IG Hell - Top 16 Louisville Regionals

Bio-Ethics Association is one of the best IG cards printed. It gives IG a solid way to grind the opponent down to a point of no return. Make no mistake. This is a deck made for murder. I've made a change already since the tournament on 4/9 to give it a chance at scoring agendas, but I have yet to score a single agenda with this deck.

There are a couple key cards for this build (Bio-Ethics doesn't count, its the point of the deck anymore): Sensie Actors Union is AMAZING for IG. Why mando-draw-draw-install-discard? SAU speeds you through the deck finding what you need, and putting ANYTHING from your hand on the bottom of R&D. Not just one of what you just drew. It allows IG to play more cards per turn, while burying agendas. It is a bit unsynergistic with Museum of History due to the deck reshuffle, but you Museum first, then trigger SAU to clean up the crap.

Genetics Pavilion is another key card once the grind begins. When the runner is taking net damage every turn, they want to draw up, but can't. It's even solid as an early opener to prevent early Diesel draws or the like. At 1 rez, 5 trash, it's as damaging to trash it. It's all about making the runner make bad choices.

Cerebral Static Because Employee Strike sucks. And it just shuts down so many runners. Played a very sad Geist & Whizzard.

The ice suite is almost counter-intuitive given the current state of the meta. Faust is everywhere, and the only things breaking the ice in this deck are AI breakers. Frankly, I look at it differently. As far as I'm concerned, using Faust is taking voluntary net damage. I WANT them to break into archives, where they can eat Shock! And if they are running all standard breakers, they can't get in. Or at best, they can make one run through Excalibur per turn. It is a judgement call each game where Mother Goddess & Excalibur go. Personally, I like Excalibur over Archives & Mother Goddess over R&D, but you can easily go the other way, and there are strong arguments for each.

The other new toy is Mumbad City Hall. Time has proven over and over that tutoring is one of the most powerful abilities in card games. Tutoring for econ via Mumba Temple, or recursion with Museum of History is great.

Other than that, this deck does what IG does. Facedowns in archives make trash costs prohibitive. Shock in archives makes clearing them suck. Bio-Ethics makes passing turn suck. Hostile Infrastructure makes trashing anything suck (hi Keyhole!). Grind them down, and set up for a Ronin/Junebug kill, or if you get all 3 Bio-Ethics & Genetics Pavilion in play, they will die in a few turns anyways.

And this deck is not the super-slow IG of old. It applies constant pressure. I had a couple 15-minute flatlines on the day. It forces the runner to constantly deal with threats.

In no way do I think this list is finished. I've been tweaking it since Democracy & Dogma dropped, and this is just the list I settled on for the day. I've already determined one change, and that will be -1 Sundew, +1 Mushin No Shin. The deck has more economy than it needs already, and Mushin traps just make everything better. And also provides the outside chance of scoring agendas, once the runner has already been zapped by a Junebug to put the fear back into them. I'm tempted to flip the ratios of Ronin & Junebugs, to give the potential of a 6-damage turn.

In short, I think IG now has the teeth it has long been missing, and the new suite of assets from D&D are amazing.