Dark Side of the Viruses

A degenerate deck that draws lots of cheap viruses, installs them, and then pawns them to recover the clicks you spent on them*. The net result is like clicking for credits, except you ground a card off R&D and dug deeper into your deck in the process.

This is a slow deck, but it can still pressure the corp by running every now and then, and late game it can funnel its credit pile into some successful runs past heavy resistance. Parasite also eats away at ICE, pressuring the corp into installing and rezzing more ICE or purging virus counters.

Start by mulliganing for Wyldside. Then try to install viruses and, once you have the pawnshop, start pawning them.

Eventually you will draw into Darwin. Install it and begin accumulating counters. Datasucker can assist so keep it low on the pawning priority list. Crypsis will let you get past anything in a pinch. Medium puts enormous pressure on R&D late game, and Parasite plus Datasucker can eat away ICE. Nerve Agent attacks HQ if it's weak, so that the corp has to defend everything. Pound R&D and any scoring remote servers and make a run on Archives for the win.

Ixodidae, Cache, and Lamprey make this deck possible, as they are cheap viruses and this deck only cares about their install cost, not their effect.

Remember that Cache immediately pays for itself. With Grimoire and/or Aesop's Pawnshop, it even gives you a credit surplus!

That Ixodidae and Lamprey are trashed when the corp purges viruses is irrelevant. You'll rarely have more than 1 installed at a time; the corp will just have denied you 3 credits from the inevitable pawning.

Virus purging in general doesn't do much except to Darwin, because half your viruses' text is irrelevant until the end game and the other half is irrelevant all the time. Darwin can be quickly recharged with Incubators and Datasuckers after a purge.

*You spent 3 clicks on the installation: 1 click to draw it, 1 to install it, and 1 for the credit for its install cost. When you pawn it, you get 3 credits, the same as if you had spent those 3 clicks on credit-mining.