[startup] Turbo-diesel

turbo-diesel: Any diesel engine equipped with a turbocharger.

To pilot this Padma deck, the key card, which is the heart of your draw engine, is Dr. Nuka Vrolyck. Or as I like to call her, Dr. Diesel.

You should not mulligan if you have this card. A good turn 1 is to play her, face check any ice on R&D, in exchange for a free diesel counter. When you are in your rhythm, you will never draw except using her ability, and you will regularly acquire new counters either by running R&D, or perhaps running HQ and using Flux Capacitor once the corp has overcommitted to R&D.

Remember that with Captain Padma Isbister: Intrepid Explorer's ability, you do not need to have a successful run to get a power counter. So, it may make sense for instance to, on click 4, initiate a run on R&D and face-check an Enigma and let the run immediately terminate, in exchange for a Dr. Nuka Vrolyck counter. Then on click 1 next turn, you can draw 3 cards, so you drew 3 cards for 2 clicks. Whether that's worth it depends on the gamestate.

In the medium term, you would like to get some economy going with Smartware Distributor, get down Endurance and start powering it up, pressuring the corp.

In the long term, you (usually) want to install your breaker suite and turbo-charger.

These breakers will let you break anything 5-str or less in a cost-effective way, and even things like Brân 1.0 become quite affordable. If you are up against Archer, you may want to reserve boat counters, or install a second K2CP Turbine.

In the special case that you are against NEH, I recommend a different strategy -- poke any ice that is played, and as soon as possible, install Paricia using Into the Depths. If the quickest path to this is installing Endurance first, then do that. Then, make sure you use Paricia every turn trying to whittle down the board state. Also install Hippocampic Mechanocytes if you can, and charge it, if you suspect Mutually Assured Destruction into End of the Line.

In the long term, you want to continually get charges / accesses in R&D, contest the remote and get remote lock, using Pinhole Threading to remove any pesky grid.

You have the option for multiaccess using WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ to try to close the game at the end. An example turn might be like:

• Run HQ, charging WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ once.
• Run R&D, charging it again with Captain Padma Isbister: Intrepid Explorer, and then again with Flux Capacitor. Access 4 cards in R&D, even if there is a Crisium Grid.

The main flex slot in the list is Security Testing. I am not at all convinced this is the best choice, I also tried Info Bounty and Katorga Breakout in this slot. Another good option is make it the 3rd No Free Lunch and replace Hyperbaric with Buzzsaw.

Notable absences:

• Basilar Synthgland 2KVJ. This is a cool card and if you used it, you could also go with Deep Dive instead of WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ. However, if you can't find Hippocampic Mechanocytes also then it is fairly scary to install this. Going down to 3 hand-size is not fun, and also leaves you vulnerable to a quick death by 1x End of the Line. Also it's going to cost you two other cards from your hand, it's not always easy to arrange for those to be the right cards. In the end I felt like Basilar Synthgland 2KVJ was awkward and I had more success when I didn't have to worry about it.
• Deep Dive. This is a good card but I didn't feel the need to include it, we're already at 48 cards and we can usually win the game with single access and remote lock, or using WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ.
• Earthrise Hotel. Almost all Padma's before the arrival of Parhelion used this card, because you can charge it infinitely with Padma's ability. However, I cut it here, because I like Dr. Nuka Vrolyck better, and it's a bit of a nonbo if they are competing for power counters. I do have two Diesel for when you are trying to draw into Dr. Nuka Vrolyck. If desired, you could replace those with Earthrise Hotel.
• Environmental Testing. This card saw some play in the Midnight Sun era. It works well if you are using DZMZ Optimizer or Paladin Poemu to install a big rig in an incremental way. However, now that we are in Parhelion era, this card just often feels like a dead draw. We don't have Rezeki anymore either ensuring that we get rich and have money to install things. Daily Casts has rotated, so Career Fair is considerably less playable, making it harder to slot Environmental Testing. The result is that you end up hard-installing this for 3 credits, with little idea of when you can expect the payoff. In this deck, I've also cut the DZMZ Optimizer, because we don't need the MU, we don't have lots of little Rezeki to install and get a discount on. But that hardware and the rezekis was often the source of power counters on Environmental Testing. So, no environmental testing.

Credit goes to Gaxeco who I spectated piloting a list similar to this one, with a similar rig and with the WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ multiaccess strategy. Any weirdness and flaws in this list are definitely my doing.