Chart Harder - Indexing variant

Same chart, different course.

This deck is a new take on my Hard Stealth Kit build I put on here a while ago. It was a powerful build and it had the tendency to drastically shorten the mid-game, really putting the squeeze on the corp. Of course, this was all provided you had all the pieces you needed in time. And there were a lot of pieces. As I played the deck more and more, its main weakness became clear: I found myself losing in situations where I simply didn't get everything set up in time. With all the moving parts the deck had, it was pretty easy to get locked out of matches simply because you had everything except a breaker or a tutor, or just a few more clicks. Conversely, my wins could be landslides if the cards came out in the right order, but I'm not one for feast or famine. So it was time to rebuild.

Enter this deck, which I've had, in one form or another, in playtesting for about two months now. In casual play, and on OCTGN, it's held its own, but the group I play with hardly constitutes a random sample. So I've held off on posting this to make sure the deck's success wasn't because I tailored it to the people whose decks I play against every week. This list here is a slight variant of what I took to my most recent tournament, and let me tell you - it performs.

There are several noticeable changes over Hard Stealth Kit, the first being Magnum Opus which drove the vast majority of that deck's economy. Powering your beefy rig was no small feat, and it sometimes needed several power turns of 8 credits to see its full potential. Talk about wasting time. So I stripped the deck of that engine and replaced it with a card I've never liked until now.

I had always thought of Professional Contacts as a stepchild of sorts: a watered down Diesel meets a watered down Magnum Opus. "I have both of those cards in my deck already" I told myself. "And ProCo takes five clicks to pay for itself." But running an ID as aggressive as Kit, who wants to come out of the gate swinging WHILE building her rig, the most important resource isn't money. It's time. You can get into servers with hardly any resources at all: a Refractor and one of the three forms of stealth - Cloak, Ghost Runner, Lockpick - and you're pretty much in every turn until they start stacking ice AND stack it so the innermost piece isn't a code gate. So what were we doing wasting time with Mopus and Replicators and CyberSolutions? Dig. Dig! You're going to find what you need sooner than you think, and if you can make money while you do it, all the better. Including Professional Contacts as the main form of draw/econ compression is a night and day improvement compared to the blunt edge that is Magnum Opus. It lets you start tearing through your deck to find the pieces you need to get into servers, and it keeps your MU open so you're never having to juggle program space. Yes, this version runs on far less money, but there are a number of ways we can make this work.

Dirty Laundry does work when you're on low credits, and can get you up to Sure Gamble range from 2c with one click instead of 3. Datasucker acts as a form of pseudo economy, freeing up stealth credits that are normally used for boosting strength and allowing you spend them on breaking subroutines instead (not necessary, but a nice bonus when it happens), and of course Kati is our backbone. For a deck with a breaker suite as efficient as stealth, a Kati with 6 credits on her starts to look terrifying. But load her up a little more if you can: anything above 9 is ideal.

Since our real strength here is the cheap breakers that get you into a lot of places with stealth credits, that lets us spend our "real" money on the tools we need for agenda digs. Even a single R&D Interface can be a powerful tool for a runner that makes one frighteningly efficient run every turn. Two RDIs? Now you're cooking with gas. So once you bank that money on Kati, don't be afraid to pop off that RDI and make a run that same turn. Your goal is to start locking down those agendas before they hit HQ.

And we of course have our classic control/support/burst cards as well. Parasite to eat through the trouble stuff and nuke ice that can turn off Kit's ability; Imp to wick away the nasty combo pieces that would do you in - Scorches, Biotics, Midseasons, SanSans, Punitives, you name it; we have the surprise Legwork to run roughshod through their hand; and Indexing to exert our will over the corp's game plan.

With the heavy hardware gone, this is our new core. ProCo to dig, Kati to build, stealth to break. Dig, dig, dig, and then LARLA everything back in to really up the pressure in the mid-to-late game. You'll skirt by on less cash, so I've had to build in some protection for that. Plascrete is back (your time is now, sweet Weyland!), but once that first carapace hits the table you're going to start feeling a lot more comfortable. Though I will say, with PE on the rise, a one-off Net Shield or Deus X is a very reasonable include (my one loss in the tournament was to a PE that Neural EMP'ed me after I was forced last click to run Psychic Field in a game-point situation. I was sad). Although Indexing is now included in this latest variant, and that in itself is a wonderful defense against PE because you can see their traps without firing them, and arrange them how you'd like. And feel free to drop a Plascrete for an Infiltration. With how quickly this deck can move, I might even feel comfortable going down to one copy. I think you could sleeve this up, and have a really awesome go of things, but I encourage you to mess with this skeleton and let me know what you find. Happy charting!