Chart Harder

Same chart, different course.

This deck is a new take on my Hard Stealth Kit build I put on here a while ago. It was good, and it served me, and I hope some of you, pretty well for a while. It was extremely powerful and had the huge advantage of shortening the mid-game; when it worked. As I played it more and more though, I found myself losing in situations where it was clear I just didn't get set up in time. With all the moving parts the deck had, it was pretty easy to get locked out of matches simply because you had everything you needed except a breaker or a tutor. Conversely, my wins could be landslides if the cards came out in the right order, but I'm not one for feast or famine. So it was time to rebuild.

Enter this deck, which I've had this deck, in one form or another, in playtesting for about two months now. In casual play, and on OCTGN, it's held its own, but the group I play with every week hardly constitutes a random sample and OCTGN for me is just a way to see how deck theory mostly plays out, so I've held off on posting this decklist until I was sure it could perform. This list here is what I took to my most recent tournament, and let me tell you - it performs.

There are several noticeable changes, the first being Magnum Opus which drove Hard Stealth Kit's economy nearly 100%. Powering your beefy rig was no small feat, and it needed several power turns of 8 credits to see its full potential. But seeing how much room the deck needed for, I only ever felt justified packing one copy of Mopus (there was zero room for a dead draw in that deck), meaning I almost always had to tutor for it. One SMC or Test Run gone, just like that; and with it, 2MU. That lost memory also meant any type of pressure you wanted to apply was severely neutered, especially if you had to rely on Cloak as your source of stealth for Refractor - that's 4MU in use, just to get you into one server and have a reliable economy. I tried to convince myself that Mopus was worth it. Even with an install cost of 5, it was relatively quick to close its own scoring window, and I operated on the assumption that it would keep future windows much tighter than the corp would like. But when you have to dig through your deck to find the first CyberSolutions, and pay 4 to install it JUST to be able to put more programs down on the table to make a run (and let's hope by now you have that Replicator because if not, it could be a while before you see the next bit of extra memory you need again - and if you do can you spare another 4 credits?), I started to realize that this deck was painfully slow. It was reasonably okay on consistency, not the best but certainly not the worst, but it was sorely lacking in efficiency. So I took the core idea of the deck, a bulldozer approach of building up hardware to the point that every run was a) unstoppable and b) painful for the corp to watch, and I threw it out. I stripped the deck of the engine that made it run and gave it a complete under-the-hood overhaul. And it all started with a card I've never liked until now.

I always thought of Professional Contacts as a stepchild of sorts: a watered down Diesel meets a watered down Mopus. "I have both of those cards in my deck already" I told myself. "And ProCo takes five clicks to pay for itself." But running an ID as aggressive as Kit, who wants to come out of the gate with the ability to get into nearly any early server, the most important resource isn't money. It's time. You can get into servers with hardly any resources at all: a Refractor and one of the three forms of stealth - Cloak, Ghost Runner, Lockpick - and you're pretty much in every turn until they start stacking ice AND the innermost piece isn't a code gate. So what were we doing wasting time with Mopus and Replicators and CyberSolutions? Dig. Dig! You're going to find what you need sooner than you think, and if you can make money while you do it, all the better. Including Professional Contacts as the main form of draw/econ compression is a night and day improvement compared to the blunt edge that is Magnum Opus. It lets you start tearing through your deck to find the pieces you need to get into servers, and it keeps your MU open so you're never having to juggle program space. Yes, this version runs on far less money (though it can be quite rich), but there are a number of ways we can make this work.

Dirty Laundries do work when you're on low credits, and can get you up to Sure Gamble range from 2c with one click instead of 3. Datasucker acts as a form of pseudo economy, freeing up stealth credits that are normally used for boosting strength and allowing you spend them on breaking subroutines instead (not necessary, but a nice bonus when it happens), and of course Kati as our backbone. For a deck with a breaker suite as efficient as stealth, a Kati with 6 credits on her starts to look terrifying. But load her up a little more if you can: 9 is the ideal.

Why? As I said, our real strength here is the cheap breakers that get you into a lot of places with stealth credits. So it's time to put that extra cash to work. Even a single R&D Interface can be a powerful tool for a runner that makes one frighteningly efficient run every turn. Two RDIs? Oh yes. So once you bank that money on Kati, don't be afraid to pop off that RDI and start locking down the agendas before they hit HQ.

And we have our classic control/support/burst cards as well. Parasite to eat through the trouble stuff and open up more code gate encounters through Kit's ability; Imp to wick away the nasty combo pieces that would do you in; and the surprise Legwork to run roughshod through their hand.

This is our new core. ProCo to dig, Kati to build, stealth to break. Dig, dig, dig, and then LARLA everything back in to really up the pressure in the mid-to-late game. You will be skirting by on less cash, and I've had to build in some protection for that. Plascrete is back (your time is now, sweet Weyland!), but once that first carapace hits the table you're going to start feeling a lot more comfortable. Though I will say, PE is on the rise where I play, and a one-off Net Shield or Deus X is a very reasonable include (my one loss in the tournament was to a PE that Neural EMP'ed me after I lost a psi game to Psychic Field. I was sad), though mileage may vary based on your meta. And feel free to drop a Plascrete for an Infiltration, another shockingly good include that can save your bacon. With how quickly this deck can move, I honestly might feel comfortable going down to one copy. I'm already working on the next variant of the deck that includes Indexing - also a great defense against PE - and Same Old Things. I think you could sleeve this up, and have a really awesome go of things, but I encourage you to mess with this skeleton and let me know what you find. Happy charting!