Controlling communications, the most essential technology

lilelia 323

Aryabhata Tech is an awesome awesome card... when it works, but so difficult to set up for. Until now. Before this ID, you needed to make a deck with enough traces to make it worth it, protect the asset, and still have enough money left over to win the traces. It was not impossible, but difficult. Enter the best ID ability for it. An ability that a) adds some cheap easy asset protection, b) gives you a source of highish strength traces if they want to trash any of your stuff (and they do).

So of course as soon as I got 23 seconds earlier today I had to make this beast. It's a very rough draft, but already pretty strong in all its test plays. It is asset spam that aims to build a horrible scoring server mid-late game, scoring via SanSan or sneaking agendas out early. It has minimal tag punishment, but what it has is impactful.

It is easy to get very rich with this deck while the runner stays poor if they're being even remotely aggressive. If they're not, you can probably set up and use a scoring remote quicker than they can effectively contest it.

It has a very obvious weakness to high link decks, or those with power tap, but those are few and far between, and because a) those decks tend to be slow and this can be surprisingly fast and b) we can still get taxing traces with our Primary Transmission Dishes, it is a salvageable match-up. It has another obvious weakness to gingerbread, but again decks with that in tend to be generally weak to the rest of the deck.

There are lots of variations of this I will be playing around with. I erred on the side of more econ, but it may well be I could change a pad or sweeps for some more fun cards, maybe a Franchise City or City Surveillance. I'll be playing around with the ice; I don't like the barrier section being all intiable, but not sure what to do with instead. I'll also be testing -1 Closed Accounts, -Hard-Hitting News, +2 Surveillance Sweep.

If you've got this far, thanks for reading! Suggestions for improvement very welcome. And I seriously suggest you sleeve this up for your next casual night, it's the most fun I've had with a Corp deck in a long time!

4 comments
19 Jul 2016 cortexjackal

I sat down to build this very deck today. though I thought I'd like more tag punishment in my variant. I was also a huge fan of Aryabhata Tech when it came out! It's such a fun and annoying card. I must say that I didn't consider ash in here but that's a thing of beauty really. The ice feels a little light for my taste, and I've never gotten Uroboros to be all that effective. Troll is a fun little tax but I think I'd rather have pop-ups. If the deck makes money you could always midseason instead of hard-hitting but I understand the appeal of them not having to steal first. Seems fun. I like the direction you're headed in.

19 Jul 2016 lilelia

@cortexjackal No one I've played against yet has gone full tagme (closest was 1 person leaving the 4 tags from a Hard-Hitting), it might well be the deck could do with more punishment for people who do. Earlier versions had a different agenda suite and some more punishment to go with it (Corporate Sales Team swapped for Breaking News and the third GFI, couple of EoI to go with; Corporate Sales Team swapped for 2 Restructured Datapool, more Closed Accounts and an All-Seeing I), there are certainly fun things you can do with that.

You're probably right about the ice in general. Number isn't too much of an issue with Sensie Actors Union to help draw what you need, but it could do with a different composition with some of the lighter stuff swapped out. Disagree about the Troll though, early game it's a small annoying tax similar to Pop-up Window (slightly worse overall but not much in it), but it gets a lot more teeth once some Aryabhata are up.

26 Jul 2016 catch8088

I'm going to try and get a ChiLo in here.

27 Jul 2016 cortexjackal

Oh dude, I didn't think about Troll with Aryabhata Tech, good call on that one. Forgot troll was a "when encountered", hahaha, that's cool.