Inspired by the final battle in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Episode 3 of the duel series pits Steve "Retrieve" against the Jinteki PE grinder. Can Keanu/Steve take a lickin' and keep on tickin', or will he succumb to a thousand cuts from the House of Knives?
These decks are assembled from the System Gateway + System Update 21 card pool and designed to play well against each other, but are also solid standalone decks. See the corp deck here: SG+SU21 duel – Episode 3: Personal Evolution (vs Steve)
In this matchup, your goal is to install all breakers ASAP, then generate economy to fuel runs on servers while keeping enough cards in hand to absorb damage. Use your cards wisely—think of them as Health Points that get expended when performing special moves, whereas successful HQ runs regenerate health using Steve's ID.
When starting out, install Earthrise Hotel (ideally with Career Fair for a 3 rebate) as soon as you can to help draw into your breakers. Generally, Carmen is first priority (to neutralize Sentries that do net damage), then Corroder (to break end-the-run Barriers), then Abagnale (for Code Gates). Use Mutual Favor to help tutor breakers from your Stack, and Inside Job if you need early access to protected remotes.
Afterwards, your priority shifts towards finding the right balance between cards and credits. (As the saying goes: don't spend all your health gaining wealth, only to spend your wealth regaining health!) This balance will change depending on how quickly the Corp scores Agendas and how much damage you take, so stay flexible.
Almost all Events in this deck have multiple copies for Steve to retrieve. In addition to those mentioned above, you have:
This deck also has multiple copies of non-Event cards. If you can't (or don't want to) install the 2nd copy, it's still worth keeping in hand to soak up net damage:
Some rules of thumb when playing against Jinteki:
In building this deck, we used PreNic's [SG+SU21] King of Recursion as a starting point, and incorporated concepts from SirLoathing's [Startup] Better Lucky (with full guide); the latter has an excellent writeup on individual cards and strategy against various Corp archetypes.
This matchup is tense but fun, especially when playing face-to-face against your opponent!
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