Consulting With the Sages

Heavily inspired by ChaosData, but refocused around Sage.

At first the idea was very similar to ChaosData, just recur Overmind over and over. But once the Sagesaurus + E3 is out, it's usually cheaper to break with those than to pumping strength and then spending an Overmind token.

The ideal play flow is as follows. Get Overmind out early with just 4 tokens to apply some pressure and prevent early scores, as well at least a few of the major econ cards - Daily Casts, Data Folding, Kati, or Symmetrical. During the early phase, you may have to stimhack once or twice to plow through a remote, but it'll be worth it. When you're not running, you're mostly going to be drawing like crazy to get out Personal Workshop and the various econ cards. You're trying to get a mass of money as well as Sage, Dino, R&D Interface and Stimhack together in your hand. Dump your less critical cards - Mem Chip, Clone Chip, e3 - onto Personal Workshop as you draw them (and take that symmetrical credit!), play the econ cards when you can. If you absolutely have to, you can host Dinosaurus a few turns before THE BIG MOMENT, but you want to keep both of these cards as much a surprise as possible if you can. Discarding a Sage early is sometimes okay - it can make it seem like you're digging for some other, less wise, icebreaker. (And you can clone chip it back at the appropriate time.)

After 3-5 turns comes THE MOMENT. You're down to one Overmind token, and you have no other breakers out, so the Corp thinks it has a scoring window. You have a decent pile of money by now, either from Data, Kati or wherever. Your turn will be, approximately, the following:

1. Dino
2. Sage
3. [Optional] Host R&D Interface on Personal Workshop
4. Maker's Eye OR Stimhack, depending

The Sageasaurus will cost you 9 credits, but I find that it's worth it paying for it out of hand for the element of surprise. If you think you have enough cash lying around, and no better target than R&D, then go for the maker's eye; otherwise hit a scoring remote and use stimhack money to pay for your R&D Interface at the end of your run.

The reason for doing it this way is that if the Corp thinks they're playing an Overmind recursion deck, they'll aim for higher strength ice, but once Sage is out, suddenly the only thing that matters is having VERY high strength, or lots of subroutines. (And with e3, even lots of subs won't slow you that much - only lots of ice.)

And once the Sagesaurus is out, you can safely unload your remaining R&D Interfaces onto Personal Workshop as well as any remaining chips if you want them. Let'em pay for themselves if you want, or abuse stimhack some more. If you've made it this far with your all your economy intact, you're in good shape.

The Less Ideal Scenarios

What all three of these scenarios have in common is that you probably won't get THE MOMENT and will lose the element of surprise.

• Fast Advance: There's a chakana in here. It really doesn't fit well thematically with the rest of the deck, but you can dig for it if you absolutely have to. Really the best thing to do with fast advance is store up money on Kati and Pressure with Overminds. These decks rarely have strong ice, so getting Sagesaurus out isn't pressing. What is pressing though is...

• Butchershop: Almost certainly the worst matchup. It's a Catch-22 because your entire economy is resource-dependent, so you really can't afford to float tags at all, but you do need to apply pressure. Your best bet here is to just stockpile money for tag removal / fighting traces, and then balance that against runs. A setup focused around just Overmind / Chakana / Memory / R&D Interfaces is a bit cheaper to get up and running in the early game, and worth blowing the surprise to get make those R&D runs really count (multi-accesses + chakana token.) If you must float a tag, keep both those I've Had Worses around.

• Anything Jinteki: This one isn't as bad as you think. Jinteki usually plays a slower game, which is mostly to your benefit. Just draw extra cards during the early game to deal with net damage, focus on getting all your econ out and finding and installing feedback filter as soon as possible. Be aggressive about going after their econ cards - you need to outpace them as early as possible.