Toolkit

harmonbee 830

Before I begin, I've got to thank the amazing @PeekaySK. He persuaded me to put The Toolbox in here and generally made some amazing improvements, AND sent me, a total stranger, two more copies of The Toolbox so that I could run this deck. Basically, he's wonderful and if you ever come up against him on OCTGN or something you will have a great time!

So, this is the Kit deck I've been working on for a while (in fact, it's my first runner deck) and I think it's in a good place now! It's admittedly not won tournaments or anything (I've only taken it to one tournament (my first tournament) and won three out of six runner games with it) but it's very fun to play!

Now, as you might have guessed by the three copies of it, you want to find Magnum Opus. Sure, do some face checking first, have a good time, but then get the money rolling in. If you can Modded it out, even better! Then, of course, you want to find Torch. This is best done through the Test Run / Scavenge combo, but you could always Modded it out as well in a bad situation, or if the Corp gets cocky and thinks that you've not found your breaker yet.

Now, The Toolbox is amazing. Why is it amazing? Well, as @PeekaySK explained to me, you can spend a turn installing it, and then you've essentially got a free Magnum Opus click every turn. This and the + and +2 means that I don't need to run any extra either, and it makes the tracer ice (*cough* Caduceus*cough*) less irritating as well. Also, you don't really need the extra until the Corp's servers have more than one piece of ICE on them, and even then you can get through a two-ice server with Femme Fatale anyway, which still leaves you within your starting 4. So, an early R&D assault is a very good idea.

By the late game you will have hopefully found Escher and Legwork. Have they been putting too much ICE on R&D? Surprise, now I'm going for HQ and borrowing all of your agendas (permanently). Or I'm suddenly putting all of the code gates on R&D and now it costs 3 to get into R&D and see four cards. Also, Tinkering is very useful to take the Corp's scoring window and shut it straight back down. Yay pressure!

You may also be wondering why there's no Self-modifying Code, considering all of the small programs that are in here. Well, there are two reasons really: memory and deck space. Magnum is already , and we don't have any cheap extra memory for the early game. Also, deck space is a thing.

To be honest though you may just not bother as you'll be drawing through your deck so quickly, so most of them will end up in the heap, where you can Clone Chip them back from! Or, considering how many Same Old Things are in this deck, you could easily recur another Test Run to find that all-important Parasite, Sharpshooter or D4v1d (which is a totally amazing card that every Shaper should import if they can).

Please leave any suggestions or comments below!

2 comments
19 Feb 2015 DavidMac

It might be worth thinking about alternatives for those games where you can't seem to draw into Test Runs. They're out there. I imagine it'd really shut you down if you couldn't get to that Torch early in the game. Rather than x3 Mangums, it might be worth considering x1 Magnum and x2 Self-modifying Code. It'll only save you a credit over a Test Run, but it'll give you more chance of accelerating out the Magnum AND the Torch. Late game they'll add a little more utility, too, if you're hunting for another program hidden in your stack and/or want to save on those all-important Same Old Things.

19 Feb 2015 harmonbee

@DavidMac Thank you for your suggestion! There is definitely a worry of not finding the correct components quickly enough. However, I think there are a few things to consider here:

Pros of SMC / Cons of 3x Opus

  • Can get anything out, yay! This includes small programs like Sharpshooter as well as Opus itself.
  • Works during a run (so, for example, you can get a discount from GRNDL right off the bat just by running on Archives and using the bad publicity).
  • The other two Opuses are basically dead draws.

Cons of SMC / Pros of 3x Opus

  • It costs to find a program with SMC in a deck with very little memory.
  • Opus can be Modded out.
  • To be honest this deck has a lot of draw so will probably find Opus eventually. And Test Run. If we think about it probabilities-wise, there is a 3/45 chance of drawing Opus as the first card, 3/44 as the second (presuming that it isn't found yet) and so on, roughly giving us a 35% chance of seeing it within the first hand. That's quite large, considering that you get two chances to see it. Also, you will probably get some draw cards if you get a really terrible hand anyway, and there are a few event economy cards as to make sure that not having Opus for a few turns is OK.
  • If you end up hitting a Trash 1 Program, having two spare Opuses in the stack can actually be very useful!
  • Opus #2 can always be used as Scavenge fodder I guess...

I think you've made a very good point! I'm still not sure which I'd go for, though - I think I'd need to do some testing to work it out.