A Skorpios Story 2 - Bloodletter is a good card guys!

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 deck is bad. In fact, it's so bad that I feel it's necessary to say that I have in fact been playing ANR for years, and have even placed fairly well this past season. It's ok, I'll admit my failures first, and then we can all move on.

This list is an attempt to recreate something found in an earlier decklist of mine (which I "borrowed" from an old list written by someone named Kopiok), which was a highly successful rush Argus deck in the days immediately before A-A-Ron dropped and ruined everything. The most fun part of that deck was the fact that every card I installed was both incredibly valuable to me and incredibly dangerous to the runner. This deck did not recapture that feeling, but it did get a few cheap kills thanks to Prisec + Snare! behind Mausolus. This is the end of it's achievements. Fortunately, it persists in providing a window for self-analysis/flagellation.

As you can see, it continues my trend of not playing Jackson Howard, building to incredibly lucky and usually unachievable win conditions, and not playing enough ice. It will be some time before I even begin to approach solutions to these intrinsic faults in my deckbuilding style. This list also shows my penchant to insist that bad cards are good (which will come to an angry frothing head later on) and insist on proving everyone wrong. In this case, it's Bloodletter.

This card regularly achieves less than nothing. Sure it may seem ok on paper, but in practice it gives the runner a safety net no matter what. If it's early game, they lose the top two cards of their deck with a low probability of hitting any one card they actually need and keep on running. When the runner is set up, they trash a program that's already done it's duty, or lose the top two cards of their deck that they no longer care about, and keep on running. It's bad.

The rest of the deck relied on scoring a Profiteering to make money while hoping that the trap filled R&D will be enough to scare off the runner. This usually didn't work (Thanks Equivocation, and Keyhole, and Find the Truth, and Indexing). The lack of EtR ICE meant everything was weak and porous unless I was already set up and could triple advance a Mausolus or lose an agenda to rez the (singleton, for some reason) Archer.

This deck was a key player in teaching me to moderate my approaches to lucky win conditions. Sure, include a Snare! or two to trip up a Medium dig, and Hard-Hitting News + Scorched Earth is nice, but only if the rest of the deck can support them while also boosting your race to 7 points. It taught me that Profiteering is not a good economy source and that I should probably include more than 1 IPO.

I still won't play 3 Jackson Howard though. He's a crutch, just play better.