UNLEASH

This deck has one very simple goal: To be the fastest consistent kill deck ever made. Do not let appearances fool you, this deck is absolutely designed to be competitive and is no joke!

I have for a very long time played with NBN-type kill decks that make use of NBNs amazing tag&bag suite, together with stellar cheap ice and an amazing secondary win condition; these features made NBN far superior to Weyland at the tag&bag job, in my eyes.

However, after the nerf to AstroScript, I started to consider Weyland more again. In my opinion, Weyland's main advantage is strong econ together with more kill tools. With Fear the Masses, we got Subcontract and Election Day too, two cards that really speed up the kill.

As Weyland's ice is less good than NBN's options (no Pop-Up Window!), I made a rather radical decision to forego ICE entirely. Now, I myself have long criticized ice-less decks, claiming that "You should never go ice-less - low ice is fine, but no ice is bad!"

There are thus only a very limited amount of compelling arguments to use no ice. Firstly, bad publicity. If you have bad publicity at all, then "low ice" suddenly becomes about the same as "no ice". Second, speed. If your goal is to kill the Runner incredibly fast, then cutting ice increases the speed and consistency of your kill, and does not significantly change the number of accesses your opponent gets.

Thus, GRNDL. "The" early-game ID, GRNDL gives you a huge headstart, which is vital for the early trace win, and the bad pub justifies foregoing ice.

The card choices are moderately self-explanatory - most cards are either econ or kill. The agenda suite is chosen to both make room for more cards in your deck, and to enable Punitive flatlines.

You should absolutely aim to get the kill as early as possible. Consulting Visit is probably the strongest card in the entire deck, functioning simultaneously as a Midseason for the "long kill", a SEA for the "quick kill", a Punitive for the double (or even single) Punitive kill, a Scorch or Traffic for the tag-bag or as any of your other utility Operations, as need be.

Subcontract is a great card, allowing you to do amazing stuff like Subcontract + 2x Consulting Visit or Subcontract + Election Day + a newly drawn Operation. However, if you are not in position to kill, do not hesitate to use Subcontract as Election Day fodder. You do not win this game by sitting on cards and hoping they will be useful, you win it by power-drawing into whichever combo is most likely to win you the game, based on what you see in play.

Commercial Banker's Group, while seemingly very weak with the bad publicity, is actually not that bad a deal. Even if checked and trashed before getting rezzed, it taxes the Runner one cred and one click, which, in terms of comparison, is only slightly worse than you getting three creds for free, i.e. only slightly below Beanstalk Royalties. If it fires even once it starts getting amazing, and it can definitely force a Runner into having to run, enabling your SEA Source and Power Grid Overload.

Currently I am testing replacing one Power Grid Overload with a Paywall Implementation, but a certain game against a Replicator Apex left me quite... heartbroken about that decision.

There is certainly an argument to be made that one could include an extremely low number of hard-ETR ice pieces, to force the Runner to find answers. For example, maybe one Vanilla/Bailiff and one Quandary could work, but from testing so far it does not seem to increase any form of consistency. In any case, probably a swap for two of the Commercial Bankers Groups.