Earworm

Story time. A few weeks ago I played a game on Jnet against JuniperTheory who was playing "Azmari" where she named none every turn. After the game she mentioned that what she was actually working on ended up being the winningest Sol deck in ages. I think what she had was probably the best good cards plan for a blank yellow ID (when I say "good cards plan" here, I mean a plan that relies on cards that are good, in this case HHN/Eco/BOOM). But it got me wondering, what's the best bad (meaning, with bad cards) plan... After tinkering around with it a bit I came up with a build that won a couple of games, sent it to Juniper just incase she had a falling out with her current list, and thought that would be the end of it. But.... it had won three games in a row vs. players I thought were pretty good with an ID that was blank. Could there be something here? The idea just wouldn't leave me alone.

Evolution of the plan

So with this deck idea on repeat in my head, I went to work and built a deck instead of working. First thing, I didn't need to play a blank ID anymore, so Spark was out and R+, and I needed to cut 5 cards and 2 agenda points, so out went 1x SIU, Tomorrow's Headline, 1x Gaslight, 1x Hansei Review and Hydra. I played around with that a bit and it felt awful. It took a bit to realize that the Tomorrow's Headline really adds a lot of power to the deck, as its an additional way to tag, so a SAM went out along with EULA which I rarely wanted to rez. Finally, after getting a consult from NetDad, I ended up cutting a few more cards and ended with the final list here. SIU, while being really cool and unexpected, was hogging the remote and taking away scoring windows, so I ended up cutting it.

OK, But What Does this Pile Actually Do?

So the plan is pretty simple:

1. Get some annoying ice on centrals (IP Block and Turnpike primarily). Runners need quite a few accesses vs. this agenda suite so if we can make those painful it'll give us time for our other plans.
2. Make a pile of tags on the remote. Ideally, the runner should be in a position where getting stuff out of the remote requires they take 2-3 tags.
3. IAA stuff in the remote. Usually, we'll either get points, the runner will end up floating a tag (which they think is OK because they're worried mostly about missiles) or they'll be low enough that we can apply our own tag or get them on the news.
4. Once they're tagged, do bad stuff to them. Feel free to fire the Hypoxia even if it won't be immediately fatal. Unlike most kill cards, the damage from hypoxia isn't going anywhere.

Are you implying you actually won games doing this?

Yeah. Somehow this seems to work. Single tag tech is basically nonexistent right now. Everybody is using their tech slots to deal with some other deck, so the field is pretty clear of things that hurt you. The only thing I'm seeing around that actually hurts me is Heartbeat, and we're packing a Baseball Bat to deal with it if we see it. Against all reasonable expectations, this earworm is my winningest corp deck right now. So yeah, go out win games with this until enough people notice that they start slotting No Free Lunch. After that you'll probably lose a lot, but we can't have everything.