Faerush Paintbrush Rush

I've been fiddling with a Chaos Faerie spam into Paintbrush list myself over the easter. Very similar to yours, although aimed a bit more at the late game (Dailies over Laundry, Yog'0 saurus over Cybers), and with a few more utility programs (is Hostage really worth the inclusion..?).

I very much agree with the fundamentals of the list. Faeries are simply the perfect support pieces for facechecking sentries in a Paintbrush list. I expect we'll be seeing this a lot more with Painbrushes moving forward (even if the trend right now seems to be Daggers).

You can't find Pro Contacts fast enough IMO, the only addition I'd slot there would be nerve agent to add HQ pressure, or stimhack and redo the slots a little.

I have just played a few games with the deck - I love the concept and find it very fun to play, but I noticed that it has a very hard time against Cerebral Imaging (or I am playing the deck wrong, which is possible). They typically build a tower on the R&D making runs horribly expensive (eg. Heimdall 2.0, Heimdall 1.0, Tollbooth - how many 15 credit runs can one make in a turn? ;) ). Running the HQ is not worth the effort against this ID (maybe Nerve Agent would help, but it won't do much good against a hand of 15 cards), and they have no remotes for us to break scoring the agendas from hand during the late game. Any tips?

Usually those decks have limited numbers of ice, and rarely ice hq...i believe dropping the crescentuses for a nerve agent could be a great decision for CI heavy metas, and we will see a top 32 CI deck at worlds, so maybe it's more important than mild denial. Gets you a free slot too.

What do you think about cutting the corroders and Hostage so you can play the deck in Kit? Get a little double duty of Cyber-Cyphers? Of course that would further diminish your access to ProCo, if you're finding him absolutely integral to the deck's ability to function.

Really, its the MU that you need to worry about, and the deck size helps recur everything so much faster, especially after the first levy. Getting the pieces together fast is important. Elements of this can certainly be applied to Kit.

I think Kit's power kind of negates the need for running faeries. The Faeries protect your other breakers, allowing you to build as you go. With her ability you should never be surprised, making her less vulnerable to ice punishment than any other runner. Though, you still get the benefit with tinkering allowing you to break big ice for pretty cheap (and the new multi subroutine trend she is also really powerful) that you get with faerie, which is nice.

I believe you're better off with yog on dino or torch with lockpicks as far as breakers go. Even in my kit decks I think hostage is a really, really big part of the gameplay, since procontacts IS your economy. When the deck is a rig builder type that uses breakers to get accesses, pro contacts shines. Kit has a tendancy to lend her play style to rig building. Pressuring early with the single breaker, and evolving her rig to handle ice but more importantly mount access threats. Her influence is better spent on getting more quality accesses like HQ interface, vamp, or medium. She can make 1 big run per turn, so it needs to be the best kind of run you can generate. So what I'm saying is that this strategy isn't bad applied to her, but her inherent play style doesn't benefit from this type of construction as much.

Absolutely fair points. I really like being able to tinker something to break with faerie, especially something big and nasty. I tend to find tinkering a bit of a hard card to slot in outside of Kit (and obviously now paintbrush decks), and faeries being almost as good as a yog in terms of efficiency, having that kind of access to 2/3 of ICE, plus the front ICE, means even using events and disposable cards has you coming and going like a goddamn criminal.

I really like the idea of disposable X breakers (presuming that sooner or later there will be a faerie-like card for other ICE) and pulling out a late game paintbrush to make up for that space. I think that's a smart move compared to the single breaker type all-in kind of paintbrush decks. But you're probably right that barriers are going to more consistently dominate the ICE comp of the corp player more than code gates, even getting one free break might not set that difference over the top.

Where I think you're underestimating Kit is that she forces the corp to layer their ICE in specific ways, trying to save code-gates for the tops of towers, thus baiting out sentries early, to get steamrolled while you are most flush with Faeries (if they are of any use early at to begin with). And this layering will wind up with most servers being pretty easy on paintbrushing clicks, because that is going to be the biggest limiting factor in your ability to make plays. I wound up puting Deep Reds into my Shaper deck that only had Knights for caissa simply because of how tired I was of not being able to get knights on the table and in position fast enough to make a play for a server when I needed to.

I like the idea, but a few questions:

Why no test run? It has great synergy with both cypher and faerie, allowing you to recur more faster. At the very least, seems like you could drop a levy and a cypher for 2 test runs. More recursion and tutoring means more flexibility and less need for breaker redundancy or the reshuffle.

Dirty laundry seems slightly out of place. Wouldn't something like kati, casts, or armitage make more sense? Your econ is extremely light - Procon is more of a draw engine than a credit engine. It might be fine, as you probably dont need a lot of money to run this list - pretty much everything is super cheap, barring RDI, levy, and procon.

Id love to see Opus + burst draw, but that would probably require more MU if you still wanted to paintbrush. Would end up taking too many card slots, unless you did something like cut tinkerings, go up to 2x paintbrush, run some mem chips, etc.

I'm going to give it a run at league and see how it goes. I need some shaper wins for achievements and im tired of my Kate list. :P

Update: Played 4 games with this list last night at league and won 2.

Econ is a big problem. This list is set up to do well against fast advance, but with cards like NAPD shifting the meta towards a more taxing approach, this list doesnt have the bucks to keep up.

I'm going to move over to opus and burst draw.
-1 levy

-1 cypher

-3 procon

-1 hostage

-1 sac construct

-3 dirty laundry

+3 opus

+3 diesel

+1 quality time

+1 akamatsu mem chip

+1 test run

+1 nerve agent

This idea predated NAPD, What I did to supplement it was switch in Prepaids, run lucky find, dirty laundry, and sure gamble. Also Maker's eye for multi access. I did this method a while ago but it was just a little light, with lucky find out, it should be much better. This works well for the prepaid chaos theory deck nord runs, I think it'll slot well here, it'll run as fast as his does, set up faster/more flexible, and should kick equally hard on access. Here's how I adapted it without dropping procontacts.

Chaos Theory: Wünderkind (Cyber Exodus)

Event (17)

3x Tinkering (Core Set)

3x Sure Gamble (Core Set)

2x Levy AR Lab Access (Creation and Control)

3x Dirty Laundry (Creation and Control)

2x Lucky Find (Double Time)••••

2x The Maker's Eye

1x LegWork ••

1x Stimhack •

Hardware (8)

2x Plascrete Carapace (What Lies Ahead)

3x Clone Chip (Creation and Control)

3x Prepaid VoicePad

Resource (5)

2x Sacrificial Construct (Core Set)

3x Professional Contacts (Creation and Control)

Icebreaker (6)

1x Corroder (Core Set) ••

1x Deus X (A Study in Static)

2x Faerie (Future Proof) ••••••

2x Cyber-Cypher (Creation and Control)

Program (4)

3x Self-modifying Code (Creation and Control)

1x Paintbrush (Double Time)

Prepaids and clone chips are static help against power shutdown, and the sac constructs also work to save your shit. basically if they're power shutdown-ing your corroder, you're doing it wrong. The econ bursts fast and comes out of no where with these prepaid builds. I think this is a strong change.

Primarily it played like a sniper before, this should help be more static in pressure, with a full kate build you could include same old thing and indexing + RDI instead of just Maker's I think that might be a little interesting to try....