Accept with minor revisions - 38th @ American Continentals

Score a 5/3 from hand for (net) 0 credits!*

*terms and conditions apply

This list was brought to American Continentals, going 4-0 in CoS and 3-2 in the main event. It lost twice, to thike on Esa and Ysengrin on Sable. It also previously made appearances at Pittsburgh and NYC Megacities and at several other local events. (My runner for Continentals was solemn_storm's Aggravated Assault Zahya, which went 2-3)

The idea for this came about a few months ago when it occurred to me that Plutus has fairly unique timing that leads to interesting interactions. Specifically, Plutus installing a card (using Peer Review or Greasing the Palm) adds a new installed card to the board for any other start of turn effects (Hearts and Minds, Cohort Guidance, La Costa) to see and target. This means you can use those effects to install and (multiply) advance an agenda, letting you fast advance surprisingly large agendas out of hand.

With the change to NCIGS, the most obvious build for this seemed to be in Ob, where Plutus is in faction and Hearts and Minds can be safely hidden as a Cybersand Harvester (or Mavirus). FWIW there is also a Jinteki version of this combo, which I haven’t really worked on but London brought to NYC Megacity.

The combo is as follows:

1. With an advancement counter stored on an ice somewhere, rez Plutus and an uniced Hearts and Minds before start of turn.
2. At start of turn, resolve Plutus first. Play Peer Review, and install a 5/3 agenda in a new remote.
3. Still during start of turn, now resolve Hearts and Minds. Move the spare advancement counter to the agenda, and add an extra one to it.
4. After mandatory draw, advance three times and score.

If you didn’t have to pay for the hearts and minds rez, this lets you score a 5/3 for net zero credits. Neat!

There are many variations on this. If the runner leaves your board alone, sometimes you can get two H&Ms on the board for the same combo turn, letting you put 4 advancements on the agenda before first click. Sometimes you will need to ice an H&M to make it harder to trash, meaning you need to get an extra advancement somewhere else. Sometimes you can Slash and Burn the agenda to keep an extra click (and if you score a Basalt Spire with this, it’s even moderately safe to do so). Theoretically you can also do this to fast advance a 3/2 with extra clicks, letting you play a Measured Response if that gets you to Threat 4, though this has never come up for me.

Obviously there are a lot of preconditions needed for this combo to work. You will simultaneously need (1) an installed Plutus, (2) a Peer Review in HQ or archives, (3) an agenda to score in HQ, (4) an advancement counter on an ice, (5) a Hearts and Minds installed OR a cybersand harvester OR a mavirus AND still enough appropriate cards in deck to chain down to the H&M, and (6) at least 4 credits after rezzing whatever is necessary to get the H&M out. It took me a lot of practice with this to stop trying to go for the full combo while missing pieces.

A couple of specific cards to discuss:

Wall to Wall: This card does a lot of heavy lifting for enabling the combo. My first attempt at this deck used Akhet, Tree Line, Syailendra, and other ice, but at some point I realized that W2W is tutorable and the third mode of the card allows you to advance any ice regardless of advanceability. As a result I switched the ice back to what I think are more generally powerful ice (3x Maskirovka, 3x Logjam).

Humanoid Resources: Also tutorable from a Cybersand Harvester. If you were able to get the HR out on the runner’s turn (e.g. Cybersand -> HR), you can pull a Spin Doctor when trashing HR to turn it into a draw 5, install 2 cards, play an operation, with the threat of spinning back the HR to immediately re-tutor it if you also reinstalled a Cybersand or Mavirus in the installed cards. In addition, due to us playing a couple of operations for Plutus, you have a pretty good hit rate on getting to play an operation versus many of the more asset-heavy Ob lists, even if a bunch of them wind up working out as essentially a click for 2 or 3 credits. Peer Review is a really great card here for letting you get an extra card out of your hand as well - popping an HR and installing a 0 cost card as well as three new installs (and +7 credits) is a really big swing in one turn.

The other important role for HR is tutoring the other 0 cost card in the deck, Plutus. If this deck becomes more well known I assume this line will stop working but I have had some success in picking up the deck to find a 0 cost, then looking at the board and saying something like “ah shoot, I’ve already got a Spin out” while searching, then revealing the Plutus and putting it uniced or behind some easily breakable ice. If you look like the Plutus was the consolation prize some runners underestimate the threat it’s actually posing. All that said, I often don’t want to tutor HR with the first Cybersand, I typically am much happier getting a Wall to Wall out first (especially while it has a chance to be the only rezzed asset, giving us a really easy opportunity to satisfy the combo requirement)

Predictive Planogram: An operation for HR, a transaction for Plutus, recovery money in a pinch, and is card draw in a deck that really wants to use cards in hand (and where Spins are heavily taxed already). Discarding three cards to rez Plutus and then playing Planogram with it just is a corpside Moshing, and if you have a S&B or a 3/2 and need to find the other this can win you the game. It’s possible more than 1 copy is correct.

Measured Response: This really isn’t the point of this deck, but after losing several games to runners who completely disrespected the card I put two copies in. In most of my games I try to reveal these to Peer Review to put fear in the runners, but these are also often some of the first cards I discard to Plutus.

Peer Review: I’m not going to claim Peer Review is better than Greasing the Palm, or that revealing cards isn’t a downside. If you’re agenda flooded you can get stuck with this in hand. But it is less influence and more money than Greasing, and there are some lines where it’s safe to reveal agendas. Most often, if you’re Slash and Burning a 3/2, Peer Review lets you potentially only show the runner the 3/2 and Slash and Burn, while going credit positive and scoring. This is very cool.

The agenda suite: I started originally with 7 3/2 agendas and 2 SDS Drone Deployment, but sometimes had trouble finding the 5/3s to combo off with. This deck idea got bounced around to other players and came back with Basalt Spires over SDS, and with 1x Slash and Burn and 1x Greenmail (and 1x Nanomanagement). Playing around with this new suite a bit I loved the S&B and combo potential of Basalt Spire, but the 1x Greenmail felt kind of awkward a lot of the time. After cutting the Nanomanagement for influence, I added another Slash instead of the 1 pointer, going to 21 points, which has felt pretty good. You could even add a third copy without cutting, and go up to 54 cards.

The ice suite: As mentioned before, I started with Akhet, Tree Line, and Syailendras, among a couple of other ice. Tree Line is fine, but Akhet is notably worse than Maskirovka, and I basically never felt like I had the time to triple advance it. Syailendra is theoretically just a big Tithe and I sort of like it as that (runners hate tithe), but late game it was a big porous liability on centrals. However, the fact that Wall to Wall doesn’t care about the advanceability of the ice means that the ice suite can be changed to just what seem like good solid value ice. There’s a lot of room to tweak this ice suite.

Playing against this deck: This is not an asset spam deck, though some turns it tries to pretend to be one (HR turns). Any kind of early asset interaction or tech (Azimat, Cupellation, Wheels) can seriously hurt the corp’s tempo, even to the point where paying the iron price to trash an early Cybersand is quite possibly correct (where you might not be able to afford that versus a full asset spam deck). Sabotage/HQ pressure can also put this deck in a very tough spot, as happened versus thike’s Esa at Conts.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to the tourney organizers and volunteers at Continentals! The tournament was fantastic.

Thanks also to all the folks in the greater greater Boston area for putting up with me continuing to try to make stupid jank combos happen.