Get Rekt with Batty Gold

People aren't always friendly when you: Fastrobiotics, nisei them out of a remote, and now when you rigwhipe them? What's left to do?

Lol! Heck if I know. The evil corps have to live up to their reputation somehow!

Yeap, people are already playing similar decks in Warsaw. Dealing with Batty is as fun as eating lead paint.

@konradh I agree. I'm not really sure of the best way to attack or tech against this type of deck yet. Its seems broken at the moment but I'm sure there's a good line to victory that just hasn't emerged yet.

I think only reliable thing right now, apart of trying to snipe him with Drive By, is Vamp corp down to 0 credits. But that requires probably Magnum Opus, and nobody has currently time to click for 2creds :(

After having been trounced by this yesterday on OCTGN, I plan on using this as often as possible. I love rig wipe decks and this seems like a really solid way to bring that archetype back.

One big strength of this deck (until it becomes the winner of every tournament) is that people just see NEXT Gold as a tax. 2 credits with Atman, a credit and a datasucker token with Mimic, it's not too bad for them. But really it's just bait.

Do you usually find you're significantly richer than the runner? And if so, does your meta include D4v1d a lot? If not, I think Corporate Troubleshooter might work a little better than Batty in some cases. I'll try the deck as is, but I think I'll also try subbing out one of the copies of Batty for a Troubleshooter. Although, after our game yesterday, I think I should have a lot more faith in my psi game skills. :) (It took @slakker three Batties to finally kill me off)

Also, I think Drive By will work pretty well against Batty if you're willing to play criminal right now. It's also just universally pretty good, against RP and other HB decks. Just in case someone was looking for how to beat it.

@Friff14 Your psi game skills were spot on! You played them perfectly.

As for Troubleshooter, it's been hit or miss for me. It's good when it lands but D4vid, Sharpshooter, Garrotte, Switchblade and Dagger can all beat it. Plus Batty gives you the chance to wipe the rig and still have Gold fire. Two Batty is good if you need the influence but I think once you play Batty you'll drop the troubleshooter.

I agree with you and @konradh that Drive By will slow Batty down some as you have to pick a server and leave it rezzed at that point. Vamp/Siphon Spam can make it tough as well. Blackmail also might would be a good counter early to mid game.

I tried this against Valencia and won, but it was harder than the old Polish version with Caprice. The deck still has enough assets, upgrades and 3/2s to bait a lot of runs though.

It could use a crisium grid, but apart from that, Gold is perhaps the best batty target there is. Archer would be great too but that requires some setup, getting wrecked by batty only requires Gold and 10 credits and most runners will find it hard to recover from that. Well done

Do you really need the 1 from EtF? I would think that Foundry would be better suited as it can tutor up all the Next ice you want. You could also use it to put in some grail ice. You get the random oops wins from tutoring up another Merlin, but using Batty to refire Excalibur is pretty rough as it just locks them out. Throw it in a scoring remote and they're stuck.

@Dstinct Against the right runners, you only need 2 or 3 NEXT ice to make that subroutine a winner. 4 will usually trash an entire rig. 5 might flatline them, but you really don't need that if you can just wipe their rigs instead.

I think 12-20 credits over the course of a game is worth a whole lot more than a few more NEXT ice and a situational kill from Merlin. Influence is tight anyway what with three copies of Marcus Batty.

@dstinct I agree with @friff14, this deck requires a lot of Econ to pilot successfully. Under most circumstances, you'll have it. But against whizzard or scrubber you are really glad to ETF since most of your Econ is asset based. I agree that Foundry would have great synergy with this deck, but with 10 pieces of NEXT type ice you always seem to have plenty.

@slakkerim actually considering Test Ground to move Batty, crazy as it sounds. Awesome deck!

There is no way to "move" batty with test ground. If you want to move batty, then perhaps you had Isabel McGuire in mind?

Sorry I meant more when you are forced to Rez him in one location and since he's unique he's kind of stuck there until you trigger or install over him, even if he's in hand or face down in a different server. With test ground you could de Rez and then Rez a different copy somewhere else.

Unlike Caprice, Batty is a single use only, so apart from rezzing him to prevent a Drive By, it's very unlikely that he will be rezzed for more than a second.

I've actually liked using him less like a trap and more like a big mean dog and been rezzing him and saying if you come here, Batty is waiting for you. For my scoring server and it's worked okay as a deterrent with a Gold. They don't want to bother until they get a second breaker. I'm not subtle though and am a terrible jinteki player, I just like saying can you deal with this?

@razortoy: I actually think rezzing him is the right call with Drive By being talked about so much. And I completely agree that he is like a big mean dog in that manner, and it definitely works.

We had a guy in our group build something like this when he first came out and we thought he was ridiculously broken. Parasite recursion is a little rough, so we added in 2 Blacklist, now it's ridiculous.

I did a review of Batty where I said he was too strong. People kept suggesting that you now have to play these other cards and such. But if you aren't running parasite recursion, and you have to wait to get those cards, if they get too much NEXT ICE rezzed, you could just die to NEXT Gold + Batty...all on a guess. So I still think he's too strong.

Glad someone else put together a deck like this though. I really hope this just swamps the game and forces FF to do something about him.