Legality (show more) |
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Standard Ban List 25.08 (latest) |
Standard Ban List 25.04 (active) |
Rotation |
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Deck valid after Seventh Rotation |
This is a list I've been iterating on for the past week in jnet casuals, with enough success to keep me interested, even against high level players. Someone asked me for a link so I figured I'd post it.
This is the first list I've seen that is combining the Harmonic ice with the LEO Construction: Labor Solutions corp id.
I had this idea after playing a bunch of (fun) games with another LEO list from Denver Megacity, which built on a series of earlier tournament LEO lists.
One thing that stands out is that these lists don't play more than a handful of bioroid ICE -- just Bumi 1.0, Bran 1.0, and Tyr. The LEO ability is primarily fed by Bumi and the Bioroid upgrades, and it might get used on Bran in critical moments.
This turns out to be enough bioroids to make effective use of LEO's ability, and other bioroid ice like Ansel 1.0 are just not good enough to make the cut.
However, my experience with those lists has been that while they can be strong, you live or die by whether you draw enough econ early and find the right ice. I recalled that Wave is one of the few ways to tutor ice, and it occurred to me that the harmonic ice is cheaper across the board.
After thinking more and playing with this list, I think there are a number of reasons why Harmonic ice may be better in the current meta than they were during the Ashes cycle:
LEO's ability helps you overcome some awkwardness of harmonic ice early on:
Other cards already in these LEO decks work well with the harmonic ice:
Additionally, we are playing Mitra Aman which can do good things with the harmonic ice.
Mitra also has a lot of bluffing potential -- the runners don't really know if it's a face-down bioroid, or even an agenda.
In terms of match ups, I don't feel that there is any runner that this list is very weak against.
The most difficult matchups I've found are LilyPAD Magdalene Keino-Chemutai: Cryptarchitect matchups which manage to set up very fast and get to a strength 5 Echelon before you can score out, and then are able to contest your remote at the end. When they camp the remote, it can weaken you because you don't get to rez echoes and waves over R&D or HQ. Your best lines have to do with making the remote server taxing, leveraging the fact that you have The Holo Man and can score never-advanced 5/3's, and a lot of installables that can bait a run. There's probably an alternative deck using Anoetic Void that would have a more solid end-game against these runners, but at the cost of other matchups.
Another weakness of this list is, against runners who find Curupira early, they can accumulate many cheap counters by breaking Echo, and then use those to bypass Bran 1.0. You should put something over the Echo so they can't just farm counters. It's not something you can't play around but you should be mindful of it. This would be the strongest reason I see to go to 1x Bran instead.
Variations:
I've played a number of slightly different versions of this but ultimately came back to this one. Alternatives I've tried are:
+1 Mitra Aman
or
-1 Key Performance Indicators, -1 Predictive Planogram
+1 The Holo Man, +1 Petty Cash
Cutting both the planogram and the KPI tends to make my games noticeably poorer and with higher rates of clicking for credits. YMMV
I've also played -1 Key Performance Indicators +1 Mitra Aman, which is also fine. KPI provides a lot of utility for shuffling Salvo Testing back into the deck, or helping you score an agenda from low credit totals.
There's also a version where you replace Salvo Testing with Offworld Office and Stegodon MK IV. However, I've had less success with this -- while in theory Stegodon MK IV should be pretty strong with harmonic ice, what I've found is that a scoring plan using The Holo Man is pretty credit intensive and so derezing things doesn't often feel very good. In games where you are rich this would probably feel amazing though.
I also don't have Flyswatter or Mavirus in this version. This is kind of questionable because these cards can do a lot particularly against Sebastião Souza Pessoa: Activist Organizer, but also against shaper lists which import Fermenter, which is many of them. They are both good and not having either of them seems odd -- on the other hand, I don't feel that the seb matchup or loup matchup is very challenging right now.
I'm pretty convinced that 2 is the right number of Wave to play. Games where I played +1 Wave and -1 Regolith Mining License felt noticeably poorer.
I'd strongly recommend keeping Tranquility Home Grid at 3x, this card is expensive to trash and can easily generate a lot of value. Games where you don't draw it early are generally much more difficult.
I didn't test playing Ablative Barrier in some form -- that card can give you a big boost by recurring a bioroid, or The Holo Man. But it can also be a liability against Curupira.
I also didn't test what happens if you cut Afshar. It's probably not essential but it does feel like a really solid ice for this corp. Might be a crutch though.
Cheers and have fun
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