MaxX Attempts To Turn In Her Homework

The deck below is not very good. It is made out of bad cards. It is completely and totally countered by Argus Security: Protection Guaranteed (and a bunch of other less top-tier identities, but who even plays Jinteki: Personal Evolution, am I right, or am I right?). It is also on fire.

What?

Big rig decks need good card draw to set up properly. Big rig decks trade early pressure for late game efficiency. MaxX has the best draw among runners. Baba Yaga has the potential to be the most efficient breaker in Netrunner. Therefore, the Baba Yaga MaxX is the ultimate big rig.

Why?

So, everyone who plays MaxX knows to things about her: a) she has a Day Job and b) Levy AR Lab Access. Well, wouldn't that imply that she is a student? I like to imagine that this deck is what happens when she attempts to turn in her homework. Also LARLA is in green, and we all know that higher education happens in green. Yet more reason to believe that MaxX is just a very angry Shaper.

Seriously, what?

Baba Yaga with Faerie, Corroder, Yog.0 and Sharpshooter is, probably, the most efficient you can break ICE in the game. With five, ten credits, you can crack pretty much any glacier. With fifteen, you can scratch the "pretty much" part. Usually, the problem here is by the time you can conventionally assemble this monstrosity, the game is over, because you've spent last fifteen turns assembling your Icebreaker of Doom while the corp guy at the other side of the table scores 5/3s behind a single barrier and makes more money than he has cards in his deck to spend on.

But what if you can get this thing online in 6 turns? Well, that's something else. And thus, this deck. It is made out of card draw, about enough economy to pay for all of this and then run a bit and a single The Turning Wheel to give you a win condition once your rig is fully armed and operational. To my pleasant surprise, it actually sometimes works. Also, I like playing by the seat of my pants, and this is like that, only the pants are on fire, and you are sitting on a pile of dynamite.

Card Selection

There are a few less than obvious choices to go over here.

The Baba Yaga Package: the choice of icebreakers is pretty self explainatory. Faerie and Yog are to give you the 0c breaking, Corroder just stands in for a fracter, Sharpshooter is to give you super-efficient boosting (+2 for 1c? Say what?). Once assembled, it slices through DNA Tracker or Fairchild 3.0 for 3c. It takes down fully armed Komainu for 1c. So on, so on. It is really that fantastic.

A few notes:

1) There are a few edge cases of inefficiency with this setup, compared to more traditional breakers (stuff such as single-sub 3-str sentries: Neural Katana breaks for 2c compared to 1c through Mimic and, notably, 6c on Tollbooth compared to 5c with Torch). They are pretty rare, though. Usually, you are getting the Best Price

2) An alternative package replaces Sharpshooter and Corroder with Breach. This is far easier to assemble, click-wise and MU wise, and 1c cheaper to the boot. However, loss of efficiency in breaking is very painful (if you deck yourself to get your King of All Breakers online, and then realize you have to pay 4c to get through an Ice Wall in a remote, you will cry).

3) No one ever plays Swordsman, right? Such a bad card.

Q-Coherence Chip is the absolute cheapest you can get MU in this game, and this is important, because you want money, and you are not making too much of it. You will need two (two host your full rig and a Trope churning in the background). The downside is irrelevant, because if you end up trashing one of your programs, you have already lost. Also, Trope does not trash itself, but instead removes from the game, so no, it does not trash the poor chip.

Deuces Wild, Build Script, Inject, Making an Entrance: this is the draw package that makes this deck tick. Deuces Wild are a card which allow you to imitate having better Professional Contacts for a while, without ever paying the PC buy-in. This is amazing. Therefore, you run six of them (because Build Scripts are just Deuces 4, 5 and 6). Also, they thin the deck, and thus, make the crazy assembly time possible. Making an Entrance, meanwhile combos extremely well with Deuces and Injects, further thins the deck and allow you to fish out the cards you need out of your stack. Singleton Frantic Coding is for when you really, seriously don't want to wait (and are sure you can land it on Baba Yaga).

Amped Up: with this much draw, you will usually have more cards than you have clicks to set them out. This is the solution. The brain damage is absolutely irrelevant, aside from usually taking with itself the one card you need. You will run out of cards before turn 6. You don't need that grip size anyway.

Talking about grip size: Emptied Mind can actually be put to use in this deck, if you can get it installed. You usually can't, but when you do, it actually works wonders.

Trope is the magic that enables this madness, at least in theory. Proper usage of it is one of the major difficulties in piloting the deck. It has two main uses: one is getting the Baba Yaga component parts out of the trash and putting them back into your (empty) stack so that you can then draw into them without worrying about MaxX ability sending them back into the trash. This is very difficult to pull off properly. You need to plan ahead and have Trope and 4 counters around turn 5, and preferably a Deuces Wild, Build Script or Amped Up in hand. Assuming you have Baba Yaga installed already (Same Old Thing and Déjà Vu are here to help with that), you can then pop the Trope and draw remaining four pieces, to assemble them next turn. If you actually get your hands on Mass Install, this is even better. After that, if you can get another Trope online, you can leave it stewing in the background and pop it when you are in a dire need of an emergency refill.

Economy: It is pretty standard, and not very robust. It is supposed to give you enough money to get you to install costs of the Baba Yaga package, and then allow a few runs. Kati Jones is your long-game insurance policy and therefore is usually absolutely worth of digging out from heap with Déjà Vu. Proper usage of Trope will also refill your burst econ, if you can get that to work.

The Turning Wheel is how this deck wins. It takes no memory, unlike Medium, is cheap, makes you unable to float tags and has one amazing feature: it does not need the run to be successful to gain a power counter. Therefore, you can stack it up by repeatedly bouncing of R&D or HQ (and unless the outermost ICE has some serious teeth, you can do this either for free, or for silly cheap), and then go on a hopefully game-winning R&D dig. This is important because while this deck, when online, is impossible to really keep out of a server, it can be taxed out due to anemic economy (the fact that you slice through mega-glacier for 7c is incredibly fun, but that is not sustainable). Therefore, you have to make the runs count.

Making runs count tools: Mad Dash, System Seizure, The Noble Path. Those are your lifelines, and the reason why you should keep a SoT out at all times. Each of those cards is supposed to enable incredible game-winning runs.

Mad Dash assists with deep R&D digs, hopefully providing the one final point (and/or quicken your inevitable loss when running 5-ICE R&D with 12 Turning Wheel tokens yields no agendas).

System Seizure for when 1c: +2 strength desperately needs this "for the reminder of the run" clause. This, however briefly, allows you to go through any server. Three FC3s, followed by three Tollbooths? 15c. This is amazing and also beautiful. At times, you may want to use it to just get rid of the Coroprate current, if it is very painful, and the servers are not that ICEd.

The Noble Path is the only way you can hope to win against identities which damage you when you steal an agenda. Spin the Wheel and hope you access enough points.

How does it play?

1) Early game (turn 1): Acquire some money through Sure Gamble and such. Start drawing.

2) Mid game (turns 2-5): Ignore the other player. Keep on drawing and using random economy events. Slap down some Tropes, Daily Casts, a Q-Coherence Chip or two, maybe get Kati Jones or The Turning Wheel. If you run out clicks, disregard safety warnings on energy drinks and just Amped Up. (Note: those are not really energy drinks.)

2.5) Realize that everything you need is in the trash, you are drawing too fast and there are 5 cards in your deck, and everything is on fire. Improvise. Remind yourself that having a half of your deck in the heap by turn 3 is how MaxX rolls.

3) Late game (turns 5+): You are now decked. Dig out the bits and pieces of your rig from trash with help from Tropes, SoTs and Déjà Vu. Assemble them together. Put down one more Trope for emergency refill. You know have no cards in your grip and no cards in your stack. Start running hard, because now that your Super-AI is online, no ice will ever stop you, other than any sort of damage. Keep the Turning Wheel turning.

4) Hack hard, waste the Corp before you waste yourself.

No future!

This is not a good deck. Some of the cards in it are considered complete trash. But that's how the punks like it, no? The game plan is insane, one dimensional and folds to more stuff than you can count. It does not pilot as much as it crashes. So, yeah. The genuine MaxX experience.
(Also you do really well maybe they will let you into that Advanced Research Lab again!)