Always Be Adam - Worlds 2017 Deck

Yukon 584

An Idea Is Born

When I was testing for World's 2017. I knew I wanted to take Adam. I knew I wanted to be fast. I knew I wanted to not get hurt by Scarcity. I accomplished 2 of those goals with this list.

I had been having problems going to slow and being impacted by Scarcity. No matter what I did I had problems with HHN decks and rush decks. HHN is easiest to fix by playing a different runner. But Adam should never fear losing to rush. So I built a deck based entirely around going faster than the corp. I had a phenomenal win rate against Titan and CI in testing. Unfortunately for me, I missed the memo that Jinteki would rule the lower tables.
This list. My pride and joy going into worlds, went 3-2 at KoS. 0-3 at icebreaker, and 1-5 at the Main Event. In my heart, the deck should have gone 3-3 but I made some tilted misplays. C'est la vie.

The Plan

The premise is simple. Always Be Running, Neutralize All Threats, and Find the Truth are your directives. Plan on having 2 clicks a turn. 1 to run, 1 to setup the next turns run. Pressure HQ like crazy and cheat your way into R&D. Don't give the corp enough time to put agendas in remotes.

Once you get to 5 points, regularly by turn 4, the hard part starts. You'll probably need to let an agenda through to get your Fan Sites in your score area. This is a great time to hopefully farm The Turning Wheel counters. Maybe throw down the DDoS and put some fear on the corp.

Corps Hate This One Trick

Corporate Defector should be in every Adam deck. You end up know almost every card the corp has. It makes them slow down because they don't want to draw. CI is obviously immune to this, but it still does a ton of work.

Events, Your Breakers, and You

This deck ignores ice. It runs 5 Bypass events, 1 Bypass Breaker, and DDoS. The events get recurred like crazy using The Shadow Net and Same Old Thing. Abagnale bypasses more ice than it breaks. For a time, I even tried Rigged Results but I came to my senses and cut it. You rely on bypassing ice and breaking it using ABR. Inti is there to support Overmind. Always Be Running is my favorite breaker in the game.

Where It Has Problems

4 ICE servers are near impenetrable in the mid game, often in the late game as well.
D2D Making News is a headache.
IG and PE can be nightmares.

Final Thoughts

The deck didn't fail me. I failed the deck. I totally blew round 2 against Biotech because I forgot I let crick reinstall Jeeves. I had the money and click to take care of it but didn't. This lost me the game.
I also forgot my own advice and didn't to farm Turning Wheel Counters. Those 2 games I really should have won. Live and Learn. Also. Don't be scared to call a judge. I trusted almost every opponent I played when they drew straight into their hand instead of revealing due to Corporate Defector. I'm not positive what the ruling would have been, but I didn't ever try to find out.
If you want to run with reckless abandon, try the deck. It is ridiculous and was a blast to pilot at Worlds.

5 comments
8 Nov 2017 Sanjay

I really love this deck. It is so fun to play and terrifying to play against.

Thanks for building it, and thank you for proving the unforeseen power of Corporate Defector.

I'm sorry we talked you out of playing Rigged Results.

9 Nov 2017 Yukon

I've been asked twice about the Corporate Defector - Judge calls. What I mean is this:

Several times on the day the following happened:
opponent click: draw card. card went straight into hand without reveal
I point it out, and a card is revealed to me. I have to trust that card revealed is actually card drawn

I could have called judge and let them handle it. but my fear was that it would result in game loss, and I came to play. In hindsight I should have called judge and let them handle it rather than worry about my opponents fun

16 Nov 2017 phette23

Would a Sneakdoor or two fit into this list? You'd have to drop some of the bypass events and/or DDoS but there's already a lot of redundancy there. I'm just surprised to not see more Sneakdoor out of Adam when he has built-in HQI.

16 Nov 2017 Yukon

I considered Sneakdoor Beta but eliminated it for a couple reasons.

It doesn't work with Always Be Running. So I cant use it 1st click. Since I use ABR a lot to break subs I would only have my last click to use Sneakdoor.

Corps ice archives against Adam regularly to turn off Find the Truth.

Sneakdoor is 2 MU, which represents 2 Overmind counters.

I want to try Sneakdoor in my latest Adam Deck which doesn't start with ABR. I think it has a home in some Adam decks, just not this one.

26 Nov 2017 Dreadreaper

I love your deck. Can you please help me understand two things?

  1. Why do you run 1 extra copy of each directive? I found them to be dead most of the time.

  2. Why do you run abagnale over say, 2x employee strike?

  3. Why no Dean Lister to combo with overmind, since the deck is super poor?

Thanks!!!