Donut Ghost House (2nd place Gamescape SF SC)

I heard a rumor about this guy named Donut. Seems like an interesting guy, so for the last Store Championship of the season, I decided to try out something that he might like. Unfortunately, when I went looking for him, all I found were some ghosts. At least the deck ended up doing pretty well.

The Deck Core (or: The Donut Hole)

Street Peddler: Replaces Diesel for setup acceleration, but with actual ProCo and Hayley synergies. Install for half a , get yourself two installs on the corp turn, and save a credit.

The Economy: Nothing new here. ProCo + Aesop + Cache + Tech Writer. When you don't need them for anything else, the Clone Chips are more Caches.

The Ghost Rig: Paying real credits to break ice kinda sucks these days, so Dagger and Refractor let you deal with a lot of ice for cheap. The setup time is certainly worse, but with ProCo, you're kind of already accepting that. Also, Hayley makes it better, and Tech Writer pays you back for the Cloaks.

The Pressure: 3 R&D Interface to follow the standard Shaper plan of locking the scoring remote and R&D. I pretty frequently get to the point where the Corp feels to need to put an extra Caprice/Ash on R&D, and that means they're in trouble. Once Councilman comes out, things will only get worse for them, because they'll be forced to commit their unique upgrades to one server.

Other Card Choices

Daily Casts: Honestly, this deck seems to have way more money than it needs. (In testing against Gagarin, my answer to Tour Guide has been to just pay through it, and it's been fine.) But Daily Casts helps the economy keep running smoothly, letting you build your Tech Writers for much longer. I've toyed with replacing these with Hyperdrivers, which might be good.

Corroder: Same influence as 2x Lady, cheaper to install, and this list doesn't have Scavenge anyway. Since MWL, and especially since the rise of Spiderweb and NEXT Silver, I have never found myself thinking, I wish I had Lady right now.

Leprechaun: SMC-able/Clone-Chip-able memory that's better than Akamatsu at holding SMCs. Also good if you want to slot in Hyperdrivers if you gotta go fast.

Self-modifying Code: There are 3 because you want to find one early. Pretty soon, you'll be perfectly happy to sell them to Aesop. (Hayley pro tip: if the card you want is in your hand, the correct thing to SMC for is often another SMC.)

Sacrificial Construct: A tech card for Batty and CVS that you can sell if you don't need it.

HQ Interface: Since this was a trial run, I just decided to throw in something that would be useful in pretty much every matchup. If the Corp tries to fight off your lock on the scoring remote and R&D, HQ starts to get stacked. But even single accesses can be worthwhile at that point, so you can do what you want with this influence. You may even decide to track down Donut.