Charting the Dark

I'm a little skeptical towards using all stealth breakers, but I think this is still a really solid deck list. I suppose BlacKat isn't any worse than Corroder if the 1 influence isn't necessary to your deck.

Do you mulligan for Replicator? Other than Astrolabe it's your only draw power in the faction that has draw efficiency as a core element. Would you keep a hand with Magnum Opus if it didn't include Astrolabe or Replicator?

wow disregard the last bit... how did I miss the Quality Time...

I really like the hardware plan with Inside Man and Replicator; however, I'd be curious if this is more efficient with Kate "Mac" McCaffrey: Digital Tinker. What is the advantage of being Rielle "Kit" Peddler: Transhuman? I think the stealth package is strong enough you could go either way.

I agree with with Bamster about using Kate instead of Kit.

Kit seems way more agressive early game with refractor.

The advantage of Kit is the early game aggression with Refractor just like @Diegofsv said. Turn one, on a server with one ice, Refractor can break anything in this list except for IQ and Wraparound: netrunnerdb.com

There's a lot of commonly used Ice there. Consider starting with a cloak or lockpick in hand as well. It's not super likely, but anything with 5 or less strength and 3 or fewer subroutines can be broken. That's a huge early game potential. It's not going to happen every game, and you're not necessarily going to want it to happen every game. But it's the threat of being able to do it.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Kit. However, the ppl in my store have learned how to stack ICE to slow her down. (Outmost = Pop-up Window, then followed by Information Overload or Wraparound) IMO if you want to use Kit, then a Paintbrush or Tinkering is needed.

Paintbrush is much too slow for Kit. You want to maximize her ability early game, and then use it to save yourself some money in mid- and late-game, especially now with Refractor. I like this list, but is BlacKat worth the 1 extra influence over Corroder? It costs twice as much to install, and in most games, you won't be breaking barriers with more than 1 subroutine. It definitely carries its weight sometimes, but with that 1 influence you could run a Stimhack or something. Just a thought.

@lroach2 I respectfully disagree, I think Paintbrush would feel like a dead-draw with this strategy. Tinkering might work, but still I'm not sure. I don't know if you've tested the Refractor early game abuse, but it can be a serious nuisance for the Corp to deal with.

If you don't need the 1 influence, then I think BlacKat can be advantageous. It's obviously more effective against multi-subroutine Ice. For example, corroder takes 2c to get to strength, and 2 credits to break Eli 1.0, who I would argue is the most common Barrier. BlacKat takes 2c to get to strength, and 1 stealth credit to break both routines. It's obviously not a huge difference, but again if you have the spare influence, why not?

@Bamser``@lroach2There are numerous reasons why this deck features Kit over Kate. For whatever reason, a lot of people think that once the corp stacks ice two-deep, Kit is somehow useless, or her ability is "turned off." They also think that, because of this, you need to be aggressive in the early game or you may as well just play a different runner. But simply slotting in Kate for this ID is a bad idea. Try it. You'll see that it doesn't work.

This deck is built from the ground up to suit Kit. It packs 3x Refractors to up the chances of drawing the breaker that for most of the game is going to be doing work. That frees up your tutors for the one-offs. And then behind that, it has the support of 3x Lockpick, which in many instances you can get out all in one turn thanks to Replicator and the fact that it's dirt cheap.

Now let's make a run on a hypothetical R&D server. We're in the mid-to-late game here, and ice is stacking up. It's now three-deep on R&D, and by a lot of people's estimations, we're at the point that causes the "you should have been running Kate" argument to get thrown around. But we press on. The outermost piece of ice is the only one unrezzed. Behind it is an Eli, and the innermost is an Archer. We make a run, because whatever that outermost ice is - it doesn't scare us. Even if we assume no Ghost Runner or Cloak support (which at this point in the game you would NEVER run without; tutor up Cloaks if you have to, there's nothing wrong that), we can get Refractor up to 11 STRENGTH before paying 1 credit per sub to break. And that's for any type of ice. They want to rez a Heimdall, a Hadrian's, a Curtain Wall? Another Archer? Be our guest. If it's on the outside, we're basically guaranteed to get through.

They rez a Grim, and we chuckle to ourselves. Raise to str. 5 with one Lockpick, break the sub with another. So now, we've "used" Kit's ability for the turn, and it's time to start relying on our other stealth breakers. A barrier and a sentry - BlacKat and Dagger. Guess what, great news. Our stealth credits for that Grim came from Lockpick, and we're now free to start dipping into our Cloaks, OR with BlacKat paying from our credit pool we should have been building up throughout the game with Magnum Opus. So we break into R&D, we access, and if we've been drawing and building our rig smartly, we should be seeing two, three, even FOUR cards by the late game. Then once we end our run, we build up any extra pieces of we need for the next turn, or take cash to avoid the SEA Scorch/Midseasons (another thing you need to watch closely throughout the game).

And then once our turn begins next time, we get all those stealth credits back.

I built this deck with a "one run a turn" mentality, the idea being to make those runs increasingly more painful through multi-access hardware that gets set up quickly and cheaply with Replicator and Inside Man. Thanks to stealth, runs cost us almost nothing once the tools are in place, and thanks to Kit, "one run a turn" becomes a far easier prospect.

For the record, Stealth Kate can absolutely work. Just not with this decklist.

Liked this ! I tried with Switchblade for a nice success, but I don't know if it will be better with Dagger, specially now that Blue Sun: Powering the Future is on the rise. What do you think about it, @BTrain?

@EfildriewSwitchblade is nice, but I think it's one of those cards a lot of people lost their mind over before realizing it works better on paper. It's two influence, which means this deck would have to cut something (probably Imp, and then add a Datasucker back in), and that's fine if you want to do that, but the biggest problem it has is that it's 2 stealth credits to break anything that's not a Rototurret, Pup, an unbuffed Draco, or a Chimera - ha, or Burke Bugs. That leaves a lot of sentries you're spending two stealth to break. Now compare Switchblade with Dagger which, like BlacKat functions on a mix of stealth and regular credits (which this deck loves because of Magnum Opus), AND is in-faction, leaving us more room for control cards like Imp, and that's more than enough reason to leave Switchblade out. It's definitely not a bad card, but since it chews through stealth credits so quickly it feels like it needs Silencer to work to its full potential.