Moon Princess

This is a final version of an IG FA deck I've been tooling around over the past month. It's a lot of fun to play and can hold its own against a lot of different decks, even those with a lot of IG hate-tech (like Imps and Scrubbers). It's based off an old PE deck I made which included SanSanCity Grid asa one of as a different avenue for scoring agendas out of naked remotes. Suddenly fast advancing a Gila Hands or House of Knives put the runner on the back foot, and with one or two Hostile Infrastructures installed it became a chore for the runner to trash the SanSan. That gave me more opportunities to score with the SanSan and made installing cards naked in remotes safer from destruction. Runners learned very quickly that trashing HI was a priority, and without HI to protect SanSan there weren't many chances to score out with it, so I dropped the deck completely.

Industrial Genomics gave the deck new life. The key to understanding how the deck works so well is seeing how SanSan City Grid, Hostile Infrastructure, Shocks in Archives and asset economy make a web of targets that need to be taken down in an optimum order or the runner will be taking too much damage and spending too much money to keep the corp from taking over the game. Face-downcards in Archives increase the cost both of the SSCG and HI to trash. Since SSCG is the main route to victory for the corp, it needs to be trashed as soon as possible. That will mean not only paying extra credits but also taking net damage from HI, so making SSCG a priority target to trash leads the runner toward other targets or face severe penalties. Shocks in Archives will then punish the runner for flipping over archives, which in the best-case gives the corp time to put more face-down cards back in archives, but at the very least forces the runner to take time drawing before trashing either HI or SSCG. The effort the runner takes to reduce the cost to trash ultimately creates more work for the runner, and as the runner exhausts their resources (clicks, cards, and credits) the corp is able to reap the benefits of asset econ like PAD and Mental Health Clinic. Finally, after all the effort the runner took to get rid of SSCG, the corp can easily reinstall it with Interns forcing them to gather more resources in order to deny the corp the means to rapidly score agendas.

The deck is surprisingly robust in the way it can defend itself. Account Siphon can be a serious problem if not countered correctly, but with so many assets to rez it's possible to deny the runner money while still advancing your game. A considerable advantage that IG's ability combined with HI is that Snares are much less likely to be trashed whether you triggered them or not, so going down to 0 credits is not nearly as troublesome in this deck as it is in other Jinteki decks. Similarly, R&D locks are not nearly as effective since most cards accessed in R&D won't get trashed with 4 or so faced-down cards and even 1 HI rezzed. Keyhole is also not nearly as effective with HI rezzed, and Caprice over R&D can be a considerable amount of protection against Eater + Keyhole since neither Eater nor Keyhole will allow the runner to access Caprice, who will be more expensive to trash.

I started testing this deck at around the time people began playing with the post-O&C Reina denial decks, and while I think that deck has considerable strengths against most of Jinteki, I found this one had enough avenues to deny Account Siphon and had such a strong emphasis of keeping assets rezzed and running that Headlock Reina is a somewhat favorable match up. The hardest match ups for this deck are Gabe denial decks (since Gabe can get lots of money without relying on Account Siphon) and Noise mils (since Noise has the advantage of not needing to consistently access cards and will often run multiple Imps with plenty of recursion). But even in these difficult match ups the route to victory is possible. Against Gabe, getting cards in archives and making it taxing to run before putting out asset economy will help keep him from overwhelming you. Against Noise, drawing a few extra cards without discarding (since Noise will mill plenty of cards to make trashing unfathomable) will give you more opportunities to see important cards like Jackson Howard and SSCG. Drawing key cards will also make it easier to spend turns purging to deny Imp counters.

This deck is a lot of fun and it's helped me develop a prodigious amount of stamina for playing multiple games over a long period of time. That said, it's not a deck you can reasonably take to competition play. Except for the random flatline death (and it happens considerably more than you'd expect from a deck not specifically designed to flatline) most games take upwards of 50 minutes to play. This is specially true once it comes to match point, because by that time you've either scored or the runner has stolen every agenda available leaving the rest sitting in R&D. This means that R&D is the only server you need to protect, and it makes drawing cards an unnecessary liability: if you can keep them out of R&D you can just wait for your mandatory draw to give you the winning points. It's not unusual to have R&D 4- or 5-ice deep, with a rezzed Caprice defending it. Even against a fully-built stealth Andy rig it's possible to lock the runner out completely. So after 50 or so minutes of the game, you're often playing out another half a dozen runs deep into the late game. That means you're likely to go to time just from one game, which is ruinous in a tournament setting.

I'm moving on to other, more competitive IG builds, but this build is a shining example to how IG as an identity can bring in a lot of power to Jinteki.