One Man's Trash

MaikH 1881

Preliminary: My main interest in building decks is not winning tournaments, but exploring an idea – an original one, if possible – as far as the card pool will allow. This deck will be updated once the Lunar cycle is completed.

As an alternative to db0‘s brilliant Street Kasparov or the many Overmind/Dog Pack Exile decks, the approach here is to have a toolbox of programs that is mainly accessed by Self-modifying Codes or Clone Chips and boosted by LLDS Processors.

The main design goal apart from flexibility is to create significant server accesses out of nothing, thanks to cheap programms and sudden credit bursts from Freelance Coding Contracts.

In the early game, those bursts will ideally go towards setup turns to mass deploy your Clone Chips and LLDS Processors via Replicator. Later on, they will go towards installing The Toolbox or towards a run, hopefully a decisive one - single copies of Indexing and The Maker's Eye for R&D, Nerve Agent for HQ and Imp for both.

Furthermore, Crescentus allows you to make all runs costly for the corp, even those that do not net you agendas. The general approach towards ice is to constantly break small speedbumps with cheap breakers and to overcome the big guns just once and then derez them. With just a bit of money and a Clone Chip and SMC in play, there is not a lot that you can't break.

Scheherazade and Sahasrara will get you through a lot of installs on the cheap, especially since your highest program cost is a measly four creds.

That's the plan, and here are the reasons why it usually won't work, a.k.a. things you should be careful of:

• Economy is unreliable, and if your Freelance Coding Contracts hide in the bottom of the deck, you will be horribly slow

• There is not enough recursion to pose a credibly threat for more than a few runs, so losing your Levy AR Lab Accesses is usually lethal. Don't hold on too long to them, especially if you've alread played more than one Freelance Coding Contract.

In spite of its problems, this is a very fun deck to play, and can catch corp players on the wrong foot due to being so unusual.

The update for Lunar cycle will, of course, include Cerberus "Lady" H1 as a natural fit, and go from event-based draw to Astrolabe and Collective Consciousness. Leprechaun will also allow a replacement of Scheherazade with good old Magnum Opus, which frees up some influence for new program tools. Chronos Protocol will still kill you dead, but this probably goes for all Exile decks.

2 comments
24 Oct 2014 Pinkwarrior

I can't help but feel you have the wrong ID, a deck with so many programs like this and no influence on anything else should be The Professor: Keeper of Knowledge imo. this would leave you with plenty of spare influence for bigger and better cards sure you'd have to drop the extra copies of some programs but that is an easy trade i feel.

i've played exile quite abit and his strength is not so much the extra draw as the survivability that comes with it (as in surviving a Project Junebug by installing a program)

25 Oct 2014 MaikH

@Pinkwarrior - This one started out with the aim of building an Exile deck, but when I was done, your advice was the first thing that came to mind - wouldn't the Professor (or Kate, which seems to be an even more attractive swap in my eyes) be more appropriate for what I'm doing here?

Apart from the extremely helpful insta-draw, I feel that Exile is a lot better for this deck approach than the Professor. The basic idea is to have cheap shitty programs boosted by LLDS, and those are also cheap in influence. Choosing a more powerful program suite would then, inevitably, steer me towards the Test Run/Scavenge engine that most Exile decks use. This would very probably make for a more successful deck, but also a less unique one.