Karma Police

What goes around comes around.

Valencia is a new gal who can make use of some old tricks, all because of that one little bad pub she gives at the start of the game. Sure, she has five extra cards to dig through, but by enlisting Cayambe's most vocal and by keeping faithful watch over its least empowered, Val will dig up her combo pieces scary fast.

So let's talk opening hands, and what you need to mulligan for. You are looking for 3 cards here, and the sooner you find them, the quicker you put the corporation into a stranglehold. Vigil, Itinerant Protesters, and Investigative Journalism are your golden gooses in this deck. Get the Protesters on the board as soon as you can and combo it with Vigil to either keep HQ woefully understaffed, or keep cards flowing into your hand - or both. Start stacking the bad pub with Investigative Journalism to tighten the squeeze even harder, because while you're doing that, you're also making your runs even cheaper.

Self-Modifying Code and Clone Chip can start fishing out or recurring your breakers for mega-cheap. Using them mid-run against a corporation with 3 bad pub almost feels unfair. And remember, those credits refresh every run, so say you run click 1 and Clone Chip a Parasite onto an Eli that you then melt with Datasucker. There's still one more ICE there that you're pretty sure is an Errand Boy. SMC is on the table, and you have enough to fetch your Mimic, but instead, what do you do? You jack out. And then you run right back in. If they rez, you've saved yourself three credits for the cost of a click. So will they rez, or is it better to just hope you don't hit something they want? Up until now, these were the decisions you'd maybe see every so often from a late-game GRNDL who was bulldozing its way to the finish line, but now Valencia can engineer and profit from these types of situations, just by seeing cards she needs. WHOA.

A lot of Val decks I've seen have hinged on Blackmail recursion, and even now, the prevailing assumption seems to be that that's the best way to make her work. I've found Blackmail to be a nicety at best. I tend to get it into my heap as quickly as possible and save it as Same Old Thing fodder in the late game. It's not a great card for a routine hammering of centrals, even when you're trying to build your Medium tokens up, but it works great as a way to ensure that you get into a remote, even if you have to break a few pieces of already-rezzed ICE along the way.

Wanton Destruction is also a giant haymaker you can throw. As the corp is recovering from wiping a brutal Medium dig, or maybe trying to shore up a remote they don't think you can Blackmail your way into, you can drop a Wanton Destruction on their (likely size-reduced) hand and go to town. The omnipresence of bad pub also means that single-iced servers are vulnerable to (cheap) Parasite recursion, and it's entirely possible to have a turn of four regular HQ accesses if you don't have the Wanton Destruction in hand. And on that note: trashable assets? Thanks to bad pub, you can nuke most of those for next to nothing.

Of course we now have to start thinking about how this deck gets countered, and a turn 1 Elizabeth Mills or Clone Retirement is really bad news. The corporation being bad-pub free simply cannot stand for this deck, because it's essentially a game-long Cerebral Static for a 50-card deck. So I've packed two copies of Frame Job to help in that regard. I explored Tallie Perrault but as of now, the grey and blacks ops pool is fairly limited, and while the trash action pulls double duty as Scorch protection, it's not what we need. Activist Support is another good way to ensure they keep that all-important first BP, though I'm not a fan of the tag it's always going to deliver you because it opens up the option for the corp to trash Investigate Journalism. That means we'd have to pack ways to get rid of it, and playing around that tag is just too cumbersome, so for now, Frame Job it is. If you find a better solution, pass it along!

And as always ladies and gentlemen: Atmans at 4.

A big shout out by the way to biggiogiacomo for the discussions about the direction of this deck. If you see him on OCTGN, chat him up, play a few games. He's a great guy.