Knights & Towers: a chain of deals v0.2

Severijn 541

Jemison Astronautics: Sacrifice. Audacity. Success. is a strange ID, but bristling with potential. Everyone sees the dream of fast advancing 5/3's and who does not like to get rewarded for playing Archer?

The plan for this deck is to act like a hybrid of a rush deck and some heavy runner harassment through trashing programs and resources.

The most crucial part of any Jemison deck is its agenda suite. We run High-Risk Investment as the pay-off, because we don't have the influence for Global Food Initiative. The start of our chain is Standoff and Hostile Takeover. The hostile takeover is likely the best card in this deck. It's money and fuel for your other agendas. Standoff plays a similar role. We do not have a lot of cards in play that will stay in play except for some ice. Our ice suite is made to surprise runners and to dissuade face checking. We are not playing a glacier deck. As such, the ice is expendable early on. Having the runner trash ice isn't the biggest of deals for this deck. Friends in High Places is commonly used to shore up our defenses in case the runner thinks it is a good idea to trash all of our cards. Our curve is filled out with Project Atlas and an odd Armored Servers. The project atlas is easy to score, and armored servers can be used and then cashes in as needed.

The ice suite is meant to hurt unsuspecting runners. Grail punishes running with less than all the breakers, though we usually do not install lancelot. Lancelot is best kept in hand until you know that they can no longer break it. I run Battlement because we would otherwise be very low on ETR ice that is affordable. Bulwark is there for surprise value, as is the archer (though that one is more expected). The star players is surprisingly Watchtower. Tutoring grail pieces is nice, as is tutoring a sapper for the runner to run into, or that lone #swordsman in order to hinder AI breakers. We need our cards in the right order, and this card delivers. The runners I have encountered stop running the watchtowers until they can break it, which is exactly what I have always wanted in my weyland code gates. The threat of tutoring the next piece of the agenda chain, an oberth or just more money is frequently respected. As it should.

Speaking of Oberth Protocol, it is together with the two Corporate Towns the main way we fire our Jemison ability. Oberth is one of those cards that you just have to trash, which works well with having the unpredictable grail suite.

As for issues with this deck: It is still pretty flawed. There is not a lot of plans for when the runner assembled their entire rig. Hunter Seeker might be your only hope at that point or Audacity for the last few poitns. Essentially, you need to stay ahead of the runner and get your train going, which brings up the largest issue with jemison: You need your agendas and scoring tools to come in the right order. The other large issue is that we are actually rather poor and I am not sure what we should cut for more economy.

Regardless, even in its incomplete state, this deck is a blast to play. Firing Standoff is hilarious, and it will make the runner be fearful for any face-down ice, as it could be an Archer.

1 comments
3 Aug 2017 Severijn

So, after some plays, I would make these revisions: Minus one Battlement, plus one Vanilla. Minus one Bulwark, plus one Tithonium. The reason behind the change is that Battlement is too expensive for our purposes. Vanilla does the same job just fine for less money. Tithonium is another forfeit outlet, though we can also just hard rez it if need be. In this world of Paperclips everywhere, I am considering not playing Tithonium at all, but I want to give it a try regardless.

I wish I could play another arc lockdown, but thus far things have been working out for me.

Audacity is a nifty way out, but I don't think I need it in this deck. There is plenty of fast advance in this deck as it is. I am considering just playing more money in its stead.

Standoff keeps overperforming. It is especially hilarious to Hunter Seeker opponents after they steal this. Perhaps I should run a third copy of it over audacity.

Employee Strike is annoying, but the deck is fairly resilient. The 2-advancement agendas are doing excellent work, and Oberth Protocol on its own can get us to fast advance an atlas without our ability.