Pizza Express: Keep the Change, You Filthy Animal

Bigguyforyou518 1760

This deck is not for the faint of heart. Ken is a spiky-haired blue guy, so obviously he's gotta go fast.

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So here's what you're going to do:

It's incredibly fun, but it's not the easiest deck in the world to pilot. With Same Old Thing being your only recursion, everything in your deck is fragile and temporary. There's no Clone Chips or Levy AR Lab Access to handicap your bad plays - go fast, don't make mistakes.

Draw up, credit up, and look to land some Account Siphons by getting whatever breakers you need. Use The Maker's Eye and Legworks opportunistically to get as many easy points early as you can without breaking your bank. Forged Activation Orders are ideally there for expensive remote ice that you'll never be checking, but they can scope out a central if you're desperate.

As the game goes on, your hand will start to clog with run events that you can't really play, especially Feint and Inside Job. When you finally draw Apocalypse, use those events on your central runs to make them cheap and successful, and then wipe their board. Best done with an agenda currently cooking up in a remote. Know when to start running tags, and know when to make big plays.

FAQ

  1. Why do you have no console?
    • No time or money to install that crap, and I'm going to delete it anyway. Yes, even Desperado.
  2. With all these events, you should totally try Prepaid VoiceP...
    • No. No. There's no time or money to install that crap, and I'm going to delete it anyway. No.
  3. What if you run out of breakers? What if you run out of your burst multiaccess? What if...What if...What if...What if...
    • Look, it's going to happen. Variance or a particularly bad matchup can completely screw you over (fast-advance games get messy fast). You're going to make huge, ridiculous plays and swing the game, and you're going to wiff completely and blow your load on nothing. That's why the deck is fun. Don't give up at the first fizzle, though. The comeback potential is huge.
10 comments
30 Oct 2015 greyfield

Cool deck. Only wish there was a way to give yourself a way to stretch out an Apocalypse (e.g. if it gets hit by stray damage and you have to SOT it, or if you need to Shutdown an Architect first). Weirdly, this may actually be a deck that could use a copy or two of Early Bird.

30 Oct 2015 Chuftbot

Apokenlypse is a really cute gimmick. The hard part is actually closing the game out once you blow everything up because you can't really rig back up here. The moment an ETR ice hits R&D again you're going to have a bad time. I feel like that's why you need Levy, Clone Chip, extra breakers, etc.

30 Oct 2015 Bigguyforyou518

@greyfield I've considered Early Bird as a way of being able to still play Apocalypse on a non-ideal turn, but it often requires an undefended central to really be helpful, and that's not a sure thing. In my mind it's fighting for deck space with Feint, which is also fairly useless outside of setting up Apocalypse (or trashing a rezzed Crisium Grid). Early Bird also screams for all the other good-stuff crim cards (Desperado, John Masanori, Security Testing) which I can't really support. In a vanilla Ken deck though, it's lovely.

It does seem a shame to run Feint without Emergency Shutdown, but I tested and found the latter awkwardly clogging my hand and tempting me to invest time and money derezzing ice that I was about to trash in a few turns.

@Chuftbot You actually can rig back up after Apocalypse, since there's two breakers of each type, not counting Faeries. So ideally the first set is for "pre-Apocalypse", and the second set is for "post-Apocalypse". Now of course stuff happens - you facecheck into an Archer at the worst time or get sniped by a Power Shutdown. Running fast has its risks.

In addition to costing precious influence, recursion in general doesn't get along very well with Apocalypse outside of Apex: Invasive Predator, because my rig is turned facedown rather than trashed, and without an Aesop's Pawnshop or Chop Bot 3000 I literally cannot get those cards into my heap.

Ultimately though, because this deck has no rig to set up at all, you tend to have a very lucrative early game. I'd say 75% of the time that I play the Apocalypse, I'm at 4-6 points, and braced to win by touching an agenda anywhere. With most of their ice in the trash, and me with Inside Jobs, Same Old Things, and potentially more breakers, as well as leftover multiaccess, I've usually got a very fair shot at winning after the board gets wiped. Fast-advance, obviously, is the biggest issue there.

30 Oct 2015 GrantZilla1979

I was going to ask him about Comet or Doppelgänger, but... Where'd he go? He was JUST here a second ago.

30 Oct 2015 Bigguyforyou518

@GrantZilla1979 ¯\(ツ)

Comet is just too expensive in every way, but Doppelgänger is slightly more palatable (the is useless here), and would allow the Same Old Thing recovery for Apocalypse that @greyfield was mentioning. I'm now dreaming of a sillier deck that tries to cap the board wipe with Notorieties...

30 Oct 2015 GrantZilla1979

Yeah, I'm still living the dream of a viable only central breaker deck with Notoriety / Quest Completed / now with Apocalypse deck that works outside of Silhouette.

31 Oct 2015 mendax

You just 100% fold to architect, right?

31 Oct 2015 Bigguyforyou518

@mendax If by "100% fold" you mean spend 4 to break with Alias or 1 to Inside Job it, then yeah, I'm tits up.

Winning the game without any breakers post-Apocalypse is very often possible, but it's not like I don't still have cards left to play. Extra breakers and Special Orders are nearly always hanging out in my hand when the nuke finally hits.

31 Oct 2015 fiveplus5is55

Hows the ruling with Rolodex and muertos gang member when playing Apocalypse?

31 Oct 2015 Bigguyforyou518

@fiveplus5is55 Oh wow, that's an interesting idea. Facedown cards are effectively blank, but I don't think they're uninstalled, so you could completely skip the bad effects of Rolodex and Muertos Gang Member (although I'm struggling to imagine a situation where the latter would help the corp in any case).