Not Your Normal Cerebral Imaging

"Wait a second," I hear you say. "Where's the Efficiency Committee? The Shipment from SanSan? The SEA Source and Scorched Earth?" Well, friend, I'm sorry to inform you, but it appears that you've spent the last few months in a coma. It's 2015 now; fast-advance CI is well and truly dead, collateral damage to the introduction of Clot. Gone are the days of double Biotic into scoring 4/2 agendas from hand. And thanks to I've Had Worse, what was once a sure kill shot now has an 80% chance of fizzling. You're going to have build a remote and protect it if you want to keep playing Cerebral Imaging.

What's the same?

If there's one thing CI does well, it's making absurd amounts of money. That part hasn't changed. You still have your Hedge Funds, Restructures, and Blue Levels to get rich and build a fat HQ.

You also still have your beefy bioroids to create taxing servers with only a few ice. Eli, Viktor, and Ichi are just as troublesome as they used to be. The old standbys, Enigma and Tollbooth, are also sticking around.

What's new?

Other than that, not much else is the same. Ice-wise, Ashigaru is a brutal stopper in CI. Barring Morning Star and Parasite, any way through this guy is incredibly expensive. I shouldn't need to introduce Architect; it's so good everywhere, and here is no exception.

On the agenda front, my favorite spread of any faction is HB's Domestic Sleepers and 3-pointers. The trick with Sleepers is to install-advance-advance it in your scoring server and leave it, giving the runner a chance to waste his money stealing 0 points. PriReq and Project Wotan are both solid. The Fragments round out the spread, as each one has a potentially useful ability. Scoring Utopia Fragment gives your other 5/3's a cost of 4 to steal from your remotes. Eden Fragment helps you bolster your ice. And Hades Fragment gives you protection from milling.

You also have Aggressive Secretary and Shattered Remains to bluff as agendas if you think the runner can get in. Secretary can create solid scoring windows, while Remains damages the runner's board state. Traditionally this slot would be used by Cerebral Overwriter, but this deck doesn't have the influence for a kill shot.

With all the bioroids in the deck, you might want to punish the runner for facechecking them. Placing a Heinlein Grid behind any of them makes the decision to click through much more difficult. Ideally, you have a bioroid outside a hard ETR ice, preventing a click through on a desperation run. Note that Heinlein works with a facechecked Enigma as well.

You might find yourself going dangerously low on credits to rez your big ice. This is where Reuse and Successful Demonstration come in to play. They both can bring you back from dangerously low credits. Reuse is limited only by the number of cards you have in hand - a turn of Reuse to trash a few cards including agendas, and install Jackson Howard, can prevent you from having to trash your whole hand while also keeping you from bleeding points. Demonstration requires an unsuccessful run, but is also needed right after you rez your run-stopping big ice. Funny how that works, eh?

Conclusion

It's a dangerous new world out there for Cerebral Imaging, and it has to reinvent itself to keep up with new threats. But that reinvention is possible, and though it may not end up looking like this, I think this deck is a solid starting point for a new breed of Cerebral Imaging.