[Startup] Legwork Fast, Finality Hard, Di(v)e Bankhar

Don’t listen to the haters! 😉 Contrary to popular belief, Anarch is not bad (And congrats on deck of the week PowerlessCube!!).

But let’s do something a little different. Lets put the AGGRO back into Anarch. We don’t need boat. We’re faster than Shaper and don’t need tons of money like Crim. We’re gonna break in for next to nothing, smash centrals and sneak into remotes and apply tons of pressure with the minimum rig possible. All we need is to get rid of our fear and have a williness to pay the blood price. Our motto: Live Fast, Love Hard, and Die Young.

LIVE FAST

No Sure Gamble?! Every card we have with the exception of Twinning costs us 0-2 creds. Our cost curve is probably the lowest of any Startup runner, so we don’t need to build up a horde of cash to break in. Thanks to that and our ID, we can run lean.

Also, we don’t have time to fiddle around with a console. We’re running too fast, too recklessly. We only need Prepaid VoicePAD. It is all the value we’re going to need. We only need one to turn on the Twinning (and pay for nearly all of our events). I normally keep the other in my grip to get sacrificed.

It’s worth singling out Wildcat Strike too. You still want to play it early in the round to give the Corp a tough choice. More than likely they will give you creds, but if they try to get tricky, because you “appear” low on creds we have plenty of cheap cards to spam down!

Lastly, our econ/draw package is rounded out by Raindrops Cut Stone, Steelskin Scarring, Fermenter, and sometimes Into the Depths. Cookbook also does work by buffing Fermenter, Botulus and Imp.

LOVE HARD

Ice breaking is simple. We use our body, our blood and our bugs.

Early on we rely primarily on face checking with regular runs and Raindrops Cut Stone and quickly pivot into a combination of Bankhar with Mayfly or Botulus to keep up the pressure. Once you have Bankhar online, the corp will be forced to double stack their servers if they intend to keep us out. They cannot defend everywhere.

If you don’t have an Imp in our opening hand, we have the next best thing. Into the Depths is the secret sauce that summons us an Imp, giving us drip econ and lets us trash corp cards along the way. Thanks to Bankhar and our breaker suite, you can apply a ton of pressure early, especially on HQ. Once you get in, you get to wreck the Corps day AND get paid for it.

Don't forget that you have the option to use Into the Depths to plant a Botulus on the innermost ice of the remote (or R&D) or finding the Mayfly you need to smash into whatever server you want to. If you’re already on Bankhar, the Corp needs to throw out even more defenses if they try to lock you out.

Finally, if the corp decides to build out their defenses into the Depths gets EVEN better. Now you can make a little cash back and possibly charge a Twinning (with a power token already on it).

DIE YOUNG

With the ease we can break into servers during the early to mid game, both Legwork and Finality are great tools to root around and try to snag agendas before we flame out, or the corp defenses get too robust. We also are running The Twinning which can boost our digs from Finality and Legwork, or make any random run better.

Katorga Breakout also comes in handy to recur extra copies of programs, or events. The winning move in one game was to recur a Steelskin Scarring to keep me alive on a final Finality run on R&D thanks to an Imp trash.

Let's pause here for a moment and take a brief detour: The secret trick to have successful deep digs is to remember Thrazznos' Patented Golden Ratio ™ AKA WTFATAH (WHERE THE F*CK ARE THE AGENDAS HIDING)...

"You need to keep in mind, statistically, how many agenda points have they drawn. 18 points in a 44 card deck? If they've draw 22 cards, that means roughly 9 agenda points are in R&D and 9 in HQ or beyond (scored or on the board somewhere)...

...The ratio is roughly 1 point per 2.5 cards cards drawn." -Thrazznos

Remember that the corp agenda points ratio is dictated by their deck size. With the current Startup deck pool only having one 5/3, normally corps are fielding ten, or more agendas. At the start of the game, always make sure you double check what the corp deck size is so you know how many agendas points there are (40-44 deck size -18 points, 45-49 - 20, 50-54 - 22).

Once I started counting scored agenda points, based on Thrazznos' advice, and kept in mind how many agendas might be remaining and where they should be, my runner game started to greatly improve.

Back to the deck. Has our intense pressure (courtesy of Bankhar) kept the Corp from scoring for a few turns? Lets think! WTFATAH? Let's take a look at HQ. Is the Corp desperately drawing to close out the game and not installing anything in the remote? Let's look at R&D first then try to sweep HQ.

Oh and if you suspect the corp is a kill deck you need to remember to keep eight creds and four cards. I normally try to hold off a second or third Finality until I need to finish the game against NBN: Reality Plus or kill Weyland. That's another reason why we have a couple No Free Lunch. Plus... we should have been probing HQ and Imping away their key kill cards along the way? Right?!

In any event Loup’s a beautiful man and intends to leave a beautiful corpse. Bankhar early and often! Live Fast, Love Hard, and Die Young baby.

Final note:
Anarchs need to embrace the Bankhar-verse!

Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga is a good card. Maybe even a faction defining card in Startup and beyond. I think it helps bring back the "vanilla" IDs, like Reina Roja: Freedom Fighter and Quetzal: Free Spirit that haven't shined as well. Until now.

Just think of these examples: Quetzal: Free Spirit and Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga. With Bankhar, you already can get into a one ice server no problem. BUT... now the corp is in big trouble if the innermost ice is a barrier. Throw in some Poison Vial, Mayfly and now we have a stew going.

Similarily Reina Roja: Freedom Fighter and Bankhar cause different issues. The corp has to install and stack two ice to keep you out (that's a cred). Now they have to rez both those ice (two additional extra creds over two turns or one cred on one run). Now that econ denial is gonna start adding up, especially if we throw in En Passant (which is fine to get trashed to Bankhar if they rez) and Tread Lightly.

Finally play Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga with Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist! Xi brings so much hate when your ice are being sabotaged away AND you need two of them to keep xir out of the scoring remote, HQ, R&D, or somehow protect Archives.