Dial-a-Rig Stealth Kit

What's a Runner to do? Right now it seems that the upper crust of Corporation archetypes are quickly widening between extremes of Fastrobiotics, and slower archetypes like Jinteki RP, HB Glacier, and the new Blue Sun "Post-Modernism". A lot of the slower decks have secondary Flatline strategies which further distract or slow the runner and can complicate deckbuilding.

Runner deck composition is faced with two choices: Accept a high percentage of poor matchups by choosing to consistently attack one end of the scale, or attempt a tricky deck-building compromise by preparing for as many possible matchups as they can. I don't know which is the right answer (indeed it's probably a local meta call based on what people in your area play) but this deck is an attempt at the latter option.

I'm using Stealth Kit as the core because it gives both sides of consistent early attack and economically viable late-game in the same coin (playing into the idea that this deck wants to contest a wide number of matchups). This comes at a price of deck space for the support tools and Influence; Kate is another possible angle for this approach but one which would complicate your early game and push you harder towards a mid-late game strategy. Kit's ID solves a majority of ICE problems in the first third of the game, letting you focus on rig tinkering.

This deck has a lot of possible openings that should be tailored to the opponent. The switch hit ability comes from Trade-In and the Hardware suite. Against NEH and Jinteki RP/PE, you are going to mulligan aggressively for a hand with Astrolabe OR Trade-In and a 1-cost Hardware (Clone Chip or Lockpick... you very likely won't need all of your Stealth credits in these matchups). With an Astrolabe on the table your opponent is faced with the decision of either accelerating your deck to keep pace with theirs or curtailing their gameplan, either of which is probably a good result. Eventually you will Trade-In for BOX-E against Jinteki, but you'll keep Astrolabe as your console all game against NEH.

If you're against a slower archetype, instead you want to find one of the three Professional Contacts. Everything you need to pressure the corporation throughout the early game is as cheap as 1 credit (Refractor/Cloak/Lockpick) or as much as 3 credits (Dagger or Self-modifying Code-->Refractor). This deck can survive the tempo hit and still attack hard with ProCo so long as you get it out early. Again, at some point you will want BOX-E to stow cards with ProCo but the important parts of this deck can flow out of your hand pretty easily without any extra economy pushing them. If Astrolabe is not an important part of the matchup, you will be using it as Trade-In fodder to get your Interfaces out and adding further threat to your attacks in the mid-game. 1x CyberSolutions Mem Chip is also there to help you get the memory needed for the late-game rig.

Clone Chip should be reserved for Parasite as much as possible in order to clean out all of the Pop-Up Windows/Quandaries/Pups/etc that the corporation will be using to try to throw off Kit's ability. Datasucker is an experimental include that should provide a little extra late game reach for the Stealth cards (having just 1 counter is very significant in the all-important Archer matchup) as well as extending the threat range of the single Parasite, as needed.

If you're facing Blue Sun, well you're going to need Plascrete Carapace pretty fast. You can probably Trade a Clone Chip for it, since Parasite is going to be dead in the matchup.

Thoughts?