ONE WEIRD TRICK

Whizzard. Bagbiter. 3x Origami. Duggars. Activist support. New Angeles City Hall. Rachael Beckman. Mass install. Medium. Blackmail. By following these simple steps, you too could regularly access 20+ cards in a single turn.

Step 1: Hook up with Rachael and Kati

Get some money (liberated accounts or Kati Jones, ideally), then get some extra clicks on the field. Rachael Beckman, preferably.

Step 2: Lose all your money

Save money on liberated accounts/Kati Jones, then play Bagbiter. Get a bunch of money. If you have problems finding Bagbiter, you'll almost always have at least two origami.

Step 3: Party Party Party

Party at Duggars! You'll need to duggars twice on average, sometimes three times. Use your extra Beckman/Joshua clicks to play out your combo setup pieces/get extra money as needed/mass install origamis/possibly do runs (more on that below). You'll probably stop using Kati during this time.

What you're looking for: 3x Blackmail 3x Medium or 2x Medium and 1x Djinn 1x Grimoire 1x Mass install 1x New Angeles City Hall 1x Activist Support

Do not trash any of these cards!

Step 4: The steppening

The cards you need to have on the field at this point are grimoire and activist support (and a djinn if you only have 3 mediums) - everything else is secondary. That being said, you'll probably want to have New Angeles City Hall up and running to protect Backman/Joshua B, as well as an all nighter and one or two same old things.

You'll also want a minimum of ~15 credits.

If the corp is close to game point, The Source can delay it a turn.

If you've lost a combo piece to PE net damage or something, you can deja vu it back.

Step 5: Drill, baby, drill

On the corps turn, use New Angeles city hall to prevent the tag from Activist Support, and hope that they don't win!

At the beginning of your turn, use Joshua B, same old thing, and anything else you've got stored up.

If you don't have your third medium, get it with Djinn.

Mass Install three Mediums, all of which will start with an extra virus counter.

Then blackmail R&D three times in a row, then same old thing the blackmail once or twice. Trash cards starting on your second run. If you haven't won yet and have an extra click and an overmind out, run R&D again (but you've probably lost).

You'll access 4 cards, 7 cards, 10 cards, and 14 cards. This will win you the game in 90% of cases.

An Incomplete List of Weaknesses:

This is not a tier 1 deck. Most decks, piloted aggressively, can easily outrace you.

Thankfully, nobody I've ever played has expected the combo, so they probably won't intentionally counter your combo. But, here are a few things that can ruin your day:

1. Oversight AI rezzed on R&D - I haven't actually seen this yet, but theoretically it would wreck your proverbial shit.
2. Caprice on R&D - only seen it once, but you better hope you're good at the psi game
3. A bunch of snares in R&D - not a problem unless they trash a blackmail - then it's a big problem
4. Unrezzed Elizabeth Mills - I've seen Blue Sun with Geothermal Fracking rez and replay Elizabeth Mills a lot - try to trash her before the corp realizes your plan. Thankfully she'll probably be in a unprotected remote server.
5. NBM Fast Advance :(
6. PE randomly sniping three blackmails out of your 30 card hand. Fuck you too, Octogn net damage applier.

What if they've played it before?

Well, there are all of the above issues. But most commonly, I'll see people assume that you're going to build up the entire game and not run, so they can just score out agendas behind an ice wall or something. Interestingly, you actually can run somewhat aggressively!

Use your judgement, but running unrezzed (non-R&D) ice is often fairly safe and costs them a lot of them while costing you resources that are fairly plentiful for you (clicks). Things to watch out for are tags and net damage if you have critical pieces in hand.

Additionally, you'll notice the 2x overmind! Arguably, this should be a crypsis, but I prefer overmind. If they get arrogant and don't ice up a scoring server/R&D properly, this is enough to punish them and nab an agenda or two (at the cost of delaying your combo by a turn or two).

Results:

Octogn: Roughly 40-50%ish Octogn wins out of 20 or so games. Ideal opponents seem to be HB (without toybox), Replicating Perfection, and other glaciery type things - people will often freak out and ice things up 4 or 5 deep. Traditional Weyland kill decks are also great to play against, but it's important to get out City Hall early to avoid the potential Posted Bounty tag.

Casual play: 75%ish wins in casual play out of ten or so games (several of them repeat players) - possibly a result of the population on Octogn being more skilled than the median card-shop goer?

Tournament: 2 wins out of 5 games in a relatively competitive local tournament with ~25 people - in my defense, the first 2 games were against very good NEH Fast Advance players who went on to place highly, and the final loss was against a very good Weyland player who posted bounty on the third turn and killed Rachael and Bagbiter. (Hadn't drawn City Hall.)

The future:

The upcoming bad pub Anarch runner has the potential to improve this deck a lot and free up a lot of card space. If that happens, a potential improvement would be to run 3x demolition run and 3x Kraken. Play the blackmails as usual, then destroy the ice in front, and then do a demolition run or two to discard their entire deck!

Comments/Suggestions welcome - there's a lot to improve!