Awakening in the Museum

Krams 948

Hi there!

A while ago I posted a fun little deck called the Awakening Center. It has grown since then and I made a really good pre-rotation/old-code/MWL1.2 54 card version of it that will now forever dust in my private deck list.
Today I present you the all-new post-roation/MWL2.0 version!
Testing in JNet casual lobby was very fun and even surprisingly effective.

the dream combo

You take a piece of Bioroid ICE - preferably at about 6-8 rez cost - fling it into the runner's face with an Awakening Center, re-install it from Archives with a Howler and later rez it with AoT.
Before you ask: Yes, this combo does work. I pulled it off several times. And even parts of it are quite okay on their own.

the game plan

Usually this deck has well-defended central servers and at least one really well-defended remote and maybe a second remote with a small ICE in front of it for good measure.
The Museums keep R&D fresh and enable you to re-use one-shot economy and defense cards while you can slow-advance your points the old-school glacier way.
Scoring windows are usually opened by just having ridiculously taxing servers, which can be done quite easily when you have a small ICE in front and a big one stored on AC.
As the game goes on, all servers tend to grow continuously and most runners eventually can't keep up with the tax. So beware of stealth rigs and maybe use two heavily loaded ACs at once in the same server to tax more than they can handle.

the influence spread

Deck slots are rare, influence points aren't. 12 is more than enough. This deck has most of what it needs in-faction. The IP Blocks are okay, but not as strong as their reputation suggests, the Election Day has been quite useful, but has been useless in other matches and I've never drawn the Special Report ever.
That leaves plenty of influence left to pay for the Museums the hard way, choosing consistency over potential.

the agenda suite

GFI was great and all, but only number 3 on my list of restricted cards I wanted to include, so nope. It had to be another 5/3. But which one? Project Wotan is crappy, Elective Upgrade and Voting Machine Initiative have no synergy with anything else in the deck, Hades is redundant with museum, and Utopia and Eden don't really pull their weight here, since they provide less of a credit swing than the 4/2s. So what's left? The chance of rezzing a Heimdall 1.0 for free with Priority Requisition. Not great, but way better than running 3/1s or 10 2-pointers.

Other agendas? Well, Project Vitruvius was a no-brainer for me with all the never-advance possibilities and both of the 4/2s are quite okay at making money. CFC is really better than I thought. Yes, it can be a blank 4/2, which sucks. But it can also give you 8 on the spot, which is better than 10 over 5 turns.

the economy suite

Advanced Assembly Lines, Lateral Growth, Hedge Fund and Marilyn Campaign are all pretty standard stuff. Together with the 4/2s they are all I have on the eco front, but that's enough for two reasons:
1. The Museum of History shuffles back eco cards whenever there's nothing else of importance to shuffle back. And surprisingly often that means you just empty Archives and re-use all the stuff again and again.
2. This deck doesn't rely on hard credits, it relies on rez cost discounts. AoT is a beast of an eco card, #Howler is a really cheap defense and Awakening Center just has awesome value. It uses ICE as one-shots, basically for free! Yeah, sometimes you pay a or two to fire your biggest ICE, but usually it's just the 2 rez cost for AC to add a new layer of ICE to a server.

the ICE suite

The deck runs 7 small Bioroid Code Gates at 3-4 rez cost that can be rezzed for free with AoT and 7 bigger Bioroids at 6-9 rez cost that it can afford to occaionally hard-rez if it has to. But preferably, the big ones are used in combo with AC, AoT, Howler or PriReq.
Why are all small ICE Code Gates? Because Markus 1.0 sucks. Going all-in with the Bioroid synergy effects I decided against Architect and the alternatives in that price range are kinda limited.
The exact setup of the big ones is mainly just personal preference. I've experimentent with every option in the 6-8 price range Bioroid arsenal and these are my best picks. Actually, Fairchild is probably the weakest pick, because it is above that price range.
The only non-roids are Howler, because it fits the deck just awesome and IP Block, because it punishes most standard answers runners have against Howler. And because HB doesn't have that many great options for low-cost Barrier ICE these days.

the final question

If you could add 5 cards to the deck, worth a total of 6 influence and 2 agenda points, which cards would that be?
I think I'd go with CFC, double Batty and two Ichis.

2 comments
10 Nov 2017 Grimwalker

I'm not sure I grok what the Howler/Awakening Center synergy is. Is it just that on subsequent runs you're assured of having Howler food and the opportunity to recur cards trashed by AC?

12 Nov 2017 Krams

@Grimwalker Yes, it's basically that.
Howler needs food and AC needs something to recur trashed roids.