Introduction

The thought of optimizing an underplayed runner... it fills you with Motivation*

• disclaimer: deck may not actually contain Motivation as it is not a very good card

Exile's woes are pretty well-known at this point. He's got a relatively weak ID ability that requires a lot of space and influence to build around, and he may have been hit harder by the NAPD Most Wanted List than just about any other runner, because some of the cards on the MWL just aren't optional for him. He can't not run 3 Clone Chips. Ever since the MWL nerfed him and gave The Professor a boost, he's been widely regarded as the worst shaper and one of the worst runners overall, left to hang out with Laramy Fisk, who is presumably going slumming or else he wouldn't be anywhere near our favorite smelly hobo.

Anyways, the point is that Exile is a runner who hasn't been thoroughly explored. The goal, then, is clear: make the best Exile deck possible. Not the best shaper deck that you can slap Exile onto as an afterthought, but the best deck that specifically takes advantage of what he has to offer.

The Pawn Engine

This is not, I'll admit, the most original place to start. The Street Chess engine is a fixture of many Exile lists, and with good reason: it's just about the only way to repeatedly trigger his ability over the course of the game. A full six points of our influence in this deck are devoted to cards that, individually, more or less do absolutely nothing. But when it comes together, it's worth it, letting you run, draw, and gain credits all at the same time.

At the core of the engine, we have Pawn. A very innocuous card on its own, it was printed mostly to help reinforce the Caïssa theme by giving it a little recursion for when they inevitably install over the ICE you hosted your Knight on, and a way to save some credits installing Caïssa in the first place. For Exile, the relevant part of this card is that a Pawn can recur other Pawns--with one Pawn in your heap and one installed on a one-ICE central, you draw a card with a successful run, and get your Pawn back. You do need two, however, a Pawn can't install itself from the heap. As such, this list runs the full three.

Deep Red makes this engine actually work--without it, you have to spend clicks to actually host the Pawns, which means you aren't actually getting any benefit; you could've just clicked to draw anyways. With it, you're getting actual free draws off of runs. It's integral to the engine, but any copies drawn after the first are completely dead. If we had more influence to work with, the third one might be worth it just for the redundancy, but as strapped for influence as Exile is, we have to go down to two to make things work.

Scheherazade is where we start actually stacking up our rewards. Besides rewarding you for any incidental installs you happen to be doing with the rest of the deck, Scheherazade means you get a credit off of all successful runs as well. While this isn't necessary to actually make the engine run, it's the piece I most want to see in my opening hand, because it actually functions with everything else that you're doing. Thankfully, Exile is a Shaper, and has approximately a million ways to tutor for this card, and as such he can get away with only running a single copy.

Technical Writer is where things really kick into gear. Everything else is very incremental, and good, but not fantastic. Technical Writer quietly banks up credits on every run until you decide to crack it and suddenly you're stupendously rich. Plus, it costs no influence, and no credits, which are perfect for a low-money runner like Exile. Without this in the deck, the engine might just not be worth it. But we do have it, so it is.

The Pawn Shop

As good as the Street Chess engine is, it's a lot of moving parts, and that takes time to assemble. As nice as it would be to be able to just draw cards until we've got it set up, the deck really does need other ways to keep things moving. So this is all about what you're doing when you aren't shuffling pawns around the table.

Aesop's Pawnshop: because we needed more pawns in the deck somehow. But Aesop actually synergizes pretty well with the fact that outside of the pawns, we're running a full nine ways to recur programs, and need to be able to take advantage of that besides just going "Yay, I activated my ID ability". Being able to get value out of extraneous programs does a lot to keep things moving along, and this is one of your main money sources. Keep in mind that you can pawn your Pawns when the engine hasn't started running, and then just recur one when you've got all the other pieces. You don't need to leave them installed for no reason.

Cache: To nobody's surprise, this is the number one Pawn Shop target out there, made even better when you're hosting it on Scheherazade. I end up throwing a lot of spare recursion at these, because turning a Clone Chip into seven credits is a pretty good deal. For influence reasons, there's only two of these, but a third Cache is never a bad choice if you've got a free point to spend (which may be the case, depending on meta).

Test Run, Clone Chip, and Scavenge: that is a lot of recursion right there. Your programs are not going to stay gone. The important thing I've learned in the course of playing this deck is that it can be tricky to value your recursion correctly. On the one hand, they're all very strong cards, and each one enables a lot of different plays (Test Run for tutoring, Scavenge for resetting breakers that need resetting, Clone Chip for mid-run answers). If you just burn them casually, you're cutting yourself off of a lot of plays. On the other, if you're letting them rot in your grip because you might need them for a BIG PLAY later, you're losing a lot of value in the here-and-now. On the whole, the Clone Chips are typically the most valuable, and should be conserved if possible. While Scavenge is probably mostly better than Test Run, Test Running back a Cache feels kind pretty blah in comparison to Scavenging one, so it's the most likely to be used for random value. Try to save your last Scavenge for resetting Lady, though, it's by far the easiest way to do that.

Self-modifying Code: Priority number one is absolutely, hands-down, Scheherazade. Unless you have the mother of all reads that whatever it's an AstroScript behind that Wraparound, an early Scheherazade is going to give you more value than anything else you could search for. Otherwise, your usage here is pretty normal! Play it, recur it, have all of the answers available to you, be happy.

Parasite: This one is a bit of a flex slot, despite how much influence is invested in it. It's great for dealing with really taxing ICE like Tollbooth or Komainu, but we don't have the Datasucker to speed up the process. Still, it gives you a lot of flexibility, and can be tutored and recurred, so the value definitely does add up. If I were going to replace it with anything, it would be a Clot if there was a lot of FA in the local meta.

Akamatsu Mem Chip: If I have one complaint about Deep Red, it's that it eats our console slot and doesn't actually give us any memory. Mem Chips are cheap, efficient, and very sadly necessary. Don't pawn these off unless you've got a very good reason to; that extra memory is really important for letting you do things with Self-modifying Code.

The Rig

Cyber-Cypher and Gordian Blade: Cyber-Cypher should typically be going on R&D, because you're a shaper and will be running it repeatedly, Gordian Blade is for all of the other runs that come in to try and distract you (I tried ZU.13 Key Master, but I would much rather pay the upfront cost here than burn all my credits getting ZU.13 up to strength). You can reset Cyber-Cypher, but that does take time, so make sure it's going to be worth it.

Cerberus "Lady" H1: By far the best fracter available to you, and at a bargain price of one influence! You don't have another fracter, but you don't really need one; you pretty close to infinite ways to reset this, so running out of counters completely shouldn't be a problem.

Chameleon and LLDS Processor: This is a natural fit when you're already running Tech Writer and Scheherazade, and sometimes you'll get incidental value off of the LLDS when you're installing a different breaker mid-run. You do need to stack things up before you can run big sentries, which can hurt (although decks running big sentries will frequently give you the time to do so), but once you do you're running through things super cheap anyways. Losing the click whenever you want to run a server does hurt, but your other options for killers are absolutely abysmal. Play the Chameleon, love the Chameleon.

Sharpshooter and Deus X: The usual Shaper silver bullets. These are the reason you should be conservative with your clone chips. They won't break that many ICE over the course of the game, but the ones they do break will be absolutely critical. Especially Sharpshooter--if they kill your Scheherazade with everything hosted on it things are falling apart for you really really quick.

Conclusion

I'm sure there's still some flex to be had in this deck--Parasite versus Clot, the last Cache or Aesop's, and meta-dependent choices like the Plascrete, but on the whole I feel like I'm mostly right with this. It's not the best deck ever--we are playing Exile, after all--but it can and does win games, it definitely holds its own against a lot of decks, and most importantly, it's fun to pilot. Maybe someone else will come out and do something way better with our smelly hobo friend, but I think I've made a pretty good shot here.

Happy scavenging!