It's criminal that this powerful but weirdly terrible card doesn't have a review. Let's rectify that!
Most of my thinking is contained in this prototype deck from around when the card was released. The breaker suite doesn't make sense anymore given the conspiracy breakers (which are auto-includes) but everything I discuss here is covered there, but with an accompanying decklist.
First off, Emptied Mind is a build around card. You don't just slap this in a deck because you might have no cards in grip and want to gain an advantage. You need to purposefully build a deck that gains the extra click consistently and plays around its disadvantages. So we have three questions:
- Why do we want an extra click? What will we do with it?
- How will we keep our grip empty consistently? There's a reason most of the time you're holding onto cards.
- How will we survive damage? No cards in grip usually means ur ded m8.
Why an extra click?
In short: Magnum Opus. Whatever card that reads "click this a lot, gain an advantage." The other options are Professional Contacts and Laguna Velasco District—those are obvious nonbos with Emptied Mind. You need money to win, an extra 2 per turn is :ok_hand:
Joshua B., the most similar card, was played in Data Leak Reversal decks; EM doesn't make sense there. DLR decks almost never have an empty grip, they want tons of card draw.
How will we keep an empty grip?
There's actually a decent amount of support for this in Anarch. I'll laundry list without too much detail:
The unifying factor of these cards is they let you avoid cards, even duplicates of cards you have installed, stick in grip. You can still get what you need but you don't have to hold it in hand—you can trash breakers, store resources on peddlers, and if something goes wrong start all over with Noble Path. Other interesting ideas:
- Express Delivery
- Bookmark
- Personal Workshop
- Earthrise Hotel (you can trigger EM before hotel so you gain & click with empty grip & then draw)
So there's actual, strong card draw for this archetype that can't keep cards in hand. These are mostly cards people play anyways that happen to support this weirdo archetype.
How will we survive damage?
Any installable that banks damage prevention is golden here. Guru Davinder is the most all purpose & his major downside (expense) is cancelled out by the EM-MOpus economy. I think Guru, which is quite honestly a bad card, is a perfect fit for EM decks.
Cards like Biometric Spoofing are OK but probably not powerful enough (you still straight up die to Snare!, for instance). Other cards are generally Shaper & you have to spend a lot of influence. Feedback Filter might be good but doesn't address meat damage.
You can also just YOLO if damage is ever super out of the meta. But random damage subs on playable ICE (e.g. Ichi 1.0, Fairchild 3.0, Cobra) are something to be wary of.
In Sum
Do you like turning Sweeps Week into a one credit self-Vamp? Is running through Komainu for free funny? Then you should build an Emptied Mind deck for sure. There's a decent tier three jank list here without a doubt. It's the best bad card in the game. Other than Akshara Sareen, of course.