Dog-Juggler Kate (v1.0)

After some iterations and experimenting, I got my Kate/Brahman deck to a point where I am pretty happy with it. Probably not Tier 1, but strong enough and fun to play.

The basic strategy is clear: Get your rig up and start juggling your programs. Bounce the dogs and D4vid back to the stack to refresh your counters as necessary, making some money with Scheherazde, Technical Writer and May while doing so.

Let's break down some particular card choices.

ICE BREAKERS

Brahaman and D4vid are obvious. In earlier versions, I ran all three dogs, but this cost me too much influence I needed elsewhere. So I replaced Rex with CyCy, which is an awesome Decoder and also has a nice synergy with Brahman because you can change its target if needed. This selection of breakers often leads to situations where you either can break a piece of ICE with Brahman or with a dedicated breaker, and this is where the juggling fun starts: Planing your runs in a way that you bounce the dogs and D4vid back to the stack at just the right moment when they run out of counters. If you can set it up, it can be quite a fun little engine. With Kates discount, the MacroDrives, Scheherazade and May, you can often reinstall the Breakers without loosing money... while piling up counters on your Technical Writers for the turn when you need some more cash.

OTHER PROGRAMS

SMC and Paricia both cost 0, so if you don't want to bounce any of your breakers, you can use those as Brahman fodder. Beyond that, the use of SMC is obvious and Paricia is really usefull in the current Asset-heavy meta. If your opponent is playing IG or Gargarin, use it to go aggressively after his key assets.

ASTROLABE

IMHO this is the right console for this deck. With all the bouncing back of cards to the stack, some additional draw ability is nice and in the current Meta, it gets triggered a lot. Plus it has a low install cost, which is important because there are quite a lot of things you want to install asap. A more expensive console would slow you down.

MEMORY

Very vanilla here with Akamatsu, for similar reasons: Cheap and fast. So maybe the Dyson may be an alternative to add some link protection, might try this some time. Was considering the NetChips, but they don't work well together with Scheherazde.

OTHER HARDWARE

Sacrifical Construct is really important here - played without it at first and was always a very sad Kate when the Con trashed Scheherazade with all my other programs on it. Sports Hopper is a more flexible and fun protection than the standard Plascrete Carapace, and the LLDS Processor gives a nice boost to your re-installed breakers.

THE REST

...is pretty standard shaper stuff.