HB Mind Games Inc.

Kaermo 14

This deck is based on an idea I recently had. It's an asset spam deck with a twist: You spam advanceable ambushes and hide your agendas in between.

Here's how to play this:

Mulligan for ICE. You want to seal up R&D and HQ as much and as early as possible. While you protect your servers, the runner should do his little setup as well.

Now you can start spam-advancing the assets. Take a credit, install an ambush and advance it with the free credit you got from installing it. Which one you start with depends on the runner's setup. Without programs or hardware Aggressive Secretary and Shattered Remains don't make much sense. But a Cerebral Overwriter is always a good start. From now on you must always remember to hold back enough of your credits to fire your ambushes if the runner gets cocky and runs on your remotes.

Now the runner is either curious of what your are doing and checks the server (good for you!) or he suspects an ambush and ignores your server. That's fine as well.

Next turn you do the same thing. Install an asset and advance. Then you can switch it up with an agenda. Then another asset, agenda, asset, asset, etc. Meanwhile you take credits, install ICE, and advance your already installed cards. When advancing agendas you should either double advance and score them or advance one or two ambushes as well in order to keep the runner guessing. PAD Factory should help you with that.

Soon enough the runner will see what you are doing and will try to avoid your mind games and try to get into R&D and/or HQ. That's why you ICE these up as much as possible. Unless the runner is playing Sneakdoor Beta, all ICE goes on these two. You put a Hudson 1.0 on each of them in order to make those multiaccesses at least more costly. If the runner fields Medium or R&D Interface, focus a little on R&D, if you expect the runner to play Account Siphon or Vamp, focus a little more on HQ.

Account Siphon and Vamp can really mess up your game plan by draining you of your money so that the runner can safely check your ambushes. If he does get through with one of those, you should have a Thomas Haas installed and ready for trashing for the credits when they feel safe to run your remotes.

With the table spammed with advanced assets, the runner should have a hard time finding your agendas among them and every time he misses it's going to be painful for him. Cerebral Overwriter, Project Junebug and Ronin should give you a good chance of flatlining the runner, and once you've got your advanced agendas on the table every turn can be your scoring window if you want it to.

This deck is not built with competitive play in mind. But if you like mindgames and enjoy messing with the runner's mind I think it is worth a try.

2 comments
8 Jun 2016 The Broken Meeple

Interesting idea, although I wonder if HB is the best faction to use with it. Jinteki is already well known for mind game tactics and has access to Turtlebacks and similar money-gain operations for multiple servers. On top of that, if you use the Tennin ID you might get some more advancement tokens out. You might even save on influence for the HB assets being cheaper than transferring Ronin and Junebug.

8 Jun 2016 Kaermo

I did think about it but here's the thing: EtF triggers right from turn one on every first install. When using Turtlebacks for eco then you need to install them, pay to rez and (unless you want the runner to trash them right away) you need to protect them with ice which would require additional card slots.

Tennin ID looks nice but with unprotected archives and lots of open remotes the question is how often you will really get to use it.

And I like to have cheap ETR ICE. Unfortunately there aren't as many in Jinteki.

There are definitely more ways to do damage for Jinteki but also less 3/2 agendas.

Another interesting option could be RP though. With Encryption Protocol and Excalibur on the centrals the runner shouldn't get many chances to check all your remotes. And then you can also slot in the Turtlebacks for eco.