Time is Money

DoubleK 787

"Time is money, especially when you have neither" - A quote I saw spray painted on some crumbling old building wall the other day, which describes well how this deck tries to make the runner feel.

This is essentially a fast advance deck with glaciery tendencies, which taxes the runner on clicks if they don't try to stop it and also taxes them on money if they do.

FAST ADVANCE

One great thing about fast advance in this deck is that the scoring happens mostly to a well protected server, so even if the runner installs Clot, they still need to get through the remote ICE to steal the agenda, adding to the taxing game plan. If the runner manages that, they often break their bank doing it and you can switch to a more glaciery scoring window the turn after. Multiple Stimhacks can be a problem though, The main fast advance tools are:

MCA Austerity Policy does both proactive click stealing and fast advancing in one card and is a cornerstone of many Mirrormorph decks. Great in Mirrormorph because it can score a 5/3 agenda out of hand in a protected server on its third turn in play, as lot of people know by now.

Shipment from Tennin is a great fast advance tool for Mirrormorph, allowing to score Project Vitruvius from hand leaving a Mirrormorph action left over to click MCA, Nanoetching Matrix, draw or take a credit to keep up tempo.

Haas Arcology AI is another thing you can jam into a remote and advancing it gives another useful thing to use a Mirrormorph action on. If it goes unchecked, it can score Vitruvius from hand with a Mirrormorph action to spare for something else. It also feels like a mini MCA Austerity because it can also score a 5/3 from hand after only one turn of brewing with the following combo...

Haas Arcology AI + Shipment from Tennin is another way you can score a 5/3 agenda from hand in a protected server and is not uncommon to have available. If the advanced Arcology goes unchecked without any other runs and you have the Shipment in hand, the sequence goes: Click 1 pop the Arcology (4 clicks left)--> Click 2 install an agenda in the protected server trashing Arcology (3 clicks left) --> Click 3 advance (2 clicks left, Mirrormorph triggers) --> play Shipment from Tennin with the Mirrormorph click (2 clicks left) --> advance two more times with the remaining two unrestricted clicks. It's a bit janky with a couple of variables, but with the time & money taxing nature of the deck, it gets enabled more often than I expected.

CLICK TAXING

MCA Austerity Policy as mentioned above. Often a target for Tech Startup.

Voting Machine Initiative is the secret spice of this deck that gives another proactive way to tax clicks. I like to play this over Ikawah Project because it makes the deck more aggressive than defensive, and that's how I like my decks. If combined with MCA Austerity, can cause a snowball effect where the runner has to take several two click turns, and if you also have Enhanced Login Protocol out, it puts the runner in a really bad spot that is hard to bounce back from.

Enhanced Login Protocol is annoying on its own and necessary to clear currents like Employee Strike and Hacktivist Meeting that are good against this deck. As mentioned above, it completes the oppressive 2-click lock with the other click taxing cards.

CREDIT TAXING

Mainly comes from the ICE suite that has been selected to be as taxing as possible whether the runner decides to take the remote baits or run centrals. A few ones to highlight:

Fairchild 3.0 is good as always especially with click taxing.

Fairchild is a monster that you don't want to run through repeatedly and people don't seem to expect. If only it had facecheck punishment...

Magnet is in a good place right now. 3 to rez, 7 to break with Laamb, 3 with Engolo and has a useful ability against cards like Chisel and Kyuban. Gordian Blade laughs at it though.

Hagen has been impressive, good rez to break cost with some facecheck punishment and often stays strength 3 or above to keep it expensive enough for Laamb to deal with.

FINAL WORDS

I don't think this is a Tier 1 deck by any means, but it has some potential. When testing this deck I thought it was too slow and lets the runner set up their their unstoppable rig. But it's been winning more games than losing in this latest iteration, showing how little I know about this great game. It's been taxing out Stabby MaxX in some test games and has the ability to recur ice with Restore and overadvanced Vitruvius, which this deck achieves often. The two-click lock is really oppressive and happens more often than I thought especially against runner decks that have a bit more setup time. I took this deck to a small Store Champs in Kilkenny in Ireland recently where it went undefeated in three games, generally taxing out runners with either clicks, credits or both. I think it has a lot of room for improvement still, but it's been good enough and and a lot of fun to play.

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