Armored Turtle: A well-tested Stirling deck v2

There's people who think that Iain Stirling is a bad identity because it forces the player to play slow. That's a very shallow understanding of the identity.

What Stirling does is boost and accelerate already powerful strategies that are slower, namely rig-building and R&D lock in a Criminal shell. He improves the power of already good cards like Logos and the Interfaces and keeps all the tricks Criminals already had.

The foundation of the deck is very simple: : Get several recurring credits per turn, drop interfaces, attack until the Corp dies. It's impossible to shake off Stirling once he starts attacking and the game will be on our hands after a certain point, no matter how many agendas has the Corporation scored.

To get to that point, the deck attempts to slow the Corporation down: Faerie and Inside Job threaten servers from the beginning of the game and allows us to facecheck from safety. Tri-Maf can also greatly help to destroy economic assets and other dangerous cards like Daily Bussiness Show and all of them are useful later in the game to save some credits.

The main issue with the build at the moment are several underwhelming card slots with no obvious replacements. The underwhelming card slots are as follows:

• Derez package: Great against Blue Sun, often overkill against Jinteki RP, dead weight that clogs your initial hands against NBN and HB Fast Advance. The economic power of Stirling is more than enough to hammer any R&D server I've seen, including my fairly extreme Midway Supergrid deck that I feel is the most taxing deck that can be built. Crescentus is better than Emergency Shutdown since you have no interest running HQ very often.

• Sneakdoor Beta, HQ Interface and Legwork: You need HQ pressure, and a split of HQ Interface and Legwork seems best but Sneakdoor Beta, which is an amazing surprise, only works with the first one. Most games will be lost because HB drew a lot of agendas and R&D lock still allows them to win so this is an important problem.

• Underworld Contact will probably be replaced by Data Folding once Order and Chaos is released. This liberates three slots which, again, have no cards I really want to put in them.

Matchups are very good from my (and other's) tournament experience, the deck is competitive right now if fairly unpolished.

Good matchups:

-Blue Sun -HB Glacier -Jinteki RP -Jinteki PE (Feedback Filter lol) -NEH (Quite surprisingly)

Bad matchups:

-Grail Fast Advance (Heavily Disfavoured) -HB Fast Advance (Disfavoured)

Decks that are slow or midrange are quite easy to R&D lock, specially if their biggest pieces of ICE can be bypassed by Inside Job. When you are earning five credits per turn and you only need to attack every other turn, there's simply no server that is hard to trasverse. This makes Blue Sun, HB Glacier and Jinteki RP fairly good matchups.

Jinteki PE can be very fast and there's always that one great Jinteki player that has so much experience that beating him is extremely difficult but Stirling's natural credit generation combined with Feedback Filter, R&D lock and three copies of Faerie makes it a fairly good matchup. I even considered taking out the Feedback Filter and play it in a more straightfoward manner because it can be kind of overkill sometimes.

NEH is, whatever couch Runners may say, a favourable matchup. Their ICE is not threatening and often pourous, their assets easily trashed by our recurring economy and they are forced to slow down that first Astroscript to avoid giving us enough money to R&D lock several turns faster.

Of the bad matchups, the new Grail decks are clearly the worst because you can't facecheck them without having all your breakers out. The deck relies a lot of Inside Job and Faerie and those are simply not very useful here, specially Faerie which has to be spent breaking Architect and brings all the Grails online again.

HB Fast Advance is also difficult because unlike NEH, its ICE is very solid and can bluff with its economy cards in a remote. There's nothing worse than having to worry about a possible 3/2 and spending clicks running into Adonis when you need to be playing resources.

FAQ:

-No Account Siphon?

I used to run three copies but like other options, I found it somewhat underwhelming. Great players won't be affected by it, specially given how little you run compared to other Runners and the credit gain is not huge, since you already have a lot of money and need the clicks to drop resources.

-No The Source?

The Source takes a lot of influence, a lot of card slots and doesn't work. The Corporation can simply advance an NAPD and offer you a choice between letting them score (bad) and stealing an NAPD for 7 credits and hitting your own The Source (Very bad). It also makes stealing agendas from R&D a pain and that's what you want to do most of the time.

-No Hostage?

Hostage only has two good targets: The Supplier and Mr Li. You'll probably draw one of them, and you don't need the other so it's not specially useful.

-No Keyhole?

Keyhole doesn't allow us to R&D lock and leaking a couple agendas exacerbates the HQ problem pointed out above. After testing, I went back to R&D Interfaces. Having only one copy is also an issue.

-You are wrong about NEH. NEH is impossible to beat.

That's not a question :)