Kyūdō Shadows

The idea for this originally came from this post over on BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/article/13076459#13076459 In it, anathomical describes a Weyland deck where he utilizes Archers and the fact that they're insanely expensive to break consistently. Being intrigued by this idea and wanting to see how it plays, I drew up a rough draft and played a couple of matches. The biggest problem was usually to score the first agenda so I could start up the Archer remote madness, so if I didn't draw into a Hostile, things could get very hairy. Other than that, the deck performed admirably.

And then it hit me - this can be built just as well, if not better in Jinteki! The agenda composition only needs minimal changes, with Clone Retirement taking the place of Hostile Takeover... and what's better, I can comfortably Trick-of-Light any other 1-pointer from out of hand to get the Archer train rolling, too! Similarly, I get better resilience to RnD digs by having Snares and the ID ability. The flatline "auto-win" isn't there yet, but I get more of an attrition aspect in return, by adding direct damage to the mix. Already having Shadows in the deck (for econ and ToL reasons) made Closed Accounts an auto-include, to complete the holy trinity of attrition - now I have program trashing, econ denial and direct damage.

The playstyle is relatively simple if you're familiar with Jinteki, only things to note would be:

• always try to get the payoff from Corporate War, it gives an insane boost that will leave you free to spend time advancing ICE and doing all sorts of other interesting things
• protect centrals with Shadows, the first Archer should probably go to a remote
• advance Shadows as soon as it's practically feasible, both because of ToL and to make it impractically expensive to break
• Chums are here for Femme protection (and to a lesser extent Inside Job protection) and to make Shadows a royal pain in the butt
• Troubleshooter is here to cause trouble to Atmen and to possibly re-connect an Archer.
• Also, Troubleshooter + Katana kills more people than you'd believe :P
• Closed Accounts are here to make an unbroken Shadow more problematic and to send repeat Siphoners to the hell where they rightfully belong
• Unorthodox Predictions should always say "Sentry" when scored

That's about all from me, thanks again to anathomical for the (indirect) inspiration!

p.s. in case anyone's wondering what Kyūdō is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABd%C5%8D