Three Dope Queens (1st @ Hex & Co. SC)

analyzechris 598

I piloted this deck to first place at the Hex & Co. store championship in Manhattan, but it was mostly carried by a good meta-call Titan rush deck and the fact that @simonmoon and @Sunny weren't there.

Down the White Nile has turned Adam into a beast, fixing a huge weakness in his game plan and further improving his central pressure. I'm new to the ID, but thanks go to @saetzero for taling me through the build and #adamlounge on Slack for tweaking.

Early Game
Your goal in the early game is to money up and pressure centrals. Make sure you're always relatively rich compared to the corp using Career Fair to get out the money cards. Liberated Account feels like a lot of influence when Peace in Our Time is just one, but it's crucial for Adam because it's 10 credits on a single card and you need to make the most out of your slots. Furthermore, your strategy of central pressure requires the corp to be broke so they can't rez ICE on every server consistently.

As for pressure, RNG Key is an amazing way to get consistent credits against ICE-light decks and force the corp to rez early. If you're new to Adam, you need to remember to start with Find the Truth as one of your directives so you can first reveal the top card of R&D before correctly naming the rez/play/advancement cost of the card.

If you get RNG turn 1 and aren't afraid of spiky ICE, you should feel free to run both centrals to let the corp decide where they want to feel the pain. Neutralize All Threats is great at starting a lock on HQ since you can quickly figure out what's in there. Information can be valuable if you get enough of it.

Sometimes on J.net I go real ham and Femme the first ICE on R&D turn 1 if I have RNG Key and hope to get a few turns out of it before they can re-ICE. Probably a bad move.

Mid Game

Finding your breakers became a lot easier with Emergent Creativity. It is clic-intensive, but the ability to trash cards from hand for a discount is crucial. The three dope queens in this dec are your three Femme Fatale which, in combination with EC, allow you to contest early scores almost for free. Simply trash a Femme from hand to find the next one and bypass that ICE.

Another great aspect of Emergent Creativity is that it's a hardware tutor. If you get an early lead, you can find a Brain Chip to buff your hand size and more easily draw up with Safety First, but more importantly you can find a Feedback Filter faster than anyone else against Jinteki.

However you do it, it's crucial to score an agenda early so you can increase hand size and MU with Brain Chip this makes earning money from Data Folding easier as well as being able to include Multithreader for deep discounts.

Late Game
Once you're completely set up with breakers, it's time to lock like a Shaper. The combination of Corporate Defector and Find the Truth means that you can always know what is coming into HQ unless the corp gets some card draw operations as long as you can make a successful run. Choose the lightest server and use your Multithreader credits to get in every turn.

If you need to make a huge final score on a remote, you can also use your huge hand size to your advantage and Dean Lister the Aumakua to get in on the cheap. Otherwise Lister helps make Femme more useful if you don't have a full breaker suite and hit some sentry.

Restricted Card Notes
This deck went back and forth on its restricted card. Film Critic is great in this meta of defensive 5-3s, but Adam seems to be able to weather most of those. Obokata isn't a big deal if your hand size is 7, Ikawah is fine if you know by click two with Find the Truth where it is. SSL is okay if you've been Data Folding for 10 turns and hit multiple RNG Key triggers.

Employee Strike ended up taking the slot because of this meta's insistence upon resources (no more Tapwrm) and the corp's reliance on Scarcity of Resources. My decision for Strike came after a game against Azmari EdTech where they literally named resource every turn and had Scarcity out all game. Rough.

Inversificator struck my fancy as another way to pressure central, but it proved too situationals, whereas Strike is almost always kinda useful.

3 comments
16 Mar 2018 Voodoofly

Have you played much Skorp with this deck? I've been playing Adam in a few different variants over the last few months (currently on Mopus Adam with emergent creativity), and I've found I need at least 3 breakers for each type of ICE to reliably win against Skorp (one breaker and 2 AIs working as well). Are you just relying on Femme to get you through any Skorp issues, or is Skorp just a bad matchup for the deck?

16 Mar 2018 analyzechris

It's true, Skorp is not a great matchup. However, there is a small amount of redundancy in breakers. You technically have four killers, so that's fine. For barriers and code gates, you have 1 regular, 1 AI, and then hopefully you can Femme any remaining ICE on the server that gives the best win conditions. I used to have Always Be Running which was a nice alternative breaker. I would say the most important thing is to use Find the Truth to only steal bigger agendas (Not Hostile Takeover) and try to get that last agenda with Mad Dash so each Hunter Seeker is less impactful. Also, Employee Strike the turn you score if Paperclip is out and it can come right back!

16 Mar 2018 Voodoofly

Thanks for the response, sounds right. Going to take your deck for a few spins as I think I've taken Mopus Adam as far as it will go.