Intelligence Implosion

Took Apex to Melbourne regionals. Did poorly (won 2 of 5), but the deck shows promise.

I was inspired by that Exclusive Party Apex deck that did the rounds on Reddit, but found the startup too slow for my liking. I'm not a fan of the Chop-Bot engine because you're cycling cards, at best, so that's out. The deck seemed to live or die based on how quickly you could get Safety First up and running. So I added a third one of those instead.

Let me reiterate: Get Safety First and a Brain Cage on the table. Safety First alone is really hard to play around, but it's not worth waiting for Heartbeat to play the Brain Cage. Tank the damage if you have to.

Try to play Day Job when you've got a card you want to install facedown and/or when you have Safety First out. It hurts a lot less.

Express Delivery seems to work better than Quality Time, because it's cheaper and you don't miss Safety First triggers.

Crypsis is there to deal with things like Architect, Crick-on-archives and other awkward things.

Cards I'm not thrilled by:

• Prey #3.
• Employee Strike.
• Levy AR Lab Access. Every game, I've won or lost before it's become relevant.
• The Maker's Eye. I'd rather have The Turning Wheel.
• Deja Vu. Seems to be included as a guard for Levy.
• Hunting Grounds #3. The fear of losing Levy made me not want to use its trash effect, and without Wasteland it's not that cheap. (Wasteland makes it like an I've Had Worse for facedown cards.)
• Sports Hopper. 3 credits for 3 cards stinks, and it doesn't have an appreciable impact on traces. Wasteland makes it marginally better (and it's another corp-turn trash), but I don't like Wasteland. On the plus side, you can fill your hand on the corp turn so you still get your card from Safety First.
• Crypsis. Dies to Cyberdex Virus Suite, but it's the least bad AI breaker right now.

(Aside: why don't I like Wasteland? Mainly because it takes a while to pay off, and is an incentive against triggering the Apocalypse. Money doesn't feel that tight in this deck.)

So that's 11 cards and 10 influence that's still flexible. Cards I'm considering:

• Parasite. Avoids having to faceplant ICE like Komainu, Turing-on-central and Enigma a second time. Makes Deja Vu more compelling.
• Rolodex. Like a slower, installable Express Delivery #4-#6. I think that trashing it post-Apocalypse will prevent it from eating 3 cards on the way to the heap.
• Knight. Possibly a better "I need to get in here, now" card than Crypsis, but telegraphed. Trades poorly against Crick-on-archives.
• The Turning Wheel.