Central Under Pressure v2

Thanks Winning Agenda for featuring this deck.

Central Under Pressure is a Yog Kit deck, a classic archetype but brought up to date to the current datapack and refined to improve consistency. I’ve been solely playing this version for 4-5 months and its been doing well on OCTGN and two city metas. It is very strong against HB and hold pretty well against NEH FA too. This deck applies a lot of pressures using Yog and Datasucker on all the central servers so much that the corp has to put aside their strategy and focus on icing up 2-4 deep on all centrals hence compromising their scoring server. Otherwise, you could go through for free and gain more datasucker tokens. The pressure is further piled on by having a highly efficient fixed and semi-fixed breakers like Mimic, Atman, Femme and Lady which get stronger from the tokens gained. Hence the name of the deck, :) (Don’t forget to play the song by Queen while watching the corp crumble).

Why Yog in Kit (TL:DR = Yog is so underrated in Kit!) As many are aware of, the use of Yog in Kit deck has always been debated. It is costly and in the long run, it requires other utility cards such as datasucker and the clunky Dinosaurus. Actually, these downsides could be made nearly negligible when built around. Utility cards are clunky only if they are used solely for a certain combo and not if they are synergistic with many cards.

I often feel people under appreciate the strength of Yog in Kit. Kit as an ID is very strong because with just a decoder, the risk of running on outermost unrezzed ice is drastically reduced. With Yog as her decoder, she essentially has a str 3 –break-all-subroutines-on-all-for-free- AI icebreaker. It could break 18 different early game etr ices and also nullify some common aggresive ices like Komainu, Tsurugi, and Architect. Secondly, it puts a lot of decision making pressure on the corp in terms of which ice to install, where, in what order and whether to rez ice yet. More often then not, because Yog would go through anyway, they would not rez the ice hence costing them a lucky agenda access. The next turn they would probably overcompensate and rez a big ice they are not ready for.

I am aware that refractor could serve the purpose of Yog but refractor would still struggle against taxing ice with multiple subroutines and it doesnt pressure archive as much as Yog with Datasucker.

The mindset of playing this deck:

Early game:

Find Yog, steady facecheck and card draw.

Look for Yog in your starting hand. Pro-Co/draw and econ card would be acceptable hand too. Maintain medium drawing and a light facechecking. Installing a datasucker early puts good pressure on corp to rez ice. Once Yog is out, force them to spend money every turn by rezzing ices.

Mid – late game:

draw cards, light run, lock up R&D and gradually complete your rig. One thing to watch out for is people would eventually pile up ices before rezzing them at the same time to get the second outer ice (more often than not, its a splashed Archer..) to do some damage. But if you have Atman and sucker tokens, you will be fine or if the calculated risk is worth it, dive right in. Program thrashing doesnt hurt the deck too badly as it has redundant breakers and heap retrieval options.

Against NBN/NEH:

Try to draw and keep testrun and/or another breaker in hand. At some point early game, they would try to rush Astroscript in 2-3 deep server. This is when you install Lady or test run Femme against the inner ice.   Justification for the inclusion/ommision of some cards:

vers. 1 had 1Cyber-cypher which has now been replaced by another copy of Lady. This is to tech against FA as they tend to play more ETR codegate and barrier

ProCo: A very efficiency card draw/economy for this deck. There are quite a few components to be installed in the long run so you would want to keep drawing cards. The money generated from drawing is usually sufficient to sustain the icebreakers.

Daily Casts: Clickless economy card is useful to complement a deck which relies on clicking ProCo for econ.

A single Kati : the deck relies quite a bit on Pro/Co and clicking Kati regularly would hinder the pace of the deck. The Kati is mainly for when the rig is more or less established and for end game economy.

No Tinkering/ Escher: I really like them as extra element of surprise but the deck will get too clunky. I don’t think the deck really need them as it already has testrun/scavenge tricks to mess up the corp.

No Indexing: Early/mid game it’s rather hard to be able to do an indexing run and to make a followup run same turn to bag the agenda. It’s mostly doable at the late game once your full rig is set up but by then, you would have had triple RD interfaces set up to lock RD. Would be nice to have one of but I can’t afford to add any situational card.

Noted Weakness:

When compared with standard Shaper deck, it lacks the robust mid-run program tutoring of SMC.

Blue Sun and decks with lots of 5/5+ str Ices. Femme could solve some of these issues but Blue Sun simply laughs at her. So far it,s not a problem yet but it will be once O&C is out.

Decks with lots of barriers especially those incorporating variable str ice walls. Cerberus won’t last long and I usually rely more on Atman with base Str of 1.

Could potentially run out of steam late game as there is no Levy AR in the deck.

No HQ multi-access. A single HQ interface would be really good in this deck but I just can’t find the influence.

No tech against PE. I usually put down one R&D interface and maintain a loose R&D lock.

Potential change to the deck:

+1 Scrubber -1 Mimic. Scrubber helps a lot against most current meta archetypes and Atman at str 3 could partially cover the role of Mimic (Rototurrets would ruin your day though) until you could test run scavenge Femme. Code Siphon. Very useful card to fast forward rig building but I cant find the space for it. HQ interface. Maybe -1 Lady, -1 Mimic, -1 Yog(!), +1 Gordian Blade, +1 HQ interface

Any comments and suggestions highly welcomed.