Amputation

tiedyedvortex 4789

Everyone has a plan until they lose their hand.

The goal of this deck is simple. Destroy the corp's hand, over and over, until they don't have the pieces they need to win. And then hit Archives to pick up those agenda points they lost.

The primary tool for this is Hemorrhage. If you have one, then you can save up for a few turns of running and then bleed them for two or three cards at once. If you have two, then the possibility of having a turn of run-run-bleed-bleed becomes a threat. God help them if you get three.

Desperado , John Masanori, Security Testing, all make this an even greater threat. If there is an undefended server, then with this full rig you can make one run to gain 3 credits, draw a card, and add one counter to each Hemorrhage you have in play. Bonus points if it was a central server, allowing you to collect Datasucker tokens.

If they manage to lock down the board, you still have a few tricks up your sleeve. Parasite helps to clear out a server to let you back in, and if that server is HQ then Wanton Destruction and Utopia Shard are ready for a quick burst. Hacktivist Meeting is a new addition and I love it; if they rez a Jackson Howard to try to repair some of the damage, they lose another card at random. And of course, as Edward Kim, you can always just hammer away operations from HQ and R&D if you get the chance.

The breaker suite is the core set Anarch build: Corroder/Mimic/Yog.0/ Datasucker. You need to be running as often as possible to fuel your economy and Hemorrhage, and these breaker keep that cost to a manageable level. Ice Carver extends the range of your fixed strength icebreakers, while The Personal Touch is insurance against Lotus Field.

The economy is designed to minimize the disruption of the bleeding. Combining Dirty Laundry with a Security Testing run is disgustingly efficient. Symmetrical Visage is useful for keeping the money flowing while you search for your icebreakers. Daily Casts and Sure Gamble are just good cards.

I've Had Worse is the only flatline protection, and frankly it's all that you need; with the amount of hand destruction going on in this deck, you're bound to kill their Scorches before they get to use them.

This is not a fun deck to play against. You will not win yourself any friends with this one. No one likes to see their game plan ripped away from them repeatedly. But once this deck gets going, it's almost impossible to stop.

6 comments
5 May 2015 zaknafean

This deck certainly seems up my alley and I'll be giving it a while this weekend! The anarch in a criminal cloak thing tends to work well for me.

You mention personal touch is for lotus field primarily, but what would your thoughts be on reworkign to fit an Atman4 (4tman? Atm4n?) instead? Given all the dangers that lie at strength 4 these days It could be a nice addition. You'd of course have to drop Utopia Shard too, so how critical do you find that piece?

5 May 2015 tiedyedvortex

Hmm, Atman could actually work really well. Utopia Shard isn't especially useful; effectively, you turn one successful HQ run into two random discards. But between Ed's ability, Hemorrhage, and Wanton Destruction, it's not always relevant.

The deck already has the Datasuckers it needs to reinforce the Atmans for breaking large ICE, and having a spare AI breaker would help the deck get set up even faster than it already does. So yeah, I think that would be a good addition.

Of course, you would have to be careful with Ice Carver if you did that; it would be awful to set up an Atman at four, and then install the Carver and accidentally make it so you can't Atman through Eli 1.0.

Honestly, the card that really needs to be in the TPT slot is Net-Ready Eyes from the next set. Because you can redeclare the strength before each run, you can make it so you can Yog.0 through a Lotus Field on one server, and Mimic through a Cortex Lock on another. And if you're running 3x I've Had Worse you might even turn a profit on the meat damage.

5 May 2015 zaknafean

Ya, given the current list, Net-Ready Eyes would be the way to go. Quite alot of flexibility with that card without the anti-synergy Atman could introduce.

The list would probably require enough changes to make the atman work as to be a functinally different list, but is something I'll keep in mind after I play around with it. Something like -1x Ice Carver, -1x Utopia Shard, -1 Personal touch, +1 Atman, leaving 2 free card slots for 0 influcence items. I'm just not sure what to slot in there that keeps the deck focused on it's goal. Anything too click intensive means less running and thus means less trashing.

26 May 2015 it987

I actually really like Utopia Shard in this deck. It's very synergistic with the Hemorrhages and economy engine. I played this deck last night and amputated the corps with extreme prejudice! Personally, I would drop the Wanton Destruction. It doesn't fit in very well, despite the fact that it destroys HQ. This deck seems to excel with multiple runs, and with Wanton Destruction you really slow down your own datasuckers/economy/hemorrhage. I think replacing them with Deja Vu would be solid.

28 May 2015 Yubinshan

A few questions for you, good sir:

1) Why MemStrips over Djinn?

2) How does this deck fare against Blue Sun, or any deck with the ability to set up a tax 10+ central server quickly and doesn't necessarily rely on having extra cheap/undefended servers?

3) How often do you find yourself using a turn to Wanton Destruction? Similar to what @imtav said above, they seem anti-synergistic when you have to give up at least 4 credits and a Datasucker token to gain one additional discard, assuming you have two Hemorrhage out. I know the random discard is more powerful than choice discard, but still...

4) Do you find that smart players are just tossing their operations when you Hemorrhage? Costly though this may be, it would basically mean your ability box is blank text.

5) Though I realize this is a poor metric for success, what's your win/loss record with the deck? How many times have you played it?

6) Have you made any changes since this was first posted?

2 Jul 2015 tiedyedvortex

To answer your questions, @Yubinshan:

1) Play order is key here. By using MemStrips, I can dump down all my viruses early, and then find memory later when I need more: but with Djinn, I would have to wait to drop my viruses until I found it. This deck needs to get set up fast to work, and stalling to find a Djinn doesn't work with that.

2) Things do get harder when the centrals get locked down, and if they aren't playing any undefended remotes it's harder still. But the game is far from over when that happens: you can use Datasucker/Ice Carver/Parasite to melt through weak ICE, and even in Blue Sun it's rare that they would be able to defend all 4 servers that effectively.

3) Wanton Destruction is probably a weak play here, since normally you are Hemorrhageing their entire hand and the random discard doesn't matter. It was basically a hail-mary for when servers get locked down and you need to catch the corp off guard or can't find your bleeders. I'm not sure what I would replace it with; possibly some backup econ like Liberated Account?

4) Typically I like to stock up on Hemorrhage tokens until I have enough to force them to discard their entire hand at once, so they normally don't get a choice. Edward Kim's ability isn't strictly necessary for this deck, honestly; if the setup speed weren't so crucial, I would just find 5 extra cards and put it into Valencia for that glorious bad pub credit every run.

5) I actually have a pretty small meta (myself and two of my friends) and don't typically go to tournaments. I did take this deck to a tournament, though, and it won every game it played, although this is largely because it played against two different Gagarin decks, and their unprotected remotes made things too easy.

6) Obviously, Net-Ready Eyes goes in in place of The Personal Touch. That was an easy change. Other than that, though, there hasn't been anything to redefine this deck released since Breaker Bay.