Built to Takeover

I am onboard with the ban of GT, but Atlas with double digit counters is very fun.

A long time ago, thinking about a similar deck idea, I was wondering how many counters you needed to Red Planet Couriers onto the various Projects to get an automatic win. Project Beale needs 13 counters (something which I've been known to show off in the past, to the delight of some of the players in the jinteki.net casual lobby and the annoyance of others). Project Yagi-Uda doesn't seem to be able to do it at all (although Jinteki's other Project, Project Kusanagi, can probably secure all your servers given sufficiently many counters; with the help of mythic ICE on the servers that matter it only needs 11 against most Runners). Project Vitruvius and Project Atlas are the most interesting, though.

This deck has partially solved that problem, demonstrating that a 10-advancement Project Atlas (for 7 agenda counters) is sufficient for a forced win next turn, which is a bit more efficient than the Project Beale approach (and in the right faction, saving a lot of influence), and a smaller RPC than I was expecting. I wonder how far it's possible to optimise this sort of deck style?

(Incidentally, I have a suspicion that the best version of this deck doesn't run Government Takeover at all, and instead relies on some sort of Atlastrain with a lot more agenda counters than usual; that would avoid the risk of having the Takeover stolen early. It might be interesting to try to work the combo out.)

And here's my take on building this without the Government Takeover. It isn't fully tuned yet, but already seems so powerful that the details don't matter much, and has the advantage that there aren't any 6-pointers that the Runner can snipe early (and that you're running enough rush and fast-advance cards that you can win very quickly even without the combo).

I agree with you that we probably need to ban something to stop this sort of deck working, and suspect that the correct card to ban is Red Planet Couriers.

The core cards are already around since a while. And I actually found a similar deck from 2017: netrunnerdb.com

ReCo was just released later that year. Maybe, no one saw the potential of this combo or the meta was just not right for it.

@ArminFirecracker: I think the release of Weyland Consortium: Built to Last is what pushed this over the edge. When you're running something like this out of Weyland Consortium: Builder of Nations, your economy takes quite a hit early on while you're busy getting the advancement counters onto the ICE. Built to Last doesn't help with the combo itself, and isn't required for the deck to work; but it does help stop you running out of credits while you're setting up (or while you're recovering counters after landing the RPC→Atlas), and so it probably saves 3-4 turns on the setup speed, which is quite a lot. (The extra influence helps, too.)

How does the deck do against ice destruction? That would seem to be a weakness of relying on ice with counters.

peepadoo!