Surfin' R."K."P. v0.2

Game plan is the same as in version 1 of this deck, though I have changed some things up to be even more aggressive in getting study guide up and running quickly. I am consistently able to get it out and up to strength 4-5 by the end of turn 2/3, which is better than the previous iteration.

Game plan is still:

• Get a 4-5 strength Study Guide out ASAP with tutors + stimhack and use it to force the corp to double-ice servers and get cheap accesses while you draw for the rest of your combo pieces.
• Throw down a paintbrush to keep getting cheap accesses
• If a combination of unrezzed inner ice, multi-sub ice, or other circumstances (wotan's or other absurdly high strength ice) make it infeasible to keep this up, get your surfer out and use it (with tinkering as needed) to keep the party going.
• Use indexing and maker's eye to keep strong R&D pressure going up throughout the game.

Some changes from last time around:

Public Sympathy helps this out so much, lets you keep firing Stimhack all day long. God forbid you get tagged, though.

Removed Prepaid VoicePAD to free up slots. Yes, there is a lot of event economy. But without the Kate discount we all know and love, I found myself losing too much tempo installing them early on when they do the best.

Changed out Professional Contacts for Symmetrical Visage, added a 3rd copy. Between paintbrush and the roughly 1-run-per-turn limit, I rarely clicked for draw more than once per turn, so this is better than procon. The later ones are (mostly) dead draws, but getting one early really helps the econ stabilize while you get more econ events and draw for combo bits.

Added a third study guide to help getting it early. Saving a tutor by getting it early on helps keep up the tempo.

Pros:

• I was able to get out a strength 4-5 study guide within the first 2-3 turns consistently, so that's step 1 taken care of.
• Between plascrete and public sympathy, I found this to be pretty well scorch-resistant, even when the brain damage piles up.
• Didn't really miss the MU from not having a console.

The main problems with this deck are:

• Still too poor. The initial setup is defrayed with stimhacks, but the lack of prepaid voicepads makes the event econ peter out more quickly than it does with Kate.
• Little to no HQ pressure. Agendas do seem to pile up once you're set up, but having to paintbrush to make a second run and relying on single access makes them hard to get if you whiff once.
• Not much margin for error, so you have to be pretty conservative with avoiding damage to lose combo pieces, and you have to be damn careful about losing your study guide once it's charged up (hence the two Sacrificial Constructs)

Notes from a GNK tournament:

Cybernetics division hand reduction: R&D pressure helped get on the board, managed to take 4 brain damage and keep going due to public sympathy. Lost on points eventually: they got R&D locked down to the point where I could only run it ~every other turn, jackson'ed behind ice to draw some agendas, and then scored out behind a deep server. I may not have even gotten paintbrush, can't remember.

Against ETF horizontal: lost on points. No money to trash econ assets, spent a lot on single-accesses on R&D, and ultimately he ended up with a remote that I could run ~1/turn, but that's not enough when Ash and Caprice are available (especially when the corp is so economically dominant). This would be a strong case for Paricia or Scrubber.

Against ETF glacier + domestic sleepers: Lost on points. Got into a must-run situation where I had to give up the Surfer to get through a Wotan (would have put him on 6 scored + a sleepers), turns out he was bluffing another sleepers. Out of steam and couldn't stop him from scoring a utopia fragment next turn.

Against Blue sun glacier + scorch: won on time with R&D pressure. Could have won outright if I'd known that he had no ETR ice on R&D earlier. Made a couple of blind indexing runs to see what was on R&D. Would like more indexing if it could fit (probably doesn't).

Other thoughts:

A weird splash and probably don't have the influence, but Planned Assault would be clutch for pulling out stimhack, indexing, and/or maker's eye.

Frequently found myself wishing for a Levy AR Lab Access or a Same Old Thing to recycle econ late game or to take advantage of a weak R&D.

Bookmark was cool, but with public sympathy and plascrete I didn't really need it for damage protection. Only one levy/SOT made it so that I didn't get mileage out of stashing stuff for post-levy funtimes, lack of draw made it not useful for overdrawing with quality time. Probably will take it out for a Film Critic or another SoT.