The Brazier of the Glacier

One of my new favorite HB decks that I recently made. Roast your opponents with the cold fire of this glacier deck by using tempo cards such as: Jinja City Grid, Lateral Growth, and Replanting to empty your hand as quickly as possible then refill with the clearances. Once you're ready to roast, throw some Bryan Spiceton into the mix to get more bang for your beef.

The deck relies upon tempoing the hand out from HQ with a lot of ICE, thus allowing Bryan Stinson to do his job after all of your ICE are done laying down some seriously taxing punition on the runner. The deck has a lot of economy and, combined with the corp identity, generally has more than enough credits to let you rez all of your ICE as soon as possible for maximum taxing effect. Once plenty of ICE have been set out on the field, you can oftentimes quickly advance a CFC Excavation Contract to make even more money than you spent advancing since all of the ICE are bioroids.

Since all of the ICE are bioroids, it does suffer from a few apparent shortcomings" 1) if the opponent sees that you're advancing something early on and you haven't laid down enough ICE yet, they can sometimes use clicks to dash through your defenses without worrying about subroutines, especially if they do this before any programs are installed and 2) As mentioned before, these ICE are mostly there to tax the runner in order to activate Bryan Stinson, but if the opponent has nothing to take away so to speak, many of the ICE become meaningless, especially the sentries.

Enhanced Login Protocol was chosen for the current simply because runners sometimes can and oftentimes will try to click through all of the subs on some of your ICE. This is mitigated with ELP, as the runner will be much more limited turn-wise. The same can be said for the three Ikawah Projects. The goal of this deck isn't to use Elective Upgrade to insta score small agendas (I just have a copy in there since it is the second best 3-point agenda for this deck), it is more so about playing a game of attrition in which you are always the winner.

As for all of the bioroid ICE, I've mostly done this to synergize with the corp's ability and CFC Excavation Contract, but it is quite possible having all 20 ICE as bioroids is not a sage decision. Furthermore, I tried to construct the deck in such a way that there were roughly the same number of types of ICE for each Barrier, Code Gate, and Sentry, but in this case it might be better to just replace Vikram with another Code Gate or Barrier. The brain damage doesn't have any synergy with any other card in the deck because, like I said earlier, the deck wins by starving the opponent out (of credits), and certainly not by starving them out of cards. All of the other ICE includes are fairly self-explanatory includes.

With regards to other possible versions of the deck, I was considering going down to 7 agendas by taking out two CFC Excavation Contract and the Project Vitruvius to put in two more Elective Upgrades, taking out the Replanting and a copy of Bryan Stinson, then adding one more Jinja City Grid and two copies of An Offer You Can't Refuse. I think the only problem with this idea is that no matter when you play An Offer You Can't Refuse, the runner will simply always not refuse if you're already at 6 Agenda Points, so you'd have to use one before the runner thinks you can win the game soon/when the runner needs the credits to set up resources, programs, etc.

So that is pretty much it. Please post any suggestions you have about changes you think should be made and I might just playtest them later. Thanks for all the feedback and happy roasting :)

*Recently made changes:

Replaced Vikram 1.0 with a Seidr Adaptive Barrier for synergy with Jinja City Grid.

Replaced Elective Upgrade with a copy of Voting Machine Initiative to further inhibit the runner from making money/using clicks to break subs.

Replaced Replanting with a copy of Celebrity Gift since I was not having any problems dumping my hand, and credits are always useful in the deck.