One Trick Pony (With Handy Flow Chart)

So first off, all credit goes to Highwire for ostensibly being the progenitor of this combo, and from whom I stole the bones of this deck. If you haven't seen Echo Chamber Valencia go look at it now and give it hearts and stars and whatever else. I've stolen his ideas and have been working on this deck for a few months and what I've ended up with is easily the most consistent and versatile combo deck that I've played. In it's current iteration, I'd estimate it's got a 85/15% win/loss ratio.

The sole purpose of this deck is to access lots and lots of cards from R&D. This is not really a novel concept, but it achieves it in a novel way.

If you're unaware, the combo is this: You trash a DDoS, make a run on a server and use False Echo once you've passed the outermost ICE. DDoS prevents them from rezzing the ICE you just passed, forcing them to add the outermost ICE to HQ, making the next piece of ICE they encounter the outermost, which, of course, they are not allowed to rez due to DDoS. Repeat ad-nauseum. If you run out of installed False Echoes, use Clone Chip to bring 'em back.

It's a very consistent and fun combo. That said, there are a couple deck archetypes that'll make this deck fail miserably (bootcamp glacier, Toybox HB, and any OAI Blue Sun deck that thinks it's more important to have a rezzed Curtain Wall over R&D than it is to have 14 credits). This deck does not deal with rezzed ICE. (It's also real bad if they, for some ungodly reason have managed to stack 7 pieces of unrezzed ICE over R&D)

But if you're in a match-up in which the corp has no independent ICE rezzing power, here's what you do:

Basically you want to just slap everything that you draw down on the board until you are at a point where you're able to get into R&D with the combo and either have a good number of Mediums installed or have the capability to install them clickless (Street Peddler is excellent for this). Lately I've been playing this deck more like a one turn win combo deck, where I won't run until I've got 3 Mediums down and at least 2 Amped Ups in hand, but it works just as well to just run as soon as you can get a full turn of medium digging and reset the combo.

Here's some thoughts on card choices that I've made.

Knight: This is an include almost purely for the purpose of lucky ABT fires that they decide to put on R&D. It can also help if they've managed to rez a single piece of ICE over R&D with EBC. Don't do shit against OAI'd Curtain Walls, though. This is probably a flex card. If you think that there's a better 1x Icebreaker to use, go for it. Once Aghora comes out, I'll probably either swap out Knight for it, or use it as support.

Street Peddler: With 19 Events, Street Peddler can seem hard to justify. I think it's pretty solid, though. Every fifth game or so, I will get a Street Peddler that has 3 events on it.. Which is only kinda the worst thing in the world. Not at all game ruining. What it really helps you do is conceal the number of Mediums you're able to get installed, which is helpful. I've had games where the corp has all the independent ICE rezzing power possible but drops it all on their scoring server because they haven't seen a single Medium.

Clone Chip: I consider this as a 3x to be pretty integral to the whole deck. It helps you bring back your False Echoes mid-run and hides your Medium digging power. It is a lot of influence though. If you think that the removal of one Clone Chip is worth freeing up the inf for something cooler, go for it.

Showing Off: Probably a flex card. But is it? I've only pulled it off in a successful way thrice over the course of the month it's been in the deck, but personally, I wouldn't trade those three experiences for all of the efficiency in the world. If you're the pragmatic sort though, yeah, you can take this out. There are better card options. But you don't know what you're missing.

Although I've been playing this deck for a long time, and it seems to be doing quite well, comments and suggestions are completely appreciated and encouraged. Thanks.