The Spanish Influenza v2.1 (The Winning Agenda Comp winner)

This deck is a bastard to play against. I think I've beaten it once, but most games I get stuck at 0c with no way to defend myself from repeated Lamprey runs. Just brutal.

This deck is tons of fun to play with! It was defeated only once during the 'Shoot the Moon' tournament (52 players, cards up to The Spaces Between). It got flatlined against a very spiky Personal Evolution.

The version I ran tried to counter all the expected Near-Earth Hub: Broadcast Center, hence the inclusion of Security Subcontract and Armitage Codebusting to get cash in the early game (no time for Kati, no time for Mr Li!). Lotus Field was trendy back then, making me drop the Yog.0 for a peacock (which was actually useful!). I think Rex is a great touch there, and the Yog/Rex package is strictly better than Passport/Peacock.

As you said, Faerie is very good to apply early pressure without fear, and can help you a lot if you expect Jinteki: Replicating Perfection (Komainu, Tsurugi). The drawback is that you actually have to play 3 of them to find them reliably.

In hindsight, I never should have dropped the Datasucker, which could have been extremely good. This may be why our opinions differ on Pheromones: as I did not have Datasucker in, I suspect that I relied more heavily on pheromones to lock HQ. I actually made people purge viruses several times in a game, for a lamprey initially and then for pheromones with 6+ counters ;).

I also cut the Plascrete Carapace, as Weyland was not played back then, wich was very greedy but actually paid off (I only saw a single Scorched Earth the whole day, in a cool Haas-Bioroid: Engineering the Future deck, but it was already broke :p).

Yeah, this deck was waiting for Cerberus "Rex" H2 for a long time. It feels like much more universal of a breaker than Peacock does, especially for 2 sub codegates like Enigma, Datapike, Viktor 1.0 & 2.0, Viper and Yagura. Passport is fantastic and super efficient on centrals for most codegates, but given its centrals-only limitation, it was pretty easy to replace. Ideally Yog.0 with Datasucker support is the only decoder that you need, but if you have to deal with Cerberus "Rex" H2 it's not so bad.

I agree about Pheromones - while you can use Pheromones to get into HQ a whole lot easier, Datasucker does a similar job. It might not save you quite as many credits, but it is more universal across other servers when you need to hit a remote with fixed strength breakers (or you don't want to pay a million credits to boost Femme Fatale).

Plascrete Carapace is definitely a meta call. Only a small handful of people play Scorch decks in my local meta. Since I'm playing Mr. Li I can usually cycle that card to the bottom of the deck when I don't need it, and bring it up when I do, Since most of my play with this deck has been on OCTGN games though, you kind of need to be ready for anything.

@PaxCecilia Lamprey is just such a mean card in Gabe. Definitely my favourite card of the cycle for that "control the game" feeling that it brings when it hits!

NO ONE expects the Spanish Influenza!

But seriously, I love this list. Been intrigued by an "all-in HQ" Gabe for a while since I feel it requires more than just "Andy with less consistency", so it's great you've had so much success with it! I look forward to trying this one out.

@ItJustGotRielle Haha, thanks! I hope it works out for you, let me know how it goes, especially if you make any changes.

After reading over Stimhack a bit, I've considered changing up Yog.0 for Passport, since Cerberus "Rex" H2 fills the void in Passport's ability well, and that the entry cost is lower - but I've been having a lot of success with Yog.0 + Datasucker//Djinn to summon Datasucker that I don't know if I'd bother with that edit. Usually I'm saving quite a bit of money in the long run with Yog.0 installed. That being said though, even if I experimented with the change, I have no idea how the one influence freed up by cutting Yog.0 would help this deck at all. I dunno, food for thought! I'm probably happy as is keeping it as written (Sometimes I play with 3x Dirty Laundry and only 2x Sure Gamble), but your mileage may vary with the all of the decoder options available.

I always just see Faerie as more of an econ card. It breaks so efficiently that you're often up more credits using it on a ton of Ice thank you would be using something like Dirty Laundry.

If you're consistently hitting Jinteki dogs and Archers then Faerie is just worth it.

Hey @wedgeex!

For the Jinteki Dogs, nawh, I have a different opinion there. Faeries here would just be single-use on something that I already have a reasonably priced permanent solution for. I'm comfortable with paying the credits and timing my handsizes to be safe from Snare! and Fetal AI when breaking Komainu for optimum efficiency. Otherwise it's a significant time investment to draw and install a bunch of single use Faeries, making you lose tempo on something that you're probably going to need a long-term solution for eventually.

When playing as the Good Knight Gabe/Ser Gabe archetype though, I certainly loved having them around, no question about that. If you can find the deckspace to have 2-3 of them, by all means you could certainly do that! Having Knight as a backup there was wonderful to keep the aggression up too. I highly recommend playing that style for fun a few times (even though it is pretty dated now).

For Archer (or any other high strength sentries to hit me by surprise, like Grim... Janus 1.0, granted I'm fine with just clicking through that for 1 brain damage) though, yeah, that is a legitimate concern. I've been pretty decent at predicting Archers on the board so far. If someone were to import Archer as a surprise out-of-faction piece of ICE though, yeah, there's a chance that it would catch me off guard and then make me have to rely on backup breakers and/or criminal events to deal with it. A half decent solution is to try to pull your Datasucker out early, tutoring with your Djinn if necessary, so that you can start building up a security blanket of virus counters before your opponent has the requirements set up to rez an Archer.

So far in about 300 games with this archetype, I can think of maybe... Twice where an Archer killed a program on me. The most recent time was super early-game where they just pinged out an empty Djinn, and ultimately was just Emergency Shutdown'd a couple of turns later.

I guess Archer is just a huge part of our meta. I must admit, Feint+Shutdown is a pretty good answer. Dat facecheck though :)

Ffffffff. This deck is garbage made for garbage men. That being said....I really hate playing against this deck against this guy haha.