Endless Austerity [3rd Place Empire Central SC]

This is my deck from Empire Central SC. It went 3-1, beating Kim, Null and Leela, and lost to Liza. Note that the write up below was written before the tournament, but I feel its still applicable.

Why should I play this?

It's really hard to tell what is good and what is not from playing games in Jnet casual. That said, at time of writing this deck is at about 85% win rate there, so at the very least I can say that if you feel like you can't win a game corp side on Jnet, give this a shot. It just rolls over bad decks and is usually competitive with the stronger runners that are getting play (i.e. Knives MaxX and Nexus 419). I'd like to give an assessment on Hayley, but no one plays it for reasons I'm unable to figure out.

Keeping MCAAP out forever:

One of our primary goals is to keep MCAAP out indefinitely. To do that, the biggest thing is to get the first one. Once you've found one, every copy of Restore is effectively another copy of MCAAP. You'll want to proactively reshuffle restores and extra copies of MCAAP with Preemptive, but always leave one in the bin or in play to restore later. Also, don't worry too much if you end up RFG'ing one. You should still have a lot of copies of restore after all.

Scoring

To score, follow the following process:

1) Put a power counter on MCAAP with at least two power counters.

2) Trash MCAAP to gain 4 clicks

3) Install a 5/3 Agenda

MM) Advance the agenda

4-5) Advance x2

If the agenda is a 5/3:

6-7) Advance x2

If the agenda is a 3/1:

6) Restore/Install MCAAP

7) Click MCAAP (Runner gets only 2 clicks next turn!)

How to get mileage out of Mirrormorph:

Given that we'll have a MCAAP active on most turns, it'll be pretty easy to get good value out of our ID. However, you'll get yourself into trouble if you don't remember the following rules:

Rule #1: Do not try to trigger mirrormorph on turn one. Your almost always going to need to install two things on your first turn. Not doing this is leaves you vulnerable and you'll end up having to do the double install turn later anyway. You could potentially make an exception if you have RLC.

Rule #2: Always plan your turn in advance, especially with regards to Rule 3. Failing to do this is going to result in you having severely sub-optimal turns or asking for take backs from gracious opponents. Seriously, plan your turn, or your going to mess it up.

Rule #3: YOU CANNOT REZ between your third action and the mirrormorph trigger. YOU CANNOT USE PAID ABILITIES between your third action and the mirrormorph trigger. This problem usually comes up in cases where you either a) install MCAAP on click 3, and therefore can't rez and use it with the mirrormorph trick, or b) advance NGO Front click 3, and can't pop it and use the money for IPO. This is almost always avoidable if you plan your turn in advance.

How to win when things go poorly:

So we've got at least 4 points, but a plucky runner has managed to assemble a rig and economy that can keep us off of MCAAP, in spite of only having 3 clicks per turn. This is where our friend, Mason Bellamy comes in. Just set up a three ice remote with Bellamy and Border Control, and score with the etr after they run out of clicks. Conversely, if they're running everything you put down, you can hold Bellamy and a RLC and install it and the agenda on the same turn.

Agenda Suite:

I ran a simulation on this agenda suite, and ~55% of the time the runner will need to steal four agendas to win (as opposed to ~10% of the time if we played Ikawah Project instead of GFI). This is improved further if you proactively Score SSL first. This seems like enough of an improvement to be worth three influence and the restricted slot.

Terminal Hax:

Note, the upcoming rules update will make this section irrelevant, but I've left it since the current Mirrormorph ruling is still active.

I've deliberately avoided abusing the Terminal Event/Mirrormorph interaction in this build, as I think it's likely to be patched away in the near future by rules. But in the event that its not, I think its worth considering both MCA Informant and Violet Level Clearance. This deck REALLY hates Beth Kirlain-Chang. You have to do a lot of work to stay under 15 credits so they can't click Fairchild 3.0 for an easy MCAAP trash. A turn that went Draw, Credit, MCAI on Aesop's, trash Beth with Mirrormorph would probably be worth the investment in influence. I'd consider cutting a CSS and 2x IP Block for 2x Eli 1.0 and 1x MCA Informant if you want to try that. The VLC swap will be considerably more complicated, since you need to open the restricted slot, so the exact method is left to the reader.