MaxX: Prepaid Hate (Charity Gift 2016)

I'm a Shaper at heart, but when I found out I was going to be playing MaxX for the 2016 Charity Gift tournament I had to spend a lot of time getting used to playing the Anarch game. I was advised several times to take a deck including either Data Leak Reversal, Keyhole or even Apocalypse but after a lot of play-testing I just wasn't enjoying myself.

At the end of the day MaxX decks usually rely on heap recursion, especially events, so it occurred to me to just play MaxX like a really aggressive Shaper and include Prepaid VoicePAD in the style of the old Prepaid Kate decks. While Self-modifying Code and Clone Chip were out of reach for influence Retrieval Run does the job and Trope is a star, keeping you in the game even if your Levy AR Lab Access gets banned.

Obelus keeps you alive as long as you can stack enough tags just before making a big Medium run and you'll have a grip size in the double figures in no time. In the mean-time Eater lets you safely check out ICE till your breakers are in place and enables the occasional Account Siphon or Retrieval Run, and Bookmark works pretty well to keep you in the game if you sense an early Scorch or BOOM! on its way (e.g, as soon as they trash your Paparazzi).

On the day of the tournament this deck did well winning 3 out of 4 matches. The VoicePADs helped a lot with early game econ and enabled cheap or even free Déjà Vus and Day Jobs, which was nice, and the wins all came from Amped Up Medium runs with Paperclip to get into R&D.

Finally it's worth mentioning that the interaction between Hades Shard and Obelus is amazing (trigger Hades during an R&D run to draw a massive amount of cards), though it's not as broken as some people seem to think as you really have to be tagged a lot to take advantage of it.