Selling the Sizzle

Current variation of Smoke I'm testing. Popular ID, most will know what's up with the cards, but the refinement process has been interesting.

The deck started out very much as a study in central server pressure. Committing to Temujin money and Patron draw set off a chain of related slots. The first version of the deck ran The Gauntlet and RDIs to stretch ice placement thin, and of course attacked archives relentlessly until the corp committed resources there. That's still the plan, since Mercur, Temujin, et al make it so profitable for us, but setup time and money were looking thin on the ground. You can either build a deck to pressure early or build a deck to rig up hard, and stealth shaper seems to want to do a little of both. The solution so far is to make the rig and the threats cheaper.

Going down the line: Escher and TME are staple cards from older Stealth Kit decks, but I think the advent of widespread archives pressure may have increased Escher's stock recently. Super cheap, super punishing.

Levy is kind of a tech card. I face a LOT of Jinteki and Snare! splashes. Also there's this ID out there called Potential Unleashed, seems harmless, really isn't? Thanks, @umbralAeronaut.

Feedback is more of that, but conspicuously missing is the singleton CC that's been around since the beginning. I just haven't needed it, and anytime I've thought I might, the deck cycled around and it was time to Levy. Necessity for Clot and the presence of destroyers could easily bring it back.

Out with the Gauntlet, in with the Mirror... Cuz it's ridiculous. I really wish I could keep the gauntlet splash, since it interacts so well with Stealth's game plan for ICE, but Mirror's price is righter and god... Did you know it triggers on every run? What is this card, Net Mercur?

Resources are a bit of a mess. Drawing hard and slapping down what we see seems to have worked so far but it's starting to look like a major Hostage situation. Beth is on the chopping block, we seem to go a little fast for her. FC probably needs to be a 2x, and plays very nicely with NACH and Source.

Special mention goes to Mercur. The card's unreal. It's not a ProCo (or a Desperado) in that you don't necessarily want it down first turn. You need it and a breaker and some money to keep you from hitting rock bottom but when you have it, you might as well bank your Smokes and Cloaks each turn you have time. The key is to lean on your Diesel and Patron draw if you can, and just hoard credits on it jealously for the late game. It doesn't mess with corp math, it politely audits their taxes for them. You will not make friends.

The breaker suite has a couple very valid variations, based on expected ICE in the meta. This is the 'quicker 'n cheaper' loadout. You start seeing enough Archers, there's Switch for that. DNA/Fairchild 3? Houdini. If you need the influence, go ahead and pop in Blackstone, but I am not super jazzed about it. Eli 1 is still a really good card and the influence you save on Corroder you'll feel like dumping back into suckers right quick. There's NRE, but you can't really bear the cost (read: I don't WANT to lose my cards, waah).

The 1x Sucker is also a bit of a MU-dependent tech card. Don't be afraid to SMC for it against HB, it will help you babysit all the children. I admit it's one of my pet cards though. A great idea worth pursuing for Smoke is to drop a few spare SMC's and resources and use the slots on 1 of each decent breaker up for consideration, which could lower your dependency on support pieces, increase breaker density (thus lowering start up time), and provide much more finely tuned solutions for each matchup. And help with rigshooting.

That's what I think. Crazy ID, fun and busted. Keep on Smokin'.