Mega Boom Kit v0.4 (Haunted Game Cafe SC Winner)

HiggsBozo 517

So, let's talk about my deck and how its economy works.

First of all, the rig is composed of lots of little pieces, many of which (Lockpick, Ghost Runner) I can't tutor. So I really need to focus more on draw power / efficiency than on maxing tutors. Shapers have two ways to do this, namely, Magnum Opus plus a bunch of expensive draw cards (Quality Time, Earthrise Hotel) that become more efficient with a bottomless well of credits, or Professional Contacts. Diesel is just almost always good.

I expect to have 5 MU worth of breakers / Cloak in a lot of games, so I don't want to deal with the headache of fitting Magnum Opus in there. I'd rather use 2 deck slots on Astrolabe, which is enough memory for my breakers and gives me even more draw power, than deal with including cards like CyberSolutions mem-chip, which sits dead in my hand if I draw it early and often even in the mid-game.

So this leaves Professional Contacts. It's an efficient way to dig through your deck to put together all the crap you need and find high-impact run events. We're doing it!

We're using a bunch of card slots on stealth pieces, so there aren't that many money-generating cards in the deck. That means the money cards we do include need to be efficient both in click investment and in card slots. That means Kati Jones!

Kati Jones and Professional Contacts both introduce some problems to your economy. They're efficient, but if you use them as efficiently as possible (install ProCon early, wait as long as possible to take Kati money), they often leave you poor at inconvenient times, making it difficult to put your rig together and giving the corp windows to exploit you.

Armitage Codebusting solves this problem. It's not the most efficient option, but it gets you from broke to solvent. It's great for scraping by while you build up money on Kati or recovering from installing ProCon, and lets you burst up to threaten the corp when you just can't wait for Kati.

This is in contrast to the other neutral options, Daily Casts and Dirty Laundry. I think Daily Casts is a terrible include in any deck that also includes Kati Jones, for exactly the reasons I described. If you're poor, it isn't making you un-poor any time soon, and Kati would've made you un-poor by then anyways. Again, Dirty Laundry makes the rich richer, and is really only good in decks that have Desperado / Security Testing / John Masanori to maximize its value. The 2 Diesel are also critical for games where you don't find Kati or ProCon right away, and are still useful for when you just keep drawing all your extra copies of Refractor / Kati / ProCon and you need a god damn Indexing right fucking now.

2 comments
10 Mar 2015 sruman

I find the indexing an interesting choice. Given the ice is only a code gate until end of run, it would seem an anti-synergy with Kit. Just wondering why that over maker's eye or RDI?

10 Mar 2015 HiggsBozo

I leaned towards R&D Interface for precisely that reason, but I found that the 4 install cost meant it really sucked to draw it early. I think the deck might be better with a single copy, but definitely no more than that.

In practice, I almost always found windows, with some combination of breakers in hand, Tinkering, and Self-modifying Code, to pop Indexing and grab an agenda. One of which was a Government Takeover which I had to find that turn or lose. There were a few times where I could have maybe grabbed two and couldn't (and I lost one game because of it), so I think that's definitely a point in favor of a singleton R&D Interface.

It's also worth mentioning that knowing what your opponent has been drawing is really good for setting up high-impact Wanton Destructions, which is really what this deck is all about.

I haven't tried The Maker's Eye and never seriously considered it. My feeling is that Indexing is a lower-variance option. The windows to use it are smaller, but when you hit it you're much more likely to actually score points (or force them to use Jackson Howard, but trust me, this deck stretches him pretty thin).

The Maker's Eye is potentially better in decks that include more support for it (Same Old Thing, Prepaid VoicePAD), but, absent that, my opinion is that Indexing is just better.