Kate Ultra Cache Refresh Red Sands

This is a deck for a Hack the Egg fun/beginners tournament that uses "Ultra" Cache Refresh deck building rules:

1. 1x Core Set
2. 1x Big Box or Terminal Directive (same one for Runner and Corp deck)
3. only the very last cycle, i.e. Red Sands

I'm a total beginner myself, having only played with a Core Set and some friends who I talked into it (all got hooked though ;) ). I bought the C&C expansion for this tournament and decided to go with HB and Shapers (Corp deck to be found here).

Plan

So the plan... ehm.. what plan!? Ah, right, the plan.. yeah, so I got this new C&C box and I figured that.. there are interesting cards... and... mmmhh.. what? Ah, plan, yeah, so I figured that I could build a deck that... what?! Yeah, right, focus and strategy and oh.. shiny little thing..

Yes, that's kinda how this deck was built, I have to admit. And that's also how this deck needs to be played I guess. I have played so little as runner, that I had no idea how much I would need of what and so I just packed everything that looked cool. Then on the evening before the event I finally acknowledged that the deck had absolutely no direction whatsoever and cut some things. I seriously tried to cut the Levy AR Lab Access, but didn't find anything properly useful to substitute it with. So I just kept it to not have to be afraid to draw through my stack, if need be. Because the whole idea of this deck was to...

... not care about winning, but always get a game going, whatever would be thrown at it! I have never really played against other Corps than HB, so I just prepared for all the things that fellow runners in the fight against the evil Corps told vague stories about on the interwebs. That's why I carried all of Professional Contacts and Magnum Opus and Armitage Codebusting into battle. Figured I'd just be able to choose whichever fits the situation nicely. Bad luck with sentries? Switch to Armitage. Corp likes to tag? Use MoPus. You're suffering a dozen cuts a turn? ProCo.

To be honest: this actually worked out surprisingly well. I was up against a pretty nifty Jinteki deck and ProCo helped me survive long enough to learn something from that game. Another game SMCing for the MoPus got me going strong and Armitage was always good as a quick and cheap MoPus lookalike for a while. I also never felt being deprived of a fitting solution to my monetary suffering for too long either.

The biggest problem with this deck was my hesitancy to play Shaper BS. It took me until the last game to understand that I could actually Clone Chip for an SMC and install a breaker from my stack without spending a single click. I thought through all this when building the deck, but thinking of it when playing is another thing! :P

So yeah, I think that more experience could have helped a lot even with this deck. Having gathered some more experience as a runner now over the course of this tournament, I'd say that this deck would have performed better with (at least) the following changes:

• -1 Clone Chip (Brilliant thingy, but I think that 2 would be enough, especially when doubling amount of breakers.)
• -2 Cyberfeeder (I still love it, just dropping it to free the influence for breakers.)
• +1 of dedicated breakers (Faster to set up since one will draw into breakers faster. Relying on SMC alone was not a good idea at all. Also probably more flexibility in using either Clone Chip or SMC depending on board state, so for example also less worries regarding trashing of programs.)
  • +1 Corroder
  • +1 Mimic
  • +1 Gordian Blade