Hunting nightmares and dreaming for peace

Tired of getting flatlined by nasty traps? Tired of having to deal with nightmares? Tired of having to deal with big damages? This is for you.

Mulligan plan : Get Heartbeat!

Game plan : get your combo pieces together as fast as possible and play normal netrunner.

Shootout to Nagnazul to have inspired me to try Apex: Invasive Predator again.

There are two path to for Apex :

1. Use Apocalypse and build you deck around that. It is very powerful, it is fun, but there is more variance around it.
2. Use Prey. This makes Apex more like Anarch, but resilient to damage instead of taking damage left and right.

Obviously, we chose the second path here. Once you go down that path, you have to chose how you will break ices. Matryoshka is a possibility, and so is Mayfly, along with any breakers you would like (you can get any of them easily with 25 influences).

But I wanted Endless Hunger, since it is such a unique breaker. This is where Adjusted Matrix comes in. With it, you can break ANY ice in the game. And with Poison Vial, you'll need only one click to completely break an ice. This makes it efficient. Considering that you would need some clicks to have the economy to break ices, this trades it with litteral clicks instead, making any ice a bioroid ice.

Because we rely on a single breaker, we are vulnerable to Retribution, to rig shooting Nanisivik Grid or Keegan Lane and possibly to Trieste Model Bioroids. There is also the problem of Self-Growth Program, but since we do not lose our pieces (maybe we lose Adjusted Matrix), we can put it back on the board after.

Considering we have a okay (not bad but not great) economy, thanks to Peace in Our Time, we are vulnerable to getting tagged. Lucky for us, most corp that rely on Hard-Hitting News usually also rely on BOOM! and or End of the Line. And we have Heartbeat for that. For Keegan Lane, we have Hunting Grounds to prevent getting a tag when encountering an ice.

Getting our combo pieces is fairly easy, with all the draw power in the deck. DreamNet draws for us until we are tagged, then Deuces Wild and Diesel does work, with the help of Reaver and Jailbreak.

While testing for this list, I had many Thule Subsea: Safety Below players conceding the game because they relied on Core Damage. With Heartbeat installed, those will do nothing and scoring their agenda cost us no tempo.

Here are some cards that are good and were tested, but were finally rejected :

• WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ : with only one in the deck, it was too unreliable. For the influence, especially with Heartbeat, you would get better result with Finality.
• Docklands Pass : this is just good, but I needed the influence for more draw.
• Zenit Chip JZ-2MJ : this could replace one Diesel. But you want Heartbeat to use it. No being able (or willing) to play it because Heartbeat was not found made it inconvenient.
• Basilar Synthgland 2KVJ : amazing here, because you do not pay the price. But it suffer from the same problem as Zenit Chip JZ-2MJ. You won't play it before getting Heartbeat, and the influence cost is much higher.

Of note, against Jinteki, even if you do not really need to keep cards in hand to be safe, you should keep your hand full to prevent Blood in the Water from being free to score.

Enjoy!