Glacier PE - The Slowest PE deck you've ever played

The idea behind this deck is to use Jinteki's most painful ID as a way of taxing runners, rather than playing the shell game that most people associate with the ID. The strategy is similar to Blue Sun decks that feature Scorched Earth, where the glacier is Plan A, and Scorch is Plan B for when runners get too aggressive.

Let's start with the basic question most asked when I play this IRL or online: why PE?

1) Firstly, PE is rather scary. Runners need to think twice and set up before they can make runs on your servers -- face checking is simply not an option for most runners, meaning that you have a bit of space in the early game to set up your economy, and advance agendas behind ice.

2) Komainu, in the absence of breakers or IHW, is functionally an "end the run" ice. If runners are foolish enough to run into a Komainu without a breaker (or, say, Faust), they won't be able to access an agenda without taking lethal damage. They will be forced to jack out before access. In other IDs, Komainu can wipe out their hand, but still allow them to take the agenda it was protecting.

3) Fetal AI does 3 net damage. This is very important, and one of the best reasons to run this deck. Medium digs, without sufficient cards in their grip can be lethal. The presence of Fetal means that you can generate flatlines unless they are above a certain number of cards in hand.

4) HoK does 4 damage over the course of the game. This is a significant card tax, and unless they have Wyldside active (more on this later), these are clicks that they will have to spend to get back up to a healthy hand size.

5) Click and deck tax. Unlike many corp decks, PE isn't as reliant on taxing an opponent's economy -- rather, the biggest tax for you are clicks, and the size of their deck. Clicking to get back up to a non-lethal hand size is going to be something that prevents runners from running every turn. Caprice and Batty allow you to keep runners out of servers, even if they have a large credit advantage.

6) Faust. Screw Faust. Faust runs on cards, and even with Wyldside in play, net damage is useful at keeping them from running through your servers too many times.

There are some problems with this deck that the card selection is meant to address.

1) Corporate Town. Wyldside, ProCo, Film Critic, Hunting Grounds and to a lesser extent Aesops and Same Ol' Thing -> Larla all suck for this deck. Hunting Grounds turns off Komainu, Wyldside is click-free permanent card draw, Film Critic laughs at TFP/Fetal and ProCo is the econ and draw engine that makes Hayley work. What's the solution to all these troublesome resources? Why it's Corporate Town of course! In the midgame, when you have a nearly-exhausted HoK, or a scored Chronos, or even a scored Fetal (this happens a lot believe it or not), you plop down a Corp town into your scoring server, add a Batty or a Caprice and then start trashing their asshole cards. With ELP, they might only be able to run on Corporate town once a turn, and often, even a single activation of Corporate town trashing an important resource can set them back significantly. Hayley only has 1 way of getting resources back, and that's their very precious Larla. If they manage to trash it unrezzed, you can crick/batty or Interns it back.

2) ELP. It may look weird, but ELP is one of the best cards in the deck. If runners are forced to click multiple times a turn to draw back up to safe handsizes, ELP further limits the amount of clicks they can use to run, meaning you can sit back and subliminal messaging, draw cards with Jackson, build your glacier, etc.

3) Program trashing. Ichi 1.0 is one of the best ice in the game at the moment IMO, and it's even more disgusting if you have Batty out. There is a window after you rez Ichi, and after they are allowed to jack out, but before they hit the subroutines where you can rez and fire batty to copy the trash program ability. If you win the psi game, you can trash their sentry breaker and then force them to slam head first into 2 program trashing subs, meaning you can potentially wipe their entire rig out. Yeeouch! Similar, but a little less deadly is this play with Rototurret/Swordsman.

3) Larla hate. Chronos Project is not only a good card to throw away with Corp Town, but it also can punish runners who are relying on Larla to recycle their heap. Having 2 means that I don't mind scoring one early. Corp Town blows up the Same Ol' Thing that they are relying on to get their singleton Larla they discarded to net damage back. If you lock them into 0 cards in their deck, it becomes extremely difficult for them to win.

Give it a try! It's a fun deck, but as mentioned in the title, very slow and you need to use your credits wisely -- you don't have a recurring source of credits other than Subliminal Messaging (remember to use these to fuel Celeb Gifts), and you don't get to use them every turn.