A Skorpios Story 1 - Synthetic Grails are easier to find.

PowerBunz 486

My name is PowerBunz and I love Skorpios. I've built more Skorpios decks than any other ID and It's time to share my enthusiasm and joy for the murderous and oppressive. Not all these decks will be good, not all of them will have actually been sleeved up and played; they together tell a story of learning, improvement, and, most importantly, huge remove-from-game piles.

This is not the first Skorpios deck I built, but it is one of my favourite early efforts, because it shows some interesting trains of thought. Most obviously, the combination of Synth DNA Modification with AP ICE of various kinds. This provides an amazing opportunity to ping cards out of the runner's grip with every run. The possibilities for RFG were endless, or so I thought.

This list was made early after Terminal Directive was spoiled, before I'd actually played through the TD campaign and before I'd realised how amazing Hunter Seeker was. As such, it's missing some key Skorpios pieces and is obviously primitive. There's also a few personal ticks that can be seen from my deckbuilding strategies, such as less than the only acceptable number of Saviours, and a lack of win conditions beyond being incredibly lucky. This AP ICE abuse deck was very fun idea and, fortunately for us who enjoy retrospective decklist analysis, shows some amazing examples of #WeylandProblems. There are three distinct areas this is evident.

  • The first shows another old theory of mine that the only thing that a deck needed to be rich was Barney and a few ubiquitous transactions. This, as anyone who has thought similarly will know, is optimistic at best.

  • The second is a struggle to get beyond 4 or 5 points. This deck was initially constructed prior to the release of Audacity, which is probably the only acceptable solution right now for regular Weyland. Given that I was trying to protect my Synth DNA Modification in remote servers, bad publicity from Hostile Takeoverwas out of the question, and so we were stuck. Given how there's no murder tech beyond the ICE, this lack of extra win conditions was a constant struggle.

  • The third is that Weyland ICE sucks. It's just so bad. Thus, the need to spend influence on ICE rises. Luckily this allows the usage of the Grail suite to further the ping potential, increase the amount of AP subroutine breaks, and force the runner to get answers. This lack of quality ICE also meant that it's harder to protect each remote server and the influence expenditure meant that a kill package was difficult to implement.

This deck actually did see play, and even won a game or two online. It was surprisingly effective. Give it a go, you might just snipe that Levy, Siphon or Parasite.

2 comments
9 Aug 2017 Waleed

I wish I could sad react

12 Aug 2017 lanadelrael

Having faced this deck, I dig it.