A Skorpios Story 9 - The Perfect Deck

My name is PowerBunz and I love Skorpios. I've built more Skorpios decks than any other ID and It's time to share my enthusiasm and joy for the murderous and oppressive. Not all these decks will be good, not all of them will have actually been sleeved up and played; they together tell a story of learning, improvement, and, most importantly, huge remove-from-game piles.

This is it. My greatest achievement.

The first data pack I ever got was Humanity's Shadow. I think I stumbled into ANR just before H&P, so there was still plenty of packs to choose from. I was young and foolish and didn't realise it was a bad idea to get them out of order. I'm pretty sure I picked this one first because it had Xanadu as the cover art, and I was enchanted. I thought Bernice Mai was excellent and that Hokusai Grid was the bees knees. My friends didn't think much of Andy compared to Gabe. Xanadu made the maths so hard. We stretched my limited collection out to make as many decks at the same time as possible.

Order and Chaos was probably the product I've gotten myself most hyped up about. I remember listening to Quinns talking about Gagarin and Asteroid Belt, and SlySquid get so excited about Hivemind. I'd been playing on my kitchen table for a while by then, and loved the speculation and hype. I was feeling excited that it was finally Weyland and Anarch's turn to explode their possibilities. Housekeeping was brutal and unfair, Argus was terrifying. It was a beautiful time to be a Weyland player.

Sure, looking back a lot of the cards aren't that good. No one ever remembers The Board or Searchlight, but this promise of speed and murder is one that has stayed with me for all these years. I think this deck is the closest I've ever come to reaching that pinnacle.

This is my favourite deck. It's punishing and variable and dramatic and huge. It's everything I love in a deck. There's so many ways it makes careless or stressed runners sad, but it's never unfair. It's porous, agendas come thick and fast, A-A-Ron can make it sad, Sunny is surprisingly good against it, and a careful runner can run it over, but only if they don't get rushed into oblivion.

The list originated as an attempt to use Warroid Tracker in combination with Standoff and other tracey-taggy cards to put the runner in a bad spot. I eventually realised that Warroid Tracker was the worst card in the deck, and that there's better tracey-taggy options around these days. It's ice-light, like most of my decks, but each one is powerful. In terms of actual deck analysis, the slots I'm most unsure about are the 2 Sapper and the Audacity. These are relatively late and untested additions, and I might feel better with Hortum or some other decent EtR ICE. Spiderweb felt too expensive, and Enigma is too Yog-able. My current choices feel solid, at least for the time being.

In a couple of months from now, presumably, this deck loses Midseason Replacements, Project Atlas, Restructure and (oh no) Jackson Howard. These are easily replaced, probably by SEA Source, Armored Servers, IPO, and Whampoa Reclamation respectively. Weyland only loses their worst cards thanks to rotation, and everything the runners lose may boost Weyland's stock significantly. Maybe. Hopefully.

There's nothing I'll really miss when rotation strikes. It's a bright and hopeful time for Weyland, for the game, and for me. I'll still have those cards in my box (too poor for binders), and more importantly, the memories of those cards. So many of my runner decks having Kati Jones and Armitage Codebusting as the key economy source, and so many corps spending influence only on Data Raven, Snare! and SEA Source.

Actually, I think that's still all I spend influence on with my Corps. Maybe some things never change.

This is the conclusion of my series. I won't stop building bad Skorpios lists, but I will stop writing about them. We've seen the highs and lows of deck building, reminisced about tournaments and cycles gone by. We've laughed, we've cried, and we may even have learned something. Thank you to everyone who joined me on this exploratory romp through some bad ideas.