that the runner will ever see GT over the course of a game are pretty low because, hey, it's just one card in your whole deck, right? Have some faith in the laws of probability and sleeve it without fear.

Your first goal is to score a Project Atlas with a couple extra tokens on it. Depending on how things are going, you can rush it out behind Ice Wall and Hortum, or never-advance it and then over-advance it the next turn with Red Planet Couriers. Use one of your Biotic Labors if you have to. You can go broke and wipe every single advancement token off your board doing this and still be in a very strong position. Atlas tokens are godly. If you have Atlas tokens, you have your combo, you have economy, you have a way to mess with Indexing, you have a way to thin out accesses on HQ, you have everything that you need.

Hostile Takeover? Nope! It increases agenda density, doesn't meaningfully complement our combo, and we want the runner to work for their bad pub.

Assets:

Anson Rose is a strong early play and definitely worth including 3 copies of. He makes all facechecks more threatening. He creates limitless advancement tokens for no clicks or credits and accelerates your Courier combo. Install him behind a single piece of ice, and if the runner goes to trash him, just move his tokens onto whatever ice you installed in front of him, where the Couriers can grab them from later.

Illegal Arms Factory is a surprisingly powerful tempo boost. Install one early when the runner is poor and trying to set up. Put a single piece of ice in front of it later to keep the value proposition unfavorable for them. Trash it manually when you have all the combo pieces and money that you need. Or, let the runner spend money trashing it in the late game; they probably won't make their investment back with bad pub before the game's over.

No Jackson Howard? You don't need it. It's pretty hard to get flooded with agendas when you're only running six, and there's only one that matters.

Operations:

I'm running relatively few economic operations, but with Illegal Arms Factory helping you find them, and the tremendous mid-late game value of Mass Commercialization you'll probably be alright. This deck bounces back from zero credits pretty easily, and IPO doesn't help with that anyway. Make sure you save money by being smart about the ice you rez. You usually won't need to build a scoring server.

Ark Lockdown is your anti-Clot tech. Install something, bait the Clot play with a Biotic Labor, and purge until the damn thing is finally in the graveyard. Yes, it's definitely worth the two influence. It's easier to tutor (with Consulting Visit) than Cyberdex Virus Suite (which can't deal with Clot & Sac Con anyway) and it's useful in every matchup. Even criminals are running Paperclip.

BOOM! is a 1-card alternate win condition. It wins games.

Housekeeping is mostly here as a counter-current, but it's also an alternative to Scarcity of Resources that I wanted to experiment with. Housekeeping isn't useless against resource-light builds and it works with Weyland Consortium: Builder of Nations to put pressure on the runner's card-draw capabilities.

Preemptive Action is your only way to stuff GT back into R&D if you're worried about HQ multi-access. Make it count. It saved my ass today, when I installed GT and played Biotic Labor only to see Clot hit the board. (I didn't think Inversificator Kit had the spare influence for it, and I was dead wrong). I installed a sacrificial GFI over GT and used Preemptive Action to tuck it back into R&D. I won later with a GT score.

ICE:

Ice Wall and Hortum are your gear checks if you want to rush your first Project Atlas. Otherwise, just dump whatever you want onto your centrals. Anson Rose makes all of your ice amazing - you can punish face-checks by moving three tokens onto Hortum, Mausolus and Colossus. You can even use him to drop a token onto Builder to activate your identity and improve your Mass Commercialization plays.

Builder never fires, because the runner knows it's a threat, and they'll spend 4 credits breaking it. That's just fine for ice that costs 2 to rez, and you can freely move it anywhere that you're most vulnerable to repeated access.

Janky deck modification ideas:

Install a card, play Biotic Labor, and watch as Clot hits the board. Stare the runner straight in the eye as you play Red Planet Couriers anyway and pass the turn. Enjoy the runner's mystified expression as they puzzle over whether you'd be dumb enough to invest 9 credits, ~10 advancement tokens and a precious influence point into a Project Junebug pipe dream. When they make the undeniably correct choice to access it, what's that? It's Plan B, bitches! Score Government Takeover from your hand.

Sometimes Anson Rose hangs around for a surprisingly long time, if the runner doesn't want to take the tempo hit of trashing him. Punish this oversight by living the Woodcutter dream. Rez this useless travesty of design and immediately dump 15 advancements onto it from Anson Rose for the flatline.