RvdH's Cigarettes & Matches, the deck I didn't play at Euros

RvdH83 686

This is my last iteration of the Smoke deck I've been playing the past months and it's doing fairly well. The deck is sometimes a little slow early game, but if you can set-up in a reasonable amount of time, you're often doing fine. I brought this deck to Euros, but eventually decided to play MaxX instead.

Notable choices:

  • Employee Strike: I think for most decks this is the best unicorn available. Film Critic is nice, but EStrike makes so many match-ups so much better.
  • Professional Contacts: While Smoke's breakers are very efficient, you still need a lot of Flurbos to be able to keep the pressure. A 40-card deck ensures you find ProCon usually fairly often. On the flipside, it can be a bit slow, so your first few turns usually consist of click 1-2 ProCon, click 3-4 play cards.
  • Find the Truth/RNG Key: A fine economic package. You could go only one FTT and spend the 3 influence elsewhere. Security Testing could be good.
  • 3 SMCs and 3 Net Mercurs. As the deck is somewhat slow, you need to be able to get your important stuff fast enough.
  • Indexing over other multi-access. Mirāju seeing less play makes Indexing great again. Indexing also makes Mirror better than Astrolabe. You could go two Cyberdelias instead here, but I like Mirror's 2 MU for 3 credits.
  • Atman over Dai V. While Dai V is fine, it's also hugely expensive. Atman is a simple solution for Excalibur-like ice. Aumakua may be good here instead.
  • BlacKat over Paperclip. Controversial, but in the current meta a fine choice. It breaks Endless EULA for 2 stealth credits, IP Block for 3 real credits, small ice for 1 real credit, Tithonium for 2 stealth and 1 real credit. It loses very hard to high strength barriers, though.
  • Net-Ready Eyes to give that one breaker just the boost it needs.
  • Trope: In a 40-card deck you need some recursion without Film Critic. Trope is fine, although somewhat expensive in influence. At least against Jinteki net-damage decks you can get it early with SMC.
2 comments
5 Jun 2018 Sanjay

Thank you for publishing this! It's really cool to see the deck choices not made that still had some promise.

5 Jun 2018 RvdH83

Yeah, it's still a nice deck to play. It wins from most glacier builds, except maybe for Azmari.

I usually play it offline with -3 Diesel and +3 Daily Casts, which is slow, but then I don't come across many Titan builds in my meta.