1/3 3/1 No Ops

Vital Goose 5

As a new player, this is my first brew that I feel is both unique enough and effective enough to be worth posting. This is also the deck so far that has created the most complicated games, with both players taking time to think through their turns deeply. If that's the sort of thing you're into, you'll probably enjoy this list!

The core idea is to lean as hard as possible into the ID, with 1/3 of the deck being agendas, most of which are 3/1's. This means we aren't that mad when they steal an agenda, and scoring any agenda in particular isn't that big of a deal. The notable exceptions are the 3 OffOffs and 1 Luminal, which are too good not to play. Besides these, we mainly want to score a Steg, preferably early. The -strength is useful very often, and there's a cute interaction with Magnet and Gatekeeper, but the main synergy is with Ablative Barrier, which has a TON of targets with this deck.

The ice suite is tuned for the way this deck wants to play, which I'll talk about in the next paragraph. Every piece of ice is either a cheap gearcheck or a really mean facecheck, with Bran being the only piece of taxing ice that doesn't have a scary facecheck. Since we only have 12, and it's not uncommon to ice multiple remotes and to double/triple ice servers in the same game, careful ice placement for the situation and matchup is paramount. Rezzing an early ablative is almost always worth the opportunity cost of its threat text, especially considering it's not hard to derez it. Archer is 100% worth the influence and sacrifice in this deck, and often wins games as soon as it's rezzed. Place ice according to the matchup, and try to bait runners into facechecking the mean stuff on low credits.

The play pattern with this deck is very adaptive, which makes it a ton of fun to play. At some point in every game, you're going to go wide, likely installing 3 new remotes for your turn. Building something resembling a scoring server is something that happens in almost every game as well. We won't be building an impenetrable bunker, just annoying enough to get through that the runner will be sad to see a Nico in the root. In some matchups, you might want tall centrals. Sometimes, you'll have a couple of 1-ice remotes in addition to your 2-3 ice scoring server.

Besides the Archives, there are no proper traps in this deck. An argument could certainly be made for some Snares or something to dissuade checking remotes, but I find that having multiple copies of pricey-to-trash stuff, along with decent recursion, means the runner just can't afford to keep checking your assets. Those 1-ice remotes are great places to put your WWs and MCAs, and we're fine with them draining resources to trash these as they constantly hand us resources by stealing.

HONORABLE MENTIONS AND INFLUENCE

Hendrik is a cool trap that I decided against for reasons mentioned above. If you want more traps in-faction, I'd look to Hendrik over Cerebral, since this deck is basically never-advance

Home Grid is cool, and was in earlier iterations. It got cut mainly because it wants to be on the same server as SanSan most of the time, but that's illegal.

In my opinion, the most flexible influence slots are Vera and, somewhat heretically, the Spins. Everything else consistently performs so well I couldn't see cutting it for anything.

Winchester was originally in, but got cut to free influence for Vera. If you want it in, I'd drop the Roto for it, and swap the Vera for whatever.

Corporate Town is great, and kind of sits in the Vera slot. It's lower influence, higher trash, and shuts down a lot of decks. I personally found it too taxing along with Archer, so it's cut.

Adrian and Void are both strong options, especially if you want a stronger scoring server. I think the Skunk/Field sufficient. Shout out to SedatedFork on jnet for telling me that Memorial Field exists

More Mavirus would be fantastic. This is the card I'd personally add first if there was free influence, because Imp decks probably have the best matchup against us.

Formicary is cute, and definitely becomes worth its influence if you add more Skunks and Voids. Being able to derez it with our agendas is gravy. If this deck went tall more often, I'd be running this.

And that's it! I have just under a 70% winrate on jnet with this list, which is about as good as it gets for me. I'd definitely recommend taking it for a spin, and I'd love to hear feedback and card suggestions! This thing is a blast :)

1 comments
21 Dec 2023 holzpubbnsubbe

I loved to play against this! It was so refreshing! You never knew what to expect next. At one point I was actually wondering if I'd get Oppo Researched. I will take this for a spin before I make any serious suggestions, but I think I would lean into more Gatekeepers, maybe cut a M.I.C. and Rototurret for it, since they align with Stegodon so well.