Fear of the Unknown

Evilpyro24 142

Let's get one thing perfectly clear.

This deck will work precisely once in your meta, and then never again.

It dies to Best Defence, program trashing, rushing, Fast Advance, Mythic ice, and any knowledge of your deck.

BUT

No one sees Fear the Masses coming.

The game plan should be reasonably clear. Set up your board state quickly with Professional Contacts, Astrolabe, and Diesel, keeping the corp honest by showing that you can get into their remote. Start piling up the cash on Net Mercur, but don't neglect the card draw ability. Stash dead cards on Bookmark if you find it. I would hesitate to put more than a couple of Fear the Masses on the bookmark, just in case.

Then, when you're all good to go, pop the Hyperdriver you installed on Dhegdheer, gain your Beth click, then play FtM, SoT FtM, SoT FtM, FtM, FtM, run archives to access 27 cards. You have now statistically won the game.

Practically speaking, you've won because once you get the combo off, the Corp doesn't have that many cards left in their deck, and they draw from an empty R&D next turn.

Card Choices

So running this in a Stealth build seemed sensible due to a) the cheap breaking of most ice and b) Smoke's small deck limit. Your major bottleneck seems often to be draw, although Scarcity of Resources can really screw your game plan up.

With that in mind, after a full set of FtM, it seemed sensible to slot 3 Employee Strike as my restricted card. There's an argument for Clone Chips instead, so we could include Paperclip as our fracter, but I've found EStrike to be so disruptive to current on-meta corp decks that it's a bit of a no-brainer.

The 1x Dhegdheer and Hyperdriver is just there for the combo turn. More Hyperdrivers wouldn't be a bad idea.

1x Bookmark can be a bit unreliable, but I've never found that the combo turn needs all six Fear the Masses played at the same time. I could -1 Daily Casts, +1 Bookmark.

All in all, this deck can play pretty quickly if you're lucky off the draw. You can apply pressure to the corp while setting up, keeping them on their toes.

This is largely still a work in progress, as I'm still tweaking card balances, but I feel like it's 95% of the way there. Give it a shot at your next GNK, and get people asking you "Hang on, what does Fear the Masses do again?"

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