Chaebol Killer

As CI lists get ever-more fine-tuned and HHN-oriented strategies blasts you with a tag-bukkake, my previous decks were suffering sub-25% winrates on jnet. Silver bullets alone, like On the Lam or Feedback Filter, weren't cutting it -- a more thorough approach was needed to fight back against the dominant corp strategies of the moment.

My main targets -- Ed's hitlist -- are four archetypes:

1. CI Shit -- there's, like, a thousand variants of this, but they all basically use Clearances, Bryan Stinson, and individual pieces of strong ice to keep you out of key servers. They then hit you with MCAAP to keep you from getting through Fairchild 3.0s easily.

2. Asset Spam -- I've seen two variants. NEH railgun derivatives, and Gagarin-based orbital kinetic-kill deliveries. Basically: through various spammy means, they build up a HHN/Boom combo and wreck your day.

3. Jinteki PITAs -- They deal damage, Obokata's hard to steal, and Punitive Counterstrike finishes you off once you've made it through. This is the corp strategy I'm playing, in fact, so I know very well what it can pull off.

4. Fast Advance all over the damn place. Self-explanatory, this one.

Well, all of these except maybe Jinteki have a range of moving parts that they need to have in hand or installed as an asset in order to work. If you can sap the right operation at the wrong time, or whack an asset at a discount, you can do serious injury to the corp's ability to score out or play as intended.

Good. Fuck CI.

Anyhow, the problem with all that is that it's all rather expensive. I experimented previously with an Underworld Contact and Sports Hopper engine that potentially provided decent drip econ, but wouldn't turn on fast enough since I was pitching the Hoppers as soon as I could for more deck access. If that was going to be the case, then I might as well make the card draw more consistent with Earthrise Hotel, and replace UWC with Armitage Codebusting for a pseudo-Mopus. Fill up the rest with Sure Gamble, Liberated Account, and Dirty Laundry, and you've actually got a pretty decent econ suite.

Casting Trope at pretty much any point in the game seems to do the job to keep the cashflow going too, and means you have some resilience against Jinteki decks that knock out a few key cards via damage.

So far, it seems to be working. It's the first of my decks in the current state of the game to reach above a 33% winrate, and will probably improve after I stop making so many play errors. Even as it is focused against specific play patterns, the nature of a CI deck is that you can at best fight them on slightly-less-than-equal terms. They'll still be rich, they'll still have 2309723456872345 cards in hand, and they'll still have the answers they want and need. For a deck built around wreaking wanton havoc, you still have to plan all your steps and options ahead pretty thoroughly.