AmpX (v. 1.3) (Power Nap Combo)

Hang on, didn't someone already do this deck?

Sort of. You may be thinking of slowy's NapX deck. His success with that design, besides necessitating I come up with a better name to distinguish my proposal from his, is encouraging as a demonstration of how effective this strategy (in short: dig up your entire deck, play Power Naps for zillions of credits, bludgeon your opponent's servers) can be.

So what distinguishes the two decks? Both run the same economic engine, but both are committed to different ultimate goals with the credits. The NapX deck, from what I understand, takes a few extra turns of digging with MaxX to really fill up on credits, and then hits the corp with a massive Vamp followed by several turns of pounding with Keyhole, Wanton Destruction, and Singularity.

By contrast, this deck, which I'll refer to now as AmpX, was never about diversity of strategy or disabling the corp - it was always about being the faster motherf***er possible - drill through your deck as fast as possible with I've Had Worse, gain your Nap credits as fast as possible, and use Amped Up to hit them with several turns' worth of Keyholes at once, in the hopes that you don't have to wait until turn 9, when they may have either started scoring agendas or have built up a serious barrier of ice. If you can get in quickly, you may not even have to take the time to take away their built-up credits, and if you can hit in one single turn, you can avoid the opportunity for them to rebuild.

Of course, the cost associated with that strategy is volatility from a different angle: the risk of fizzling, and having to limp to the finish line. But I'm of the opinion that problem relates primarily to the composition of card draw-to-credit gain in the deck; if you can hit that ratio right, you should be able to Keyhole enough to have a high chance of success.

In short, the difference between AmpX and NapX is just a less-extreme version of the difference between this deck and SlySquid's Motherfker deck: you sacrifice the ability to play the long game to play your best game as early as possible. This deck will always be a pure metagame call. But in a metagame where MaxX decks shine, I think this may be the best one.

(To analogize for any MTG players here - in the old formats, there are combo decks that have control games, combo decks with disruptive elements to protect their combo, and combo decks that say "seat belts are for pussies". This is the latter.)

To that end, I've cut Levy AR Lab Access. I'm of the opinion this deck may have serious problems against certain types of thousand-cuts type decks (like this Argus Security deck I posited recently) that threaten to chip away at your critical mass of winning cards. If you feel like you need the stability that comes from LARLA, or your metagame has a lot of decks that can damage you even if you don't run like Jinteki PE, then I suggest running one of the more methodical MaxX strategies instead.

Instead, I've invested the influence in returning the double count to normal and substituted in Quality Time, the best card for pure digging in the format. Since this deck has the strategy of getting to its bottom as quickly as possible (or, rather, getting there as quickly as possible while still playing your Power Naps and other credit-making cards at prudent times), I felt it needed a boost over Inject and I've Had Worse - especially because it hurts your soul to have to Same Old Thing them, and it was worth the credit cost in the short run to fill your heap faster.

But what makes Quality Time so interesting in this deck is what it means for Amped Up - no longer do you have to worry about running out of cards to convert into brain damage to max out your click count (not to mention reducing the likelihood of trashing the Amped Ups off each other). Instead, if you play a Quality Time at the beginning of your turn of going off, you'll have 10 cards in hand - more than enough to play 3 or even 4 Amped Ups, for maximum clicks.

Right now, I feel like the deck has 2 free influence and up to four slots that are negotiable - in the list above, the Quality Times, the Wanton Destruction, and perhaps one of the breakers if you're feeling daring. Cards I've considered so far for the extra slots besides Quality Time are Utopia Shard, Notoriety (against Punitive Counterstrike-type decks that run few agendas and all 5/3s), Femme Fatale (another hat-tip to slowy and co. for that bit of tech), Vamp (ditto), and Quest Completed (though Singularity does this job better, Quest Completed has the upside of not requiring you to hold back a Double and being able to take out a Crisium Grid on R&D - suffice to say, I'm really looking forward to Drive By).