Suicide Goldfish Walker (too slow to be a Runner)

This deck is intended to be the worst in history.

Watch your opponent in despair at watching you watching him play. Use it as a dummy to goldfish your corp deck.

Economy cards:

• Calling in favors: with no connections in the deck

• Freelance coding contract: with no programs in the deck

• Public Terminal: with no Run events in the deck

• Hard at Work: lose clics. Yes you will gain credits but you have nothing interesting to play with.

• Push your luck: Yes, push your luck. Wins credits to play useless cards. Or lose them all. Indeed the context makes Push your luck the strongest card in the game.

Overall this consistent economy will set up a solid base to develop the game plan...

Play the least possible ! Why manipulate cards? They are fragile, even with sleeves. Here are the keys to properly handle the Suicide Goldfish Walker:

• Play Laramy Fisk ! Who owns this card? Why use a runner ID that everybody owns? The very first sacrificial tribute one must pay to lose with class is to procure this card. If any fears that his capacity will help you in any way, don't worry: just avoid running a central server. And 0 link is great as long as no trace occurs.

• Lose clics ! Calcuting everything is so exhausting. Make the math easier. With:

  • 3 x Starlight crusade Funding
  • 3 x Hard at Work
  • 2 x Wyldside

  ...give yourself a well-deserved break. This creates sharp windows of play when, if you handle the deck properly, you will in position to play a card. This gives a strong psychological advantage in the course of the game, since the Corp would never expect that passed a couple of turns.

• Tutor anything you need. The right card at the right time:

  • Hostage allows you to delve your deck and realize it contains no connections.
  • Planned Assault enables you to scope your deck and make sure it involves no run events.
  • Special Order permits you to scan your deck and assert that it includes no icebreaker.
  • Express Delivery authorizes you to dig your deck so that the useless card you were going to draw costs 1 extra credit. Sheer class !

The advantages are evident:

• By inventorying your deck mid-game, you make sure you did not lose a card anywhere. Once home after the tournament, it is far too late to recover any card. Who wants to lose a Starlight Crusade Funding? I don't.

• Some illustrations are so beautiful that they provide a real delight to the viewer. The set of cards displays fine images of people crawling, shaking hands, jumping from a building, praying, eating tacos, trying helmet at the local motorcycle gear store. You can even stop for a moment in front of Push your Luck and look you in the mirror. Am I the real player searching the deck and gazing at the card name Push your Luck? Or is the guy pictured in Push your Luck the real deal, searching the deck and gazing at me? Who of the two is the card?

• The moment of abeyance your opponent will experience while you are searching is magical. Most opponents expect you to play to win a game. For a couple of seconds, they will over-calculate and try hard to figure which card you are trying to pick. Meanwhile, you will remain in a safe mood, enjoying the mental comfort of who expects nothing.

• Tutoring makes games longer. But be careful: in exceptional situations, game may then end in a draw. You don't want this.

Boost MU:

You need space to fill the rig with the 0 program set. To enforce self-confidence and determination, the deck includes:

• Dyson Mem Chip: loads you with extra MU and link that you will never use. But it is always highly impressive to sit on a high-value of quantitative metrics of any kind. Prestige matters.

• Blackguard: First, the name is so cool. And, most of all, Blackguard allows you to get rid of the undesired credits provided by Hard at Work. Work is hard. Why make it pay? It is always great when two cards interact in such a way that one annihilates the negative aspects of the other.

So what do we play?

Economy, tutoring, and MU built a safe environment to play the definitive cards that have game developpment reach its climax when played:

• Mass Install: is awesome. For the low cost of 1 credit, it does nothing at all because you run no program. But it allows you to read the flavor text that really defines your deck the most:

"Welcome to the mass install wizard! This wizard will guide you through the process of installing a whole mess of programs onto your almost-certainly inadequate rig. When you're ready to continue, say–oops, too late, here we go!"

• Grifter: the prodigal son. Install. Don't run. Let him be trashed. For a second you'll be famous but labelled posthumous. Forgotten sons.

• Executive wiretaps: OK, you will never access cards... but why not look at them anyway? First, accessing cards is dangerous. You may run the risk of placing agendas in your score area. Then, corp cards too have great illustrations and flavor texts. Unlike your opponent - who is working hard to calculate whether he needs an average of 5,879 or 6,1456 clics per agenda point scored - you are enjoying an optimal state of bliss that makes this moment the best to look at a card, and say: "Hey... Nice... OK." Finally, this allows you to know your opponent better. By analyzing his build, you are ready to meet him in a future tournament.

As a conclusion:

The weakest point of the deck is Starling Crusade Funding reducing the cost of Planned Assault, Executive Wiretaps and Hostage. Which is unfair. But SCF is such a bad card that I can't afford removing it from the deck.

The deck can be switched to a fast-advance version:

+3 Logos / -3 Blackguard

+3 Stimhack / -3 Freelance Coding Contract

+3 Theophilius Bagbitter / -3 Calling in favors (because you don't want to gain 1 credit with Theophilius).

Game plan then is:

• Play Theophilius Bagbitter:

  • you have 3 of them in deck
  • you have 3 Hostages too
  • you have 3 Logos to tutor too. Just wait for the Corp to score an agenda.

• Theophilius will empty your credit pool. Don't click for credits. Lose your hand.

• Spend all of your clicks to draw cards until you get a Stimhack or a Planned Assault to tutor the former. At the end of each turn, you will lose your hand. Dig on.

  • Never draw on your last click if you are at 0 credits. You may run the risk of being forced to trash the Stimhack.
  • Play useless cards that you draw to get rid of the Wyldside effect (otherwise these 2 extra credits per turn allow you to keep cards in your hand).
  • Push your Luck can help: once you get two credits, play Push your luck: you can either lose zero credits or gain twice this amount.
  • Note that you have both a Stimhack + Public Terminal in the deck. But it is not a major issue. Stimhack costs 0. So Public Terminal remains useless.

• Play Stimhack with an empty hand. Make a useless run. Die to the Brain Damage.

Now you own a Laramy Fisk !!!