Az and his Harem

So....

It all started on Novemer 19th, 2024. I was watching a Metropole Grid Stream. He was making an Az deck, and someone in chat said "I've never put Juli Moreira Lee in a deck and felt good about it."

Now. I really liked the look of Juli when I first read her text. It seemed pretty fun and the click compression seemed like itd be pretty useful, but after realising you need to click resources, I realised it would be a little harder. Still, I took this as a challenge to make Juli work, and so I started...

How do I play this?!?

From the way this deck panned out, the idea is you must draw. Draw like your life depends on it. Draw until you draw over hand size and and draw some more. You ideally want to run through your deck as fast as possible and catch your 6 one-of rig pieces before they hit the trash. These important cards are:

• Carmen
• Cat's Cradle
• Tremolo
• PAN-Weave
• WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ
• Zenit Chip JZ-2MJ

Once most of these are on the table, pop Ashen Epilogue and go again, but with a slimmer deck and more goodstuff per card.

Turn to turn, compress your clicks as much as possible. Use your run events for draw, credits, or installs. Try and use Az's ability once as turn. Use Juli on Debbie, Nuka, or Telework Contract depending on what you need. Juli telework is especially good if you're bottoming out on credits. Hopefully, with enough tempo you can get setup and really start to apply pressure all over.

Your main wincon is wake implant, so make sure that hits the table, or you're gonna have a bad time.

Tips and Mulligan

You want to hard mulligan for draw. Ideally you start turn one with a Class Act to get your stuff rolling.

The times this deck has felt great is when every single Nukaclick was underneath Juli and Class Act. Again, draw is insanely important.

Always use Bahia Bands for draw, followed by install. This is your most valuable run event in the deck.

Getting Debbie down early can save you in the late game. Your entire economy is through run events, so a last ditch run with debbie and 10 additional credits is incredibly valuable. This is not even mentioning free runs once a turn with Juli.

Looking at this list, you may be tempted to use Class Act to send Ashen Epilogue to the bottom fo the deck to make sure that you can have your whole rig setup before reshuffling. THIS IS A MISTAKE! Crim doesnt have nearly enough draw for this sorta gameplan over the course of a game (I'll cover that later) and so you just wanna make sure you have a good amount of your rig down and then ashens. You sometimes have to take a risk on net damage though.

Possible Changes and Imporvements

I'll start with the obvious / not so obvious. This deck has so much draw. Like a ton, that no criminal would ever fully make use of. BUT THIS DECK STILL NEEDS MORE DRAW! There arent any slots for it, but more draw is more econ, more runs, more clicks, more used resources coming back for Juli etc. I have thought about Blueberry Diesel as an addition, but there isnt much space left in the deck. That testing can go to the next person.

Previous versions of the deck ran Hannah "Wheels" Pilintra as a way of dealing with tags, and gaining clicks from runs on servers using Juli. She eventually came out for a third Nuka, but if youre running into wide NBN decks then it is defeinitely a consideration.

Hermes over Swift? I have gone back and forwards on it for a while. The conclusion I came to was that the extra clicks from Swift were nice on top of the runs I was already doing, but Hermes saved me so much that it ended up being the one I went with. Either is proably fine though.

Conclusion

This deck isn't great, if I'll be honest. It struggles a lot with stuff that Swift Lat does for free. However it is really fun to play! I pulled off some really cool wins using not very commonly seen cards, and I love that. Thanks to my friends in Steel City Grid for all the help tweaking and refining this deck. Yall are the best!!!