The Red String of Fate

Snake Eyes 4639

"The Red String of Fate; an invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstances. The thread may stretch or tangle but will never break."

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This low agenda density deck, powered by a "Clones are not People" to give you more freedom (NOT THROUGH EQUALITY) to choose how you score your agendas is glacial like the ICE age. The suite is chosen to allow you to Never Advance half the agendas in the deck, and IAA the others once you have a half-decent window.

DNA Tracker is a beautiful piece of the puzzle that put this all together, being one of the most taxing pieces of ICE to come out in the game since Fairchild 3.0. ;)

The Grail Suite of Galahad, Lancelot and Merlin is absolutely brutal when combined with our main man Marcus Batty, letting you choose to destroy key breakers right as a runner is about to slam into what was once a harmless Galahad.

Cortex Lock is to help with the early game, being relatively mimic-proof and safe to hit a few damage on. Cobra is my favourite piece of ICE so it slots into all of my decks, but it serves here as a quick-to-set-up Lancelot/Merlin combo, and gives multiple sentry servers a little more kick against Mongoose. Quicksand is a little piece of ICE great on repeat visit servers to make it very expensive very fast to get into.

The Shock! suite is to help punish people addicted to Temujinbuxx, since the only cheap server to get into in this deck is archives - you can definitely make them faceplant into a little bit of damage. A pair of Snare!s can surprise many an aggro runner into flatlining.. Often times I'll just install them out naked T1 after hitting a Hedge Fund, generally yielding hits.

The Pālanā Agroplex is a nice econ card that will help you powerdraw into getting your Grail pieces up online and Shock!s out in the open. Restructure and Celebrity Gift round out the money suite along with Pālanā Foods: Sustainable Growth's ID ability.

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Shout out to the Triangle Illuminati.

3 comments
31 Oct 2016 MasN

Grail with no Mumbad City Grid jank? FOR SHAME! I'm not a huge fan of Pālanā Agroplex, even though some people seem be having fun with it. How do you deal with Parasite recursion and/or Rumor Mill?

1 Nov 2016 igrekk

Very nice list! Only problem is Rumor Mill on my opinion. Why 3rd batty over caprice? Absence of mk2 seems very painful too.

1 Nov 2016 Snake Eyes

Hi @MasN ! Mumbad City Grid is definitely a fun card, but if I played that one here I'd be too tempted to add Komainu and The Twins to get the most painful drops possible. Would start looking like a totally different deck (I made a deck out of Harmony Medtech: Biomedical Pioneer like that, probably could be ported into here, I dunno!)

For parasite Recursion- well they have to run ice first for me to rez them. Make the rezzes hurt. If they're on the Grimmoire train too, I guess hold Galahad in hand or only rez it if you can hit hard with it. There is enough ICE here that is high enough str to be somewhat parasite resistant, DNA Tracker and Merlin are nice for that. They probably won't be able to farm Datasucker counters very well since your archives should be loaded with at least one Shock! and your RnD and HQ should be well iced.

The Rumor Mill problem that you and @igrekk mention is a truth, the play around for it is either "Clones are not People", to score a never advance agenda, to score a bigger agenda behind big ICE and piles of money, or to just kill them with kindness/merlin/whatever else.

@igrekk I agree, cutting Nisei MK II from the deck was a little painful, but keeping the agenda density down via 3 pointers and the never advance option for 2 pt agendas makes for an easier game. Runners suddenly have to check every install on your scoring remote. If they start doing hat, eventually I just drop a Snare! down. :please

The triple Marcus Batty over Caprice is because batty with Grail is a killer. It helps rig shoot a whole lot easier. Being able to shoot multiples on a single run is great too. I used triple batty double Caprice in my Regional winning Palana to fire them off of Cobra and it worked really well, so I guess I'm just more of a batty fan in this type of deck!

Thanks for the comments and Questions guys!