Legality (show more) |
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Standard Ban List 23.09 (latest) |
Standard Ban List 23.08 (active) |
Rotation |
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Deck valid after Fourth Rotation |
Card draw simulator |
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Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
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Repartition by Cost |
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Repartition by Strength |
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Derived from |
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None. Self-made deck here. |
Inspiration for | |||
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Argus Always Wins 4-0 (2nd) Austin CO | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Baby's First Argus | Throwback NANPC Boston | 3 | 0 | 0 |
Include in your page (help) |
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(gifs courtesy the lovely 0thmxma)
Quiverfull is the name of a conservative Christian philosophy that equates one’s children to the arrows in a quiver. This is the deck’s philosophy. Our agendas are our children; we should protect them, but they are also our weapons. By aggressively scoring agendas, we force the runner to take riskier and riskier choices to keep us from winning. Eventually, they either run out of luck or run out of courage.
Argus compliments this game plan by adding a “when stolen” clause to every agenda in your deck. In general as a corp, I don’t like to push an agenda unless I have two “problems” for the runner to solve. Argus’ tags/meat exists as a permanent problem, so it simply requires one other problem to add, be it a piece of ice, or a Prisec. This lets Argus set up a threatening scoring remote faster, needing fewer cards to do so. And the faster we can start scoring agendas the more effective our gameplan will be. While Argus’ ability triggers during a run, dealing with the effects of it - clearing a tag or drawing more cards - is normally done outside the run. What this means is that bad publicity is less of a downside for us because the runner can’t use the BP credits to deal with the problems we set up. We still don’t quite want to go whole hog on BP as much as, say, The Outfit - we’re not (just) trying to tax the runner on credits, but also on clicks – finding breakers, clearing tags, drawing cards. In addition, bad publicity cards trade immediate benefit in the short term for drawbacks in the long term. This is fine for us, because our gameplan is to win in the short-term and let the long-term be damned.
Our primary weapon against runners. Every agenda in this deck needs to be as punishing for us to score as it is for the runner to steal. 3/2s are the most efficient agendas scoring-wise, so we’re running quite a few of those.
The potatoes to our agendas’ steak. Operations are our counter-threat to scoring out. The runner should always be fretting over “Do they have access to Economic Warfare + Hard-Hitting News?”. Operations also don’t have trash costs (usually), which means that our plan of taking some BP is less damaging than a deck that relies heavily on Assets and Upgrades.
While the ice in this deck is important, it’s not nearly as important as in a glacier-style deck. Because we’re running so many operations and agendas, we need make cuts somewhere. Part of that is in Assets and Upgrades, and part of that is in Ice. We should have about 13-15 ice total. This means our ice needs to be extremely efficient. We need to be able to place any piece on a central or a remote, because it may be a long time before we draw a better piece. Also, we’re not trying to build deep servers; no server should be more than two ice deep (if that). Building those deep death-servers takes time and credits we can’t afford to waste. So while it's really tempting to a build double Funhouse double Border Control remote, we’ll be much better off with just any two of those. The ice also needs to be cheap to rez. Funhouse is the biggest ice we run at 5c, and our 4c pieces of ice have subs that discount their rez cost. Again, our priority is to get a threatening remote set up as quick as possible.
Beyond those pieces of ice, you’ll probably want some more to hit that 13-15 amount. Right now, I don’t think there are any auto-includes, but there’s a lot you can experiment with. They all have their pros and cons, and I’ll list possible options briefly. When choosing ice, we should keep in mind what kinds of breakers and tricks we’ll be seeing early (things like Botulus, Boomerang, bin breakers, etc.)
I’m lumping these two together because we’re running so few of them. Us running bad publicity means these cards are especially vulnerable, and they weaken our centrals as the runner can trash them and run again, seeing new cards. The advantage is that we can use these cards to bluff as agendas, which is especially effective when we’re at 5 points, as any face down card in the root of a remote could be a game-winning 3/2.
Again, we should remember our gameplan – aggressive scoring. We want to be pushing our first agenda by turn 2 at the latest. For opening hands, we’re actually looking for agendas, in addition to a few other things. We also want to see some econ, and something to start setting up a remote - either a Prisec or piece of ice. Keep in mind that our econ could be in the form of an agenda! If we’re against a crim, we’ll want another piece of ice to protect against an early Diversion of Funds. Finding our tag n’ bag pieces is secondary - we’ll draw into those later, but first we have to create the threat of scoring out. Common t1 plays are: score a Hostile; hedge, ice remote, install something in its root; ice remote, install Oaktown, advance; etc.
Agenda two is often the pivotal point of the game, and we should be pushing it around t3/4. If we score the second agenda, anything in the root of the remote is now a must-run. That’s when we can really bully the runner. So, before pushing our second agenda, we should ideally have a combo piece or two in hand. Our spare clicks should be spent drawing cards rather than clicking for credits. If the runner does steal the agenda, it should be at such a tempo loss that we can land an HHN and push the next agenda, effectively forking them between stealing another agenda or clearing the tags. From there, it depends on what the runner’s chosen. If they’ve chosen to contest, we should be punishing with HHN and then protecting centrals, so they don’t steal out before we find access to an HPT. If they let us score, we should bully them by jamming things into the remote, defending centrals as necessary.
Another thing to keep in mind is that even if HHN is no longer viable because the runner was able to generate a ton of credits quickly, there are still ways to kill the runner. For example, you can still force them to run through a Funhouse/Prisec/agenda remote click two or three, forcing the runner to end with a couple tags, which you can close out with double HPT. This works because of our focus on taxing the runner on clicks outside of a run and not simply credits. So if we have to discard at the end of turn, we should discuss our HPTs last out of our hand, and ditch the HHNs and EWs first.
There are two things that I wanted to emphasize in this decklist writeup.
6 comments |
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12 May 2022
Zerothmaxima
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15 May 2022
Baa Ram Wu
Amazing writeup - really enjoyed seeing the thought process behind all your decisions. Have you considered/tried Tithe as an option over Vertitas? It’s obv terrible once bukhalter is down, but what isn’t, and it does seem to play into argus’s game plan quite nicely. |
16 May 2022
chouxflower
Hmm Tithe is certainly an option, and it's a pretty cheap way of (probably) forcing a killer. It being blank once Bukh comes down (or worse credit positive for the runner if I have BP) gives me pause though. Worth testing though |
Philosophically, i agree with blowing up Anarchs.