Career Snitch: Information Is Power

lukifer 1284

There are some who might tell you that Snitch/Au Revoir only works out of Chaos Theory. Those people are sadly mistaken.

The psychological impact of knowing the Corp's ICE can't be underestimated, and incredible pressure can be applied just by knowing where to poke at the right times, and leveraging the effect of "I know that you know that I know". Getting credits or peeks at hand in exchange for gathering intel is icing on the cake.

Even with Andy's opening flood of cards, it's important to play the hand you're dealt. This deck operates in essentially three modes, depending on the cards available:

  • Standard Criminal: Use burst econ, drop a killer, apply immediate pressure, Siphon spam if able. Try to avoid permanently floating tags even against safe decks, but sometimes it's the best move. Inside Job and Drive By answer rush plays, traps, and annoying upgrades.

  • Snitch Criminal: If you're able to drop a Snitch early (turn two is ideal, so they don't see it coming), you can put the Corp on the back foot and usually get some free accesses, or force them to spend money while you stay safe. As soon you get two jack-out effects (Snitch, Au Revoir, Wheel, Reflection), the click compression adds up fast.

  • Big-Rig Shaper-Criminal Hybrid: The weakness of Criminal has always been the late game, but not so with this deck, which can sit comfortably with its pseudo-Opus of 2-3x Au Revoir, and a full breaker suite. Keep the scoring remote locked, and stack up Wheel counters for big bursty multi-accesses.

Being as you're Andy, the mulligan and opening turn is incredibly important. Unless you get the perfect set of cards in your opening 9, you usually want to mulligan for money and Earthrise (preferably via Career Fair). People often don't expect first turn runs from Andy; use Dirty Laundry aggressively to check remotes or an open R&D, and if you're able to fire Career Fair first turn, it leaves a free click to run, Drive By, or even blind Siphon.

Cards

  • Career Fair: Vital for tempo. Primarily for Earthrise, but a free first-turn Casts is great for carrying the early game. If you have no other targets, using them for Scrubber or Wheel can be worth it.

  • Sports Hopper: Takes the Plascrete slot; useful for activating cloud mode until you find a Reflection, protecting against Ronin kills, or quick deck digs if you have plenty of money. I'd love to find room for a 2nd.

  • Test Run: Takes the 2nd Special Order slot. Useful with regular breakers, a single Femme run, or finding the 2nd/3rd Au Revoir (don't ever waste it on finding the first). Combined with SOT, it's also your answer to program trashing, since the fracter and decoder are singletons.

  • Faerie: Takes the slot of the 3rd Snitch, since it usually gives you the same freedom to run safely. Otherwise serves as an econ card against expensive sentries, or a safety net against sentry-stacking with Mongoose.

  • Femme: Silver bullet for certain annoying ICE, extra killer for getting around stacked sentries, and emergency backup breaker if something gets trashed that you can't Test Run back. Late game, you'll have plenty of money to hard-install it.

  • Drive By: Often still surprises people. Great answer to traps, early San-Sans, defensive upgrades, or never-advance mind-games. 1x might be enough, but 2x helps you see it early when you need it most. (Just remember: Psychic Field is a card.)

  • The Turning Wheel: The secret sauce. Since it triggers on Au Revoir runs, you can build up counters while clicking for credits, and getting free peeks at hand to boot. However: it's important to note that it only gains counters from HQ/R&D runs. That means if you allow the outer ICE on both to become rezzed, you can only gain counters via successful runs or wasting clicks hitting ETRs, and the Snitch/Au Revoir synergy disappears. So think about the Wheel late-game as you apply pressure; if you can't goad the Corp into putting more unrezzed ICE on HQ/R&D, you lose a huge advantage of the deck.

  • R&D Interface: As a safety net against the downside of Wheel described above, one RDI helps to apply pressure and goad ICE installs, if not locking R&D on its own.

  • Employee Strike, Scrubber, Film Critic: The first two are near-mandatory in the current meta; the last is a meta call to deal with The Future Perfect and Midseasons.

Cuts

  • Legwork: This really needs to be in the deck (huge synergy with Reflection), but I'm not sure what to cut. Feel free to trade a Drive By or an Inside Job, or just go to 46. Turning Wheel is your HQ multi-access otherwise, or take single pokes when you know they're flooded.

  • Rebirth: This seems like a no-brainer out of Andy, except for one problem: the deck relies on cloud breakers in the late game, and the best runner to rebirth as (Leela) has 0 base link. Sports Hopper still makes it possible, but when it's only 1x and your primary kill protection, it doesn't seem like a great plan. Rebirth could still be worth slotting to become Iain, but I think I'd rather have the 2nd Employee Strike most of the time. A 2nd or 3rd Hopper might change the math, though.

  • Plascrete Carapace: Meta call. With yellow kill making a comeback, might be good as #46.

4 comments
31 May 2016 Millennium

Really cool deck, have you tried it against a FA?

31 May 2016 FreqKing

I have been playing something very similar for a while now. You might find more value dropping the [Career Fair]s and adding in [The Supplier] and 2 [Hostage]s. Even with only those 3, you are going to hit one ~25% of the time in initial draw. It then adds value on 7 or 8 of your Resources and helps you dig for Film Critic on those match ups that really need her.

31 May 2016 FreqKing

And obviously my Markdown syntax needs work lol. Anyway, Cool deck!

3 Jun 2016 Dothanite

So I love this deck. I sleeved it up and everyone agrees that there's competitive potential here.

The only thing I am not sure about is the Account Siphons. It's hard to justify spending the clicks to run and drop tags when you have your mid-game rig up an running, which I find very early on in the game. Even then, the resource economy dissuades me even more.

Solid build, going to keep testing it. Want to take it to a regional tomorrow I love it so much.