So the is the first revision of this deck. The drip card focus and the wantons have come out. with plenty of burst econ and clone chip + inject, I am trying to eschew all of the combo play that Valencia decks seem to want to build in favor of just having a solid breaking strat, putting pressure on HQ through Vigil and Itinerant Protesters and RND through Medium.
Ideally, you want an Investigative Journalism in your opening hand. If you can pop one early, it will pay dividends throughout the rest of the game. Once you've done it once or twice, Itinerant Protesters truly shines. Definitely dip into HQ once you've put the squeeze on the corp and let THEM do the agenda filtering for you.
Blackmail helps in many ways. If you have IP'd them, it makes them very cautious to play off the top of their deck. it can be used in a pinch to keep up pressure when the corp decides to ice a central with something else after you've installed the right breakers to get virus counters on Medium or Datasucker. Be very careful with the way in which you play your Déjà Vu, retreving viruses can be nice but being able to retrieve blackmail means they have to bait your blackmail or turtle up more, giving you more time to gain money.
The problem I've run into with this deck so far is MU, or more specifically, whether or not i want to run Grimoire vs Vigil. There is a strong case for both. I initally only ran one ZU.13 Key Master and a Yog.0, but without much room for virus support cards I thought it would be more prudent to keep fixed breakers to a minimum. Vigil was designed to counteract Val's 50 card drawback. The corp can definitely play around it early game, but my experience so far has shown that when a corp willfully gives you a Vigil draw without any pressure from a card like IP, that something has happened. Either they have a combo they want in their hand, or they're worried about agenda density. Grimoire would give some of my key viruses a lot of support however, and would allow for one more MU that i think would really open up the strength of my programs.
As I continue to revise, I see how Vigil and Itinerant Protesters + Legwork would be a really good combo, but i'd need to free influence up. Lucky Find is an incredible econ booster, but might go to 2x and 1x stimhack, to go to 1x legwork.
these are the things i'm trying out. I feel like Val is played best when you're trying to burn through her drawback instead of using it to put more card combo cards in to make her slower. JUST THE FACTS MA'AM.