Tests with Friends (1st place SC)

grampage 17

This is a pretty standard Friendscoat deck that I brought to 11 person SC and it faired well. Wanted to share some of the card choices:

Macrophage

This deck use to run a single Wall of Static instead but it was useless most of the time. Macrophage is usually positioned on R&D to fight Medium digs, or Archives to fight Datasucker farming. I made the decision to only run 1 Cyberdex Virus Suite, this card helped that decision by having another way to fight against viruses.

Turing

Turing isn't as strong as it use to be with Black Orchestra being everywhere and dealing with it is a lot easier than cards like Fairchild 3.0 but running a single copy helps against the popular Adam builds and Faust based decks.

Hellion Beta Test

This is my favourite card in the deck by far. It's the tempo hit that can really push you to win those tight games. This deck runs the standard Campaign economy package so they will either be fighting to trash your Campaigns or completely ignoring them. If they do trash the campaigns, Hellion Beta Test can just start removing the Slums, Wyldside and SIFR of the world. If they leave your economy alone, just pop a SanSan City Grid in a guarded remote and see what happens. You'll either be scoring agendas out of hand or they'll put themselves in a vulnerable position where Hellion will do some work


Strengths

  • Recursion is great in this deck with only Friends and Jackson and the occasional Architect fire.

  • Multiple ways to win:

    • Rush out against opponents who are making big rigs especially when you start with a Mother Goddess early on.

    • Create deep remotes that grow stronger with Next ice.

    • Defend centrals and SanSan or biotic 3/2s out of hand.

Weaknesses

  • This deck can create multiple unprotected Campaign server. You need to be aware that they will be easy Temüjin targets and plan accordingly.

  • Like every other deck: Slums + Whizzard + Sifr + Parasite hurts. Use friends for ice and try to surprise them with a mid game Hellion after their additional copies of Slums and Sifr are gone.

1 comments
13 Mar 2017 Cyberzack

Cool deck, i've often thought Hellion to be too situational to be worth the slot, but with your ice suite being on the lower end of the cost curve I could actually see having enough money to justify its use commonly in games. It can be difficult with how rich runners are these days, but if you can get them to run and trash SanSan in a remote, repeatedly, then I can totally see windows lining up while you have it in hand.

I always love a good write-up, especially one organized and concise!