Horoidizontal

Preliminary: My main interest in building decks is not winning tournaments, but exploring an idea – an original one, if possible – as far as the card pool will allow. This deck will be updated once the Lunar cycle is completed.

Most attempts at getting Haas-Bioroid: Stronger Together to work are glacier decks, something which the big bioroids are particularly good at. This deck tries to go in the opposite direction, spreading out its many assets and upgrades over a lot of remotes. You will feel underpowered and overwhelmed at the start of every game (unless your facing an extremely deliberate runner), but if you survive, you might feel like King Midas later on.

A lot of your remotes will go unprotected, which necessitates high trash costs, and your centrals will be porous during the early game, so you will have to risk a couple of stolen agenda points at the start. The ice composition is intended to stem those early bleeds as much as possible: Eli 1.0 and the small Viktor 1.0 are the workhorses for this, with a Viper and a Quandary thrown in to spice things up a bit. The rest is either special interest (Zed 1.0, Hudson 1.0 and Howler) or big bioroids (plus an Inazuma to give them teeth) for the later game.

Just as Haas-Bioroid: Stronger Together makes the bioroids just a tad more of a nuisance than they usually are, especially against decks that try to Parasite their way through everything, the Encryption Protocols should make slogging through your remotes just that little bit more expensive. Be the straw that breaks the camel‘s back is the motto of this deck. Ideally, you’ll play the Protocols along with an Eve Campaign or a PAD Campaign, and possibly you can even afford to protect them.

Apart from being a useful money injection in a deck that mostly relies on drip economy (but those drips can add up ...), the Diversified Portfolio is a nice cover move if you intend to sneak out a 3/2 agenda between all those assets – slap two new remotes on the table, follow through with the Portfolio, and few runners will go and investigate whether it’s just another PAD they can’t afford to trash.

As nice as it may play against Shapers and Criminals (Eve and Howler make for nice Siphon denial), Anarchs are bad news and Whizzard is an obvious nemesis. Quetzal might also become one, less for her innate ability, but for the apparently inevitable inclusion of E3 in her decks.

On the other hand, the update to the Lunar cycle might bring a considerable boost, and I’m very much tempted to go to 54 cards, at least for the testing stages. Obvious inclusions are Heinlein Grid and Architect, possible stuff includes Enhanced Login Protocol (not sure whether I can afford space for currents), Eliza's Toybox (another way to cheat out the big guns) and Peak Efficiency as a swap for the Diversified Portfolios. And since there is some free influence, I’m also considering the Jinteki cards Hostile Infrastructure, Turtlebacks or Port Anson Grid.

In the meantime, this is definitely fun to play and, hopefully, fun to play against. Advice that stays true to the design paradigm (Stronger Together with lotsa remotes) is very welcome.