Smoke Testing 1.0

In computer programming and software testing, smoke testing (also confidence testing, sanity testing) is preliminary testing to reveal simple failures severe enough to (for example) reject a prospective software release.

Depending on your source, the term originated from plumbing, where pressurized smoke makes leaky pipes easy to spot, or alternatively, from building an electronic device and turning it on the first time to see if it catches fire.

This is the somewhat tuned up version of my test bed for a Smoke deck concept that I put together. I last published an Escalation-era version of it out of Hayley, but this was always the desired end state.

The basic ideas are simple but there are a few different things the deck is working on.:

• Combat Shaper's inherent slowness by maximizing the return on runs, and to that end, Temüjin Contract, Patron, and Net Mercur are fantastic together. I'll almost always keep a grip that has one of the two latter cards in it. Shaper needs to draw cards, and Quality Time sucks, because there's nothing like bloating your grip with five cards and being down the three credits you'd need to play any of them. I'd much rather draw two cards and profit $4-5 while I'm at it.
• Convert Stealth Credits into real money. Mid or late game, or if they just ice up your server, Temüjin is less purely profitable than it is a break-even situation. But if you're paying for that run with Stealth Credits, and banking money on Net Mercur, there's little if any loss of tempo.
• Stealth can break into almost any server, but it doesn't make multiple runs per turn very well, so the run needs to be effectual. The Source and Film Critic are very difficult to score around, and they hamstring Shell Game decks because you almost never need to run an unadvanced card. NACH complements that shell very well.