He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy... 0.4

Ever since Brainstorm was spoiled I've been dreaming of building and playing this deck. I finally got my hands on a copy of Liberated Mind the other day and I've been trying it out to surprising success since.

When I thought of it I very much saw it as a 'works once, back in the binder' sort of deck. I'm not saying it's tournament competitive, far from it, but Brainstorm/The Twins is hard to deal with even if you know it's coming. So far it's gone 4-2 in casual play (with the two losses coming in earlier iterations.

The Fix

The main gameplan is simple. Draw a copy of Brainstorm, put it on a remote in front of an ETR ice (just in case). Then, start scoring out in the remote. Eventually they'll start sniffing around it, so you rez BrainstormThe Twins and drop a metric shit ton of brain damage subs on them.

The reason to have it in The Foundry: Refining the Process is so you can always guarantee you'll have that extra copy of Brainstorm in your hand to drop to The Twins (assuming they haven't ended up in Archives thanks to Noise or Imp).

It works even better if you can horde the third copy too, and even even better if you have Project Vitruvius counters to spend recurring it, as The Twins can be used as many times as you can trash the ice. The timing window for the Vitruvius counters is after the runner passes priority post breaking subroutines on the second and subsequent encounters.

The backup plan, if you know Brainstorm won't kill them, or they aren't running the server it's on, is to keep building up your ice and and score out. This is something The Foundry: Refining the Process is actually surprisingly good at, and why Ash 2X3ZB9CY is there.

Card choices

I chose fairly standard ice rather than going gimmicky like Grail or NEXT. Grail is too influence heavy (though hilarious with The Twins) and NEXT is too flimsy early on to really keep the runner out.

Agenda suite is fairly standard. Don't fire the ABTs unless you're definitely not going the kill route. It ruins the surprise.

I went for operation econ because there's a lot of anti-IG asset hate around at the moment and you can't really afford to not have the money for an 11 credit combo. The Clearances also help you find the pieces a bit quicker.

Project Junebug/Snare! are edge case includes but are both funny. Put the Project Junebug in the remote and laugh as their reward for all their hard work is death. Really though, anything better for 3 influence could go in here.

Corporate Troubleshooter was in here for a while but I wasn't using it and this already costs a lot of sponds to drop without boosting it further. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, don't do it til it does.

Conclusion

This is fun as hell to play. Like I said, even when it's expected it often can't be stopped. Played one game where the guy knew in advance, faceplanted then realised he didn't have enough money to deal with it twice and it was game over. Another game I dropped a total of 90 -N I N E T Y- Brain Damage subs on Leela, who had Switchblade, 2 Silencers, a Cloak and 2 fully loaded Ghost Runners installed, but that only got her through 4 of the 5 necessary times (thanks to my 2 Project Vitruvius counters). It's always the last 30 brain damage that gets you...

It still needs a bit of testing and tweaking. I think I might drop Wall of Static and the traps to make room for some better barrier alternatives to Eli 1.0 and bring in a couple of Archived Memories to recur any trashed combo pieces.

Like I said, this won't win me any tournaments any time soon but it's a fun ride.