[SG] Gateway Crim Loup

Hahahaha Fermenter machine goes whrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Turns out it's hard to go wrong with a ton of money and cheap ways to break ICE.

With the recent influx of Gateway-only league players, I thought I'd publish a couple of runner decks and talk about my thoughts on building them.

Gateway is a very small format, and the decks are going to have a lot of overlap. But we can still make meaningful choices!

First, ID. Tao is interesting, but for my money I'd rather have access to the Crim or Anarch card pools. Anarchs have the best breakers in the format by far, and Fermenter is easily the best econ card available, and I've never met a Botulus I couldn't find an icey home for. So for this one, I decided we'd be starting in Anarch, and gave my favorite gay werewolf chef a big bear hug.

With ID sorted, we can think about influence. The big question here is which tools are we missing in-faction? Our killer is an obvious one. It's honestly a toss-up between Carmen and Echelon - I picked Carmen. With so many other ways to break ICE in the faction, I reckon one is plenty. We also don't have much multi-access, so I threw in a Docklands Pass. You could play Conduit. You'd just have to change up the rest of the influence spend, and it's a bit slow - docklands helps us trash more cards from HQ, and we'd rather trash from HQ than R&D given the choice.

Cool. What else are we missing? Oh, that's it? Then we can spend the rest on money. The Anarch console, Carnivore, just doesn't have the draw in the format to support it. (Unfortunately, it doesn't have the draw to support it in any other format either, but that's neither here nor there.) 2 Pennyshaver should meet our MU needs and pay us for the runs we want to make anyways to boot. Pennyshaver, it turns out, is a pretty good card.

Our full rig is probably 3 breakers, a Leech, and some number of Botulus and Fermenter. Since we're installing a lot of programs and can use the MU, DZMZ makes sense, but I'd cut it in a heartbeat if any better options were available. That leaves 3 influence - We can grab a Telework for some more cash, and with one left? I guess Tread Lightly is reasonable?

And then I put in all the Anarch and Neutral cards and took out all the bad ones. And then I had to put some of the bad ones back in to make minimum deck size. The important ones are Botulus (S tier), Fermenter (S tier), which both should be there in triplicate. Leech really wants to be a 2-of, not three, because you really don't need more than one and while it's nice in the early game you don't need it in your opening hand. If I had my druthers, I'd cut a Smartware or two, a Leech, a Mayfly, and a couple of the Overclocks to play more draw and faster money but — as you'll find if you try to build in the format — you start scraping the bottom of the card-quality barrel pretty fast once all the good ones are in your deck already!