Ice Trafficking

Here's my Runner from the Battleground Games and Hobbies Store Championship, held on February 28, 2016. I made top seed in Swiss out of 42 players.

I love weird draw engines, so I've always been a big Geist fan. And my other recent experiments in Criminal left me frustrated with how expensive it is to use their breakers, so I decided it was time to bring this back out. And it works better than ever! This can be a tough deck to run, since you have to make every run count, but it can also seriously mess up a lot of Corps.

Programs: Crowbar, Shiv, and Spike do a lot of work, but they won't get you into servers often enough on their own, so having a backup/persistent rig is important. Inti, Passport, and Mongoose isn't a perfect backup rig, but I think it's the best balance of low install costs, low influence cost, and efficiency at breaking cheap ice. Medium is of course a major win condition. Note that as long as you have Cloud active, you have enough memory for all the programs in the deck, but if you have to burn all your Links too late in the game you might have to ditch some stuff.

Economy: Drug Dealer is critical, especially early game. Geist's ability keeps you moving once you have a critical mass of stuff on the board, but you need to throw down a bunch of pieces first. Mulligan for Drug Dealer or Hostage, and generally use Hostage to get Drug Dealer or The Helpful AI. Never install both Dealers. Getting a Link installed is important but doesn't strictly need to happen right away. Kati Jones is a backup economy engine; since all your stuff is cheap, you will be fine with drips, Siphons, and the occasional Bank Job for large chunks of the game. Drive By is your best answer to upgrades and high-trash-cost Assets, so use it aggressively. Same Old Drive By is a lot of clicks, but it's sometimes the right play. You Decoy along with Forger can let you ignore a Breaking News or the second tag on an Account Siphon, but even without it, Siphon, burn Forger, install and burn another Forger is great tag-clearing efficiency. Watch your memory if you're burning links though, and try not to end your turn without one unless you really need to.

Tricks: Levy AR Lab Access is important if the game goes long, but you won't always need it. Unless you suspect Chronos Project, you can coast for a while with an empty stack, so don't be in too much of a hurry to reset if you still have a bunch of breakers out. Levy is most of your recursion so make those breaker-uses count.

Your best friend in a lot of matchups will be Traffic Jam. This can do work against any Corp, but it's brutal against an HB with one of each 3/2 scored. You can't win at never-advance, so don't let them play that way: Traffic Jam generally means they'll have to leave advanced cards on the board. NBN has some better answers but this can still keep an Astro-train from happening. It's more situational against Weyland and Jinteki, but a surprise Jam after they single-advance their second Nisei is so, so sweet.