White Girl Blackmail

Are you a Val player still smarting from losing your precious Clone Chips and wondering how you'll get your Blackmail cheese fix now? Well, I have the... a solution for you.

This is an adaptation of an old list of mine, which is based on tech I took from someone whose name now escapes me whom I played against on OCTGN. It uses Shaper's prowess at assembling combos (while keeping the threat of Clot ready) to set up your Bad Publicity and a stack of R&D Interfaces, so you can lock down R&D all without ever having to check its ice. Where that list used Harbinger and Drug Dealer as an overwrought (and influence-expensive) means of generating card advantage, this build has gone back to Professional Contacts to smooth out the rough edges, leaving a sleek combo machine.

How it works is this: with a DaVinci and an Aesop's Pawnshop in play, install Activist Support with DaVinci at the end of your opponent's turn. At the beginning of your turn, you'll get the BP from Support; then immediately sell it to Aesop, so you never have to worry about taking a tag.

I strongly emphasize playing this strategy in Hayley, for a number of reasons:

• Hayley makes it easier to justify spending most of your clicks on drawing cards, because you'll lose fewer of them to backlog. Sometimes with the deck, you'll run into a situation where you have a glut of Blackmails which you don't want to discard for fear of revealing your strategy; this makes maximizing the installs you do get critical. Hayley does that, especially if you use your instant-speed install effects (Clone Chip, SMC, and DaVinci) to get extra free installs on your opponent's turn as well.
• Hayley also makes it easier to move your combo pieces onto the board in one fell swoop, also enabling you to contain information from your opponent - whether that be installing the Aesop's and the Activist Support at the same time, or dropping multiple R&D Interfaces immediately before you Blackmail.
• And perhaps most critically, Hayley, unlike other runners, doesn't even need to put counters on DaVinci in order to drop Activist Support, because you can just DaVinci out a Same Old Thing and use Hayley's ability to play the Support, saving you a click of screwing around.

Other Card Options:

• Street Peddler is a great, but risky, card. On the one hand, it can serve as extra DaVincis and can even fill in as your 0-cost Resource when you want to use a DaVinci without any power counters. On the other hand, there are some matchups where you need every regular Blackmail you can get, and the threat of losing one to a Street Peddler is serious. (On top of that, if you end up needing to Levy, which is not infrequent, losing it to Street Peddler will tie up a Same Old Thing, which also effectively costs you a Blackmail.) More aggressive versions of the deck could consider it, but I like my more flexible build here.
• A more developed breaker suite is always acceptable. Since this build is very combo-oriented (and I like being able to keep in extra money-making cards, like Cache and Daily Casts, for those games where your Professional Contacts are all at the bottom of your deck), I've gone with the last-resort basic breaker suite of Faust and Cerberus "Lady", but there's nothing stopping you from running a more typical Shaper breaker suite with Mimic, Gordian Blade, and even Atman. Whatever suits your playstyle.
• And when Democracy and Dogma comes out, this deck will definitely want a couple of Councilmen, for protection against Ash, Caprice, and SanSan City Grid. (Plus, Councilman is a 0-cost Resource, and thus also synergizes well with DaVinci and Hayley.) Not sure yet what I'll cut for those.

Counters:

• Rushing can be a problem for the deck, simply because the combo, while composed of many pieces that aren't useless by themselves, is intricate and thus sometimes slow. Hence the addition of a single Faust as your get-out-of-shit-free card (and a Cerberus "Lady" on top of it for two problem: Wraparound and Oversight AI). Clot also helps against fast advance; its existence is enough to buy you enough time to set up the combo-lock, and maybe even nab you a free agenda.
• Certain kill decks, like Convenience Shop and various Doomsday combos, can put you in a bind because they are so redundant that the threat of death becomes constant. For that reason, the deck plays three separate pieces of protection, in Film Critic, Plascrete Carapace, and Utopia Shard, and there may even be an argument for a fourth, depending on your metagame.
• Executive Boot Camp, Accelerated Beta Test, Eliza's Toolbox, or anything else that permits ice to be rezzed without being encountered. Obviously, this can't be helped. But usually, there's enough inconsistency to these safety measures and how they're used that it's uncommon for them to totally blow you out. Plus, unlike the DDoS-False Echo combo, a single rezzed piece of ice at the outside of a server doesn't destroy your entire combo; so long as you can break that one piece of ice, the rest still can't be rezzed under Blackmail, so break out the Faust and start hucking junk into your heap. But against certain matchups, such as Bootcamp Glacier, be prepared to attack servers that you think might be hiding one of the above cards even if you have to let your opponent rez ice to do so.

Overall, this deck does depend a bit on the element of surprise, and definitely requires some practice to get the hang of (anyone who's played a lot of Hayley will tell you how complicated and agonizing some of her decision trees can be). but some decks simply roll over to Blackmail abuse and R&D locks.