ARE THE GAME DESIGNERS EVEN TRYING?!

This deck is stupid. That is all. The game plan is singular: win via R&D Blackmails. Corporate Scandal has enabled a scenario in which the Progenitor-Hivemind-Medium combo no longer requires a giant pile of cash and Darwin to be successful or Chakana to prevent the corp from rushing out before you can finally dig through R&D for half of their deck.

Unfortunately, I think this deck may be viable competitively in the right hands. Not Tier 1 for sure, but maybe once Political Operative and Councilman drop it could be. I guess we'll have to see. Barring the corp running multiples of Cyberdex Virus Suite, or being able to rush out in about 3 turns, you can get your combo set up and see the top 5+ cards of R&D very quickly and possibly Turntable away the Astro tokens or GFI, thus making it nigh-impossible for the corp to close out the game before you have them in a complete R&D lock.

This deck has been tweaked after seeing about 20 games of play and I think this is close to the best build. I'd like to see a 3rd Virus Breeding Ground but it's very hard to find card slots. I haven't tried it, but running Incubator might also be good here.

Eventually, I stripped back the entire deck and started with the minimum cards needed for the combo, then added some card draw with 3x I've Had Worse and 3x Inject, and filled out the remaining slots with economy cards. My build ended up having 44 cards and in discussion with a friend, we decided a 3rd copy of Progenitor was the best extra card to include since you want to see it asap because it's draw order dependent and you need to draw it before your Hivemind. With the extra Progenitor I often find myself having both Hivemind and a Medium each hosted on one letting you keep an extra access after the corp purges.

Throughout a game I think you need about 25 credits total, so you can get by only playing 3-4 of your 11 economy cards. If you want to play with some card slots, I think maybe dropping an Inject or a Day Job might be okay to slot something else. No clue where I'm going to find slots for Councilman, but I think you have to drop the Clone Chip for 2x Political Operative and maybe play an Easy Mark or even a Utopia Shard with the final influence after Democracy and Dogma comes out. I've also toyed around with the idea of Gang Sign instead of the Clone Chip slot but I'm not sure if it's a good call or not.

I played an older version of this two weekends ago at a store champ and went 3-1 in swiss with it, losing to HB firing 2 beta tests to put 4 rezzed ICE on R&D. I killed all the ICE but my opponent was able to rush out while I was stuck parasiting the ICE away. Then in the Top 4 cut, I lost to a Palana that rushed out but I completely whiffed agendas on 3 R&D accesses where I saw 3-4 cards each, then on my final click before he won I saw 15 cards seeing 2x TFPs (stealing 1), and a Philotic. The last agenda in the deck was a few more cards down. I then played the HB who beat me in Swiss again and Ash on R&D was enough to keep me out, then make me blackmail in again to trash it, then finally blackmail to see accesses. Didn't see enough cards to win. I think I forgot about my bad pub credit and could've trashed the Ash when he first rezzed it but I'm not 100% sure that's true. Also looking back, I think I should've challenged the scoring remotes in those games but I was too mentally locked on R&D. Moral of the story is this deck can be brutal if your opponent doesn't know it's coming and you have 2-3 turns to get rolling before they know what's up. Also, if I count correctly, there are only a handful cards in the game that directly counter your plan: Oversight AI, Executive Boot Camp, Caprice, Ash, Accelerated Beta Test, and Priority Requisition. New Angeles Sol also can cause you problems overwriting your Corporate Scandal. Maybe the deck needs a Faust.

Enjoy the stupidity!