The Singularity Is Near

This is a casual deck that hasn't been piloted yet. Edited from the previous version to add Wyrm into the fight (so that ice die when you want them to, not when they happen to).

The initial idea was to use powerful and versatile icebreakers like Paperclip. Paperclip and Black Chorus are both straight forward icebreakers, able to beat any ice of their sub-type given enough credits. To alleviate the credit strain I started adding ways to lower the strength of the ice.

This quickly turned into a virus driven deck. Parasite was one of my first choices to lower the strength of ice. This caused me to re-examine Hivemind.

Hivemind is potentially powerful, since every virus counter on it counts as being on every other virus. Combined with Grimoire, it would come into pay with 2 counters and could be further boosted by Virus Breeding Ground. This means that potentially everyturn each Parasite would reduce the strength of a piece of ice by 2 more. That can be further amplified by multiple Hiveminds.

After Hivemind, Medium becomes a great card for targeting R&D. With Medium's effect increasing each successful run on R&D, complimented by the growing effect of Hivemind, you're potentially accessing an entire hand's worth of cards at once. Potential to steal agendas aside, this gives you fantastic situational awareness and an opportunity to trash cards before the Corp can play them. Hopefully, by mid-game you'll have mitigated the Corp's existing board state and prevent them from rebuilding. This is where Demolition Run comes in handy. With an overpowered Hivemind or two in play and a revved up Medium, you activate Demolition Run at two credits and have a reasonable potential to trash about 5 cards at the cost of 1. And it still lets you steal agendas you access.

I'm concerned that Parasites may quickly kill off weaker ice and be removed from the game, so I've added Deja Vu. It's a tough call between this and Clone Chip, because Deja Vu brings up to two viruses back from the heap to your grip, but Clone Chip would bring up to one back to the rig.

This deck is very costly for memory. So I added MemStrips (+3 MU for viruses) to alleviate the burden of playing so many viruses. Then, Progenitor which not only nullifies the MU cost of a virus, but also prevents the loss of one virus counter when they are purged. If you get both Progenitors out and host Hiveminds on them, then all your viruses will always have access to at least 2 counters.

Since my install costs and ice breakers are credit driven, I probably went a little overboard with credit generation. This will probably eventually get evened out to add in Clone Chips, more card fetch, etc.

Now the important part. How to use it. This deck should flourish when running central servers, especially R&D. Early game you should try to get Medium out and punish an open R&D server. Reasonably, the Corp will respond with ice. These are where you want your parasites, to keep R&D open for massive card grabs later in the game. Drop Parasite strategically, use them with Datasucker and Wyrm to kill ice on your time. Since there's no Killer card in here, make sure that you use Parasite/Datasucker/Wyrm combos to remove them from the board. Then repeat that combo with Deja Vu. If the Corp transitions and tries to make a tower or other heavily fortified remote server, punish it with Singularity which will trash everything in the server.

There are only decoders and fracters in this deck, but those two are pretty strong. I've complimented that with Paintbrush so that you can make whichever you find cheapest to use work against any ice for the cost of a click. I'm taking a gamble by not including another copy of paint brush, but that's hopefully alleviated by Wyldside's card draw and Deja Vu. However, with Wyldside being the source of card draw/damage avoidance, you'll be a tad shorter on available clicks.

Future inclusions may add Incubator or similar cards to the deck, so that you can beef up Hivemind and Medium faster. Including Nerve Agent would allow you to transition from running R&D to running HQ, which is potentially a stronger way to keep the Corp from doing, well, anything besides clicking for cards and purging virus counters.

Happy hunting.