The Shippest of Shapes

Having a lot of fun playing this very Shapery deck. I think a deck like this is a great way to learn to play shaper, it tries to focus on their core competences, tutor, recursion, and efficient card draw. I learned a lot from playing it, and it's won me a lot of games, but your mileage may vary. It doesn't have any real tricks, just efficient breakers and efficient ways to get them out when you need them.

The Core of the deck is the quartet of Smc, Test run, Clone chip, and Scavenge. Such a powerful tutor and recursion platform provides a lot of flexibility for how to build your deck, since you only need 1 of your breakers, so you get lots of wiggle room for interesting additions and splashes.

The breaker selection is maybe a bit unusual but it gives you really great solutions to a lot of common ice. Usually, you go in one of two directions; either your opponent is moving quickly with cheap ice, in which case you go with cheap breakers that get you in places early, like inti, low strength atman, and mimic. Alternatively, against slower more taxing decks you invest in getting some really efficient breakers on the board, i.e. morning star and torch. The deus X and sharpshooter are there in a pinch to save you from bad things. The atman and femme are both utility breakers for whatever you can't break easily with the other options, as well as your only way past barriers that morning star can't break.

Imp is the only 'trick' in the deck, though it is there mostly for trashing expensive economy assets, like eve or pad campaign. However, it is also your only defence against NBN scorch decks or other CI or Weyland builds that land tags through alternative means than sea source. It's not great defence, but those decks haven't been too prevalent in my local meta, so matching Econ with Weyland is functioning as an excellent way to avoid fiery corporate justice.

For Econ/Card Draw I focused on making the most of Professional Contacts. I don't know if this is 'best', but I find that it slots in well with my play style. The sure gamble and lucky find help you get out that early professional contacts with a minimal hit to your tempo. Modded is similar, in that it helps accelerate your early installs or get you a toolbox before you've really earned it. Magnum opus is your mid to late game Econ, unless you've gotten some lucky early accesses you will most likely need it sooner rather than later. Don't be afraid to search for it if you feel you are starting to stall on credits. This was something I struggled with at first, since I often held off on installing M.O. until far too late, now I just go for it as soon as whatever early burst Econ I drew is gone.

For R&D pressure I took two of both indexing and rdi, I'd actually like more of them since I often find myself digging for one or the other, but haven't yet found room for them.

The Akamatsu and The Toolbox give you a lot of memory to work with, often not necessary, but in longer games toolbox can really shine. I'm not sold on using 4 slots for this and am thinking about using cyber solutions and maybe freeing up a slot or two for extra r&d pressure or something else.

Some Nice to Haves: I would really like a nerve agent in here to give some hq pressure when I want it. Also, parasite at least one, I've hit double Tsurugi plus caprice on r&d twice now, and it sucks, you are basically locked out of that server. 8 credits just to play at that table, similarly a big remote with caprice at the bottom can be a problem. You have no choice, but to keep running it until you win the psi game, or alternatively you shift and apply a lot of pressure to r&d. Plascrete or some tag avoidance would be nice, but in my local meta it hasn't been necessary just yet.