Erhabner Geist's Final Form

With the newly-announced B&R list and rotation about to make this deck history, I am publishing it, just for posterity's sake. I've always loved Geist, and I've always been convinced that Faust was meant to be one of his cards thematically, presumably named after the "Spirit of Earth and Fire" which Faust summons in the first part of Goethe's play. (This is before he meets Mephistopheles - in fact, in Goethe, Mephistopheles only turns up to pick up Faust on the rebound from being turned down by the Geist.)

Back when Foodcoats was the most popular deck, running a remote server with the B&E breakers meant ending up with 9-10 cards in hand and not enough clicks to install them. So I squeezed in a Faust in order to get more value out of those cards and conserve my B&Es. Eventually, the increase in trashable cards meant that Faust could get in just about anywhere on its own and I cut the B&Es. This solved my main gripe with Geist, that the B&Es needed a lot of setup before you could run. Sports Hopper + Faust otoh lets you get into most servers early game, and is supported by the permanent breakers late game (and can be overwritten if there are a lot of Chiyashis on the board).

I've found this to be surprisingly adaptable to most metas in the 2 years I've been playing it. When glacier was strong in the D&D era (and the deck had more influence to play with, since Faust didn't cost 5 influence), I would splash on Gordians and/or Corroders. When the meta shifted to Fastrobiotics and asset spam, and Wraparound became the only barrier you'd ever encounter, that Corroder could be an Inti or even an Aurora, and the spare influence go to Scrubbers and Off-Campus apartments. I even experimented with Imp, since back then Geist had Clone Chips. The Source was also a thing for awhile. E3 Feedback Implants was in several versions of this deck, due to its synergy with Faust, but tbh I found out that most games I wasn't even installing it.

Faust going on the MWL definitely restricted the amount of out of faction hate cards I could include, and after MWL 1.2 you only have 3 spare influence to play with. The current list is only its latest iteration, when Obakata made Film Critic the best 1 influence splash you could have. Nevertheless, even with having lost so much of its flexibility, it's still has good matchups even in the current (pre-rotation) meta.

Faust + Siphon + Same Old Thing + Levy is the core of this deck, slowing down the corp until you can set up your Geist Engine and be able to contest their board state. Asset Spam decks are its worse matchup, since they can duck siphon effectively and refill their credit pool with drip econ, but you do have some game even against them. TTW gets fuelled by Siphons, and Spy Cameras can force premature Jackson pops, slowing down the corp (I've hardly ever gotten more than 2 agendas a game off R&D - most of my spycam runs were bluffs!). Against conventional corps a remote lock is easy to establish using PolOp to get round upgrades, and against fast advance corps you slow down their scoring using siphons and eventually use TTW to hammer HQ.

While Aumakua would at first glance seem to be a good replacement for Faust, it doesn't do what Faust does, which is allow you to run with no money. With no room for real economy cards, Geist is poor until your engine is set up, But Faust allows you to land siphons from 0 credits. This makes this deck play very different to the conventional Geist decks with the B&E breaker suite that have been published here before, and even won some large tournaments. This version was more aggressive, ran earlier, and offered a much stronger central threat than the standard version, which focussed on remote lock. As such, with siphon rotating out, this deck is no longer viable even if I replace Faust with the Turtle, unless a new siphon analogue is printed in Kitara. (Plus, it loses the Goetheian flavour!)

This is the deck I've played the most for the past 2 years. Whenever the meta shifted, or a key card got MWL'ed, I would think "well, it's dead now", but every single time, some little tweak or new card allowed it to get back in the game. I've really enjoyed the mental exercise of adapting the basic shell of Faust+Geist+Siphon to keep up with a meta that's been through a lot of change and upheaval in this time (although it was at no point as efficient as the tier 1 decks, which is what I usually took to tournaments). I'm sure I'll play some version of Geist again in the future, and maybe I'll keep playing this in Joseki's Eternal tournaments, but I'll doubt I'll ever have the experience of tweaking the same shell over a period of 2 whole years again! So I'm publishing it in order to effectively retire it, in its final iteration. Give it some likes, I need the deckslots, and it deserves a proper send-off! Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles, Warum ich bat!