Endless Euler (Startup)

CephalopodWizard 220

Sometimes you just have to ask yourself: "What if I could fit my entire breaker suite onto one card?" Startup seems like Kit's chance to shine, with a strong primary breaker, good supplements in case the corp stacks ice (Boomerang, Pelangi), and low-influence HQ pressure (Jailbreak).

Strengths: You can run very aggressively even with a minimal rig (or none). When you install Euler, you can readily deal with most ice in the game. If you are running with a stale Euler (or nothing), you don't have much to lose. If breaking ice is expensive, you can just let subroutines fire! What are they going to do, trash one of your 11 Eulers? The only high-investment card is Professional Contacts, which does hurt if you lose it before it pays off. Play careful, I guess! Also there's a huge amount of Aesop's fodder in this deck. Daily Casts, Telework Contract, stale Eulers, and empty Pelangis/Imp are all excellent things to sell toe Aesop. There's not as much to sell as the Haley decks had, so I'm only running 2 Aesop's. Finally, you have 6 multi-access events. If the corp doesn't put at least 2 ice on R&D, you can easily keep sweeping it for new cards.

Weaknesses: Some ice lines up poorly. Wraparound is particularly mean for the rez cost, but a fully advanced Pharos demands that you use Boomerang to deal with it. If the corp gets 2, you're going to have to give up on that server. Finally, if the corp can afford to stack gearcheck ice that you can't ignore, you can't easily deal with more than 3 ice.

Play tips: Test Run is the tutor of choice, because not only does it fetch Euler to prevent rush strategies, but it lets you recur these one-time programs... twice! Try to get the most out of these cards by using it one turn, selling it to Aesop's, test running it for another turn, then drawing it to use the following turn. Also, run aggressively, and try to get the corp to rez everything. You have a lot of tools to paint/cheat ice, but it only works if you know what you know what to target with boomerang! Don't be afraid to let ice fire if it's cheaper, your rig is pretty impermanent. If you run into combo/kill decks, you have one Imp. Grab it and try to knock things out of HQ.

Mulligan advice: you have 2 goals early on: be ready to challenge the first scoring attempt, and get ProCo as soon as possible. If a hand has a 1-card breaking solution (Euler, Boomerang) and a lot of money, I'd consider keeping it. Otherwise, I'd mulligan in hope of ProCo.

Cards I've tried (and cut)

Cybertrooper Talut: Euler is already very efficient. Adding another card to this combo only achieves what you already have: "very efficient". This went from 2 copies, to 1 copy ("in case I draw it"), to 0 copies ("I don't even draw it anyways") Money in the bank account is more versatile.

Paule's Café: This does offer a genuine benefit that can't be replaced by mere credits: not having to commit your limited uses of Euler/Boomerang/Pelangi until you have to use them. In earlier iterations, Cybertrooper Talut/Aesop's Pawnshop made the numbers look good an paper, but in practice, neither card came online very quickly. Eventually (especially after cutting cybertrooper), it became clear that installing multiple cards as a prerequisite to installing Euler/Boomerang wasn't playing to the strength of the deck: being ready to interact after installing a single Euler. If you play aggressively to make ice rezzes happen, you will already know if you can get in to servers.

Docklands Pass: Having ongoing HQ pressure is attractive, but influence is too tight to spend on a card you may never see. This was cut for Jailbreak. It's cheaper, replaces itself, and can impersonate copies 4, 5, and 6 of The Maker's Eye.

VRcation: This deck is often holding 3 or so tools in hand for when the time is right. VRCation pretty much always results in you discarding economy. Professional Contacts flows smoother for this deck, since the only card you NEED to have in order to interact is Euler. As long as you've got one, you can accumulate resources to prepare for the next run.

Leech: After I included Imp to tech against kill decks, I only had 1 influence left. You're never going to fetch this with Test Run, and it's not particularly critical. I cut it for...

Dubious choices/season to taste:

Buzzsaw: If I want an ongoing, efficient way to walk over servers with just 1 ice (maybe an asset spam deck wants to defend R&D with just 1 copy of Enigma), Buzzsaw seems like an option. I have yet to play a game where I was happy to have buzzsaw, and you can probably think of something better to do with 1 influence (ideally tutorable with Test Run).

4 comments
4 Jan 2022 Diogene

Excellent deck. Some questions : 1. Why Imp rather than Stargate? Since you have MU free, it would seems to me that Stargate could be of more uses.

  1. Why no Rezeki, which is the best drip econ?
4 Jan 2022 CephalopodWizard

@Diogene Stargate doesn't fit into the deck too well, given the current tutoring plan (Test run). I'd be forced to pay 7 credits total for Stargate, and use two of my "endless" (by which I mean 11) fresh Euler turns to have R&D pressure. If I were using Self-Modifying Code + Overclock, it would be easier to justify, but then you don't get to reuse Euler as often. Stargate also heavily telegraphs the need to ice R&D, even with sub-par options that are actually quite taxing on my ability to deal with non-code-gates. I'd rather the corp think they're safe behind 2 expensive R&D ICE. If I want more good R&D runs, I could get several more with one copy of Harmony AR Therapy.

Rezeki is a legitimate option that I just didn't give much consideration. One of the highest priorities in my econ choices was not stumbling after installing ProCo, which is the reason for Laundry and Telework. This does presuppose that you'd rather run ProCo than Rezeki. 3 Rezekis would certainly be better than ProCo! The catch is you will probably only have 1 Rezeki. While the breaker suite mostly fits on one card, it is not uncommon to have 3 MU occupied while you hold a stale Euler until Aesop shows up, use an active Euler, and use one or two Pelangi.

I guess both points could be summarized as "those cards go a little slower than I'd like to", which is a strange justification for ProCo, but here we are. I think a Kit deck might make these choices, but probably not this one. (particularly if this was standard, and you could play Engolo)

5 Jan 2022 Diogene

Do you think you could use Rejig in the deck?

Also, using Test Run, could Spec Work replace Aesop's Pawnshop?

Thank you for you previous answers, it enlightened me on the thoughts behind the deck

5 Jan 2022 CephalopodWizard

@Diogene Rejig is a possibility that I'd have to try out. I haven't evaluated it, and 0 is an excellent price. It probably has a comparable role to the simulchips (getting 1 Euler re-use on an established board). It looks slightly worse than selling an Euler to Aesop and bringing it back with a simulchip that was around earlier (clickless on a turn where you might need clicks to set up Boomerang/Pelangi), but might enable some clever program shuffling with Test Run. However, these programs are all 1 or 2 cost, so it's not like cheating a Femme Fatale into play. Perhaps that's how the last influence could be used...

I don't think Spec Work can replace Aesop's. It could be used to sell something before Test Run sends it to the stack, but you actually want to send stuff back! It guarantees fresh programs, one of the best possible draws. Aesop's is also pretty compact, with 2 copies allowing me to sell... everything. I'd have to run 3 copies of Spec Work for that to be worthwhile, and I wouldn't be able to sell Daily Casts or Telework Contract with it. The card draw is hard to evaluate without playing it, but I don't expect to ever use it to dodge the "return to stack" text on Test Run.

Thanks for looking at the deck!