Azop's Peopleshop

A few months ago @paulyg mentioned a wonderfully novel idea for a draw engine: The Class Act, Drug Dealer and Aesop's out of Az . Installing The Class Act with the 1c discount from Az then selling it later effectively nets you 4 cards for a click, and with Drug Dealer it's 3 credits and a card.

That is some pretty great value and I was instantly enamored with it, but unfortunately never got a chance to play it in a tournament... until a December jank tournament in Aldershot, which is probably the perfect place to debut something like this.

While the core Aesop/Class Act/Drug Dealer engine basically never changed (dropping down to 2 Aesops for influence being the only difference), the deck as a whole went through a ton of iterating until I arrived at this, which I feel pretty happy with for a 'for fun' deck.

The most important change was bringing in Off-Campus Apartment, which frankly should be considered as central to the engine as the other three cards. With one of those bad boys down piloting the deck becomes so incredibly silky smooth as you're constantly refueling your hand and advancing the engine far, far faster than you'd expect. Without it, relying on just the Class Acts and Drug Dealers, the deck was prone to stalling and clicking for cards - far too slow and dependent on chaining TCAs to actually work. But if you can land an OCA early you almost never have to click to draw as you just windmill through the deck at an almost terrifying pace. I can't understate how vital this card was in making this engine viable; any opening hand with OCA should be given serious consideration, it's that good here. And hey, even dupes aren't that bad - they basically turn into Easy Marks thanks to Aesop's!

Street Peddler unsurprisingly fits into this engine incredibly well, adding yet more draw with OCA while we dig for pieces and opening up some amusing shenanigans like installing a Class Act during the corp's turn to draw 4 cards, which obviously gets even sillier if DJ Fenris for Hayley is down. And with it the engine was rounded out nicely; what was left was finding something to do with it.

This was hard, because have you seen how many slots all those cards take up? After cutting it down to the bare bones I settled on a simple money and breakers strat. Cache was an obvious include, this being an Aesop's deck and all, and even if you could do something better with the slot it was my last chance to play it in standard. The Rogue Trading/Citadel Sanctuary package felt like another no-brainer with Az's link, and gives the deck some serious bursty economic heft. And finally, Rezeki and Kati (also a connection!) give us a permanent long-term money solution.

Your basic gameplan is to use the draw engine to blitz through your deck and quickly get into a position that allows you to camp the remote while The Turning Wheel provides some central pressure. Which, frankly, feels a bit of an underwhelming outcome considering how cool and fun the journey to get there is!

As can often be the case when pursuing fun ideas, this deck is all engine and (almost) no win-con. Turns out the sick draw engine takes up a lot of cards and doesn't make us very rich, which doesn't leave us much room to, y'know, do other things. But! The engine is extremely fun, performed solidly on the day, and is pretty novel. Maybe someone can take this and do something better - it only loses Cache to rotation after all - but for now I'm pretty happy with it. So thanks @paulyg for sharing the original list!

(Also it dies to Scarcity but that just doesn't bear thinking about)