Oh... lucky you. (50 cards)

Reverse 47

So, this deck was born out of a misguided idea to combine Argus, lots and lots of one point agendas, and The Board (along with Oaktown Grid to protect it as much as possible).

That proved gimmicky and fragile, because the Runner would steal the board and win. Or even just trash it. They would need to get into that server only once, and that would be enough.

So, after a couple of iterations (one including Self-destruct), I abandoned that. And gradually, I found the solutions to my problems.

What are our core strengths?

  • Argus Security: Protection Guaranteed's ability makes it moderately dangerous for the Runner to steal agendas. But the cost isn't that high, they can circumvent it, mainly by taking a tag and removing it next click. 2 isn't very expensive. Or, they can just take 2 meat. Who cares, right?
  • We have plently of agendas to burn for abilities.

How do we make these strengths count?

  • As mentioned, the cost to steal an agenda is tolerable. How can we make it worse?

    • The Cleaners. This is both a weakness and a strength of the deck, depending on whether it will be accidentally stolen or actually scored. If it's scored, though, suddenly it makes everything a bit more powerful: Scorched Earth can kill a lot more easily. Tags start to look like a better option than 3 meat. What if they steal a second agenda? They can't afford taking 3 meat a second time. Also, Dedicated Response Team.
    • Dedicated Response Team. This card fits perfectly in this deck. The perfect setup is to have one or two of this unrezzed, while the Runner is getting into an agenda server. They spend a bunch getting in, and just before they access, we can rez one Dedicated Response Team. This means they no longer have a choice between 2 meat or 1 tag. It's either 2 meat, or 2 meat and a tag. 3 meat, even, with The Cleaners scored! Consider also what happens when there's 2 Dedicated Response Teams.
    • News Team fills the gap left behind by The Board. It gives us breathing space when the Runner is stealing agendas by the cartload (which we slightly encourage, anyway). They need a couple more points to win now. A good tip is to throw this card in the trash, along with some agendas: if the Runner accesses all of these at once, they'll be in for a treat.
    • Checkpoint suddenly becomes very taxing, what with a possible The Cleaners and perhaps even a Dedicated Response Team. It sometimes even sort of turns into an ETR ICE, because the Runner jacks out willingly, choosing not to succeed with the run.
      All this means that the Runner can't just go about multi-accessing like it's nothing.
  • Corporate Town plays two roles: it trashes potentially essential resources (some game breaking ones are Off-Campus Apartment, Film Critic, anything that hosts a bunch of cards, Adjusted Chronotype, etc). And it also costs the Runner precious time and money to trash, especially when paired with Oaktown Grid. Even unprotected, its role isn't to be there for the entire game. It's, again, to give us breathing space. And we can rez it almost anytime, with so many small agendas!

Other cards and combos of interest

  • A well-timed Archer is essential. We have three, and we also have a bunch of agendas to sacrifice (Hostile Takeover is perfect for this). Often people aren't aware that this deck relies on so many agendas, and they don't expect Archers to just pop up from anywhere. Well, they do, and they usually trash (in most of my Jinteki.net run with this deck, at least).
  • Museum of History means we don't need to despair if the Runner trashed all of our Dedicated Response Teams or Oaktown Grids. We can just play them again a little later!
  • Mumba Temple means we can probably rez most things without breaking a sweat - or the runner needs to spend clicks trashing it first, which could cost 3, or even 6, with an Oaktown Grid.
  • Chronos Project is just an all around great-to-have card. Especially since we do lots of damage, and we'll have lots to remove from the game.
  • An Architect in front of R&D or Archives is often pretty effective as either a deterrent, or a facilitator to build a Big Ass Server (TM).

How to win

This deck wins both on points and flatline. It's never straightforward, though, some circumstances need to converge, usually.

To win, we generally want to score The Cleaners, to keep the Runner point-poor, to give us 3 precious agenda points, and finally, for the ability.

Then, on one hand, there's plenty of ways for a flatline to occur:

On the other hand, we should always keep pressuring to win by points, mainly using our high-point agendas (Oaktown Renovation and Project Atlas).

To accomplish that, we need to be building a very costly server (a couple of Archer, some of the advanceable ICE, etc.), and then we need to do two things. One is to distract them with taxing (for them) or really helpful (for us) assets in other servers, potentially protected by Checkpoints and Oaktown Grids, so that they run those and not our scoring server. Two is to bluff low point agendas in the scoring server, so that we can see how they manage to go through our defenses (as they're bound to do at least a few times), while at the same time draining them of money, and perhaps counters (eg. from D4v1d, "Lady" and so on). This gives us windows to score Atlases or Renovations. As long as we've scored The Cleaners, we only need a couple of those, and we're done.

When do we not win?

We do not win, when the Runner accidentally steals The Cleaners before we've managed to get a hold of it. We do not win, if the News Teams are all stashed in the bottom of the deck, and thus all stolen points count. We do not win if all our Posted Bountys come too early, or too late, and we don't have Scorched Earth in hand at the time. We do not win our economy cards are late.

Weak matchups and powerful counters (what to watch out for)

This deck is vulnerable to Runners that can trash for lessened or no cost (Imp, Whizzard etc.). They make nonsense of our pressure assets: they trash our Corporate Towns right after we rez them, making the agenda sacrifice worthless. They trash our Mumbas before running, and then we can't rez. And so on.

We also lose one of our main advantages if the Runner is playing Film Critic. Sure, it's slow, but they have time, as we're not pressuring them.

We do badly against Apex with Heartbeat, as it's very hard to flatline it.

Mongoose is always a sad card for us, as it makes our Archers pretty easy to deal with.

We obviously don't do well against Jesminder.

Conclusion

I finally won some games as Corp! Let me know how I can improve this deck.

6 comments
23 Apr 2016 FarCryFromHuman

Sadly The Cleaners doesn't work with Argus. It does work with the rest of your cards though!

23 Apr 2016 Letsaros

The Cleaners doesn't work with the Argus passive. With the Argus passive the dmg is not done by the corp.

23 Apr 2016 Reverse

Fuck. You folks are right, I didn't realize. This honestly just made this deck a little bit worse for me. :-/

I even think it might be implemented wrong on Jinteki.net.

@Letsaros 'φχαρστώ. Θα ρίξω μια ματιά και στο δικό σου αντίστοιχο.

23 Apr 2016 bracketbot

A problem with this deck is that there are a lot of hate cards for your ID as well as some of the cards in your deck. Councilman for Corp Town, Film Critic for your ID and Data Dealer/Artist Colony for News Team and the bajillions of things people are running to trash assets. Still, it's a cool concept for a deck

23 Apr 2016 Reverse

@bracketbot Yeah, unfortunately. I'm just thinking 'you win some, you lose some'. I'm not going to be a world champion with this deck, but I'm going to have fun watching Runners sweat trying to decide whether to take meat or tags.

Thanks for your kind words!

24 Apr 2016 Letsaros

@FrontierPsycho Thanks, check it out. (I'll keep it in english so people won't start complaining)

What you will find that you need in Argus is someway to tag the runner other than your passive. You passive can be shut down by film critic and/or NACH. That why most people run 2-3 Data Ravens. If you don't wanna pay the influence there's always Hunter and/or Shadow.

Shadow is the junkier combo because you might need a Dedication Ceremony to take it out of Mimic Range but that's 2 cards. Especially since after 1-2 Bad Pub the trace 3 won't matter much. (Tough since you are running builder it might work better)

Same with Checkpoint. After some bad-pub runners can pass it by paying. It's the reason i ended up taking it out.