Inversifi-Gebre and The Maker's Deer (2-4 @ Worlds 2021)

DoubleK 787

This is a Kit deck I played at Worlds 2021 and helped me to the top 16 tiebreakers and ended up as the top Shaper, mainly carried by my better performing corp deck to be fair, but it's still a pretty decent deck and takes advantage of arguably the most fun icebreaker in the game!

In a nutshell, the deck runs a Prepaid event economy, a Kit's Inversi-Gebre breaker suite and a Maker's Deer wincon.

ECONOMY

Mulligan for the core draw & economy engine pieces: Prepaid VoicePAD, Mystic Maemi, Aniccam and Beth. With a few of those set up you can play the draw and economy events for free most of the time and get nice bursty tempo. You go through the deck quite fast with this, so 2x Harmony AR Therapy prevents running out of steam and recycles the best events back in.

BREAKER SUITE

The most fun part of the deck. The breaker suite is very quick to set up to challenge early rushing, because as Kit you basically need to find one breaker. Inversificator is the main target but against some corps with big ice, Engolo can be a better choice. 3x Self-modifying Code helps find these and Prepaid Overclock helps with the install costs. You can then look for a Gebrselassie to put on the main breaker, which saves a lot of credits over the game.

A single Inversificator with Gebrselassie is usully the only breaker you need throughout the game and allows getting into all 2 ICE and many 3-4 ICE servers. Since you're Kit, the first ICE will always be a code gate, so you can break it and swap it with the next ICE and break it again, since it's a code gate until the end of the run. Gebrselassie makes sure the breaker stays at the right strength.

The challenge is to be creative with the Inversificator swaps, moving nasty ICE you don't want to break repeatedly into positions where you're not intending to attack anytime soon, or where you can jump over them with a smaller ICE and an Inversificator swap. For deeper servers you have to move natural code gates to the innermost positions, so you can ride over the first two ICE with the Inversifi-Kit swap and keep going. If this isn't possible, you may have to use Engolo as a backup breaker and a painting device to turn more ICE into code gates.

WIN CONDITION

The strongest wincon is The Maker's Eye & Nyashia combo, which is basically a DIY Deep Data Mining. The 2x Deer stacks up and feels great in this deck since our breaker suite takes up 1MU and we're running VoicePADs instead of Rezekis for economy, so we have the MU for it. We also mainly go for a few high-impact runs, so the three use limit doesn't matter much. It feels like a tutorable cheap R&D Interface that you can pull in when you want to change the angle of attack to R&D.

Secondary wincon is usually remote snipes with the weird breaker suite that often seems hard for the corps to read. Overclock and Gebrselassie are MVPs in challenging remotes.

HQ pressure is mainly provided by a surprise Wanton Destruction which always seems to catch corps off guard and feels great with an extra click from Beth to nuke HQ. Good target to recycle back in with Therapy.

TAGS & DAMAGE

This deck runs quite aggressively and early, so Misdirection with 3x Self-modifying Code is useful, as is the Prepaid Deuces to clear tags from low credits.

Damage prevention is almost non-existent, relying just on Aniccam to draw up when losing events to damage. It does protect against double Punitive Counterstrike quite well and helps a bit in bouncing back against net damage decks, but you're quite vulnerable to damage. In those matchups it's good to be careful with the Harmony AR Therapies to recur cards as hit points and not lose them to damage in general.

WORLDS RECAP

Round 1 against Mark playing Azmari. Epic 50 minute marathon with a lot of ICE swapping, Maker's Deer runs and Overclocking remotes. Mark gets a well deserved win by sneaking out a Beale in a remote while I try to find the winning agenda on R&D with the Deer.

Round 2 against groenkaaf playing CtM. Quick loss for Kit as I can't find any SMCs or breakers in the first half of the deck while CtM scores out on SanSan behind ICE.

Round 3 against lstm playing The Outfit. Finally a win for Kit by messing up the corp servers with Inversifi-Gebre and then riding the Makers Deer for the win.

Round 4 against aunthemod playing Restoring Humanity. Tough net damage match-up with Kakugos and Data Loops, but the luck is on my side to find the agendas with a few R&D multiaccesses with the Maker's Deer and a big hand after drinking Diesel.

Round 5 against Lucidit playing Argus. Took some risks with Maker's Deer and clearing tags with Misdirection, but didn't find agendas and struggled a bit with economy. In the end Argus was too fast and had the Audacity to fast advance for the win.

Round 6 against Sanjay playing SYNC. Went all in on R&D after the corp built a nasty remote with lots of upgrades. Only found a bunch of 1-pointers with the Makers Deer while Sanjay scored out the winning agenda on the remote. I kind of regret not running the remote to see what kind of fun stuff Sanjay had hiding in there, as I always enjoy reading his funky deck lists :)

FINAL WORDS

Despite only getting 2 wins with Kit at worlds, the games were still fun and aside from the CtM match where breakers were nowhere to be found, it felt like this deck always had a fighting chance with quite a lot of accesses. The weird breaker suite takes a bit of time to get used to but is a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. Shoutout to my fellow jankster @Kagolskab from our small Copenhagen meta for helping test this deck and huge thanks to all the NISEI folks, TOs, streamers, commentators and the whole community for keeping this game alive. Thanks for reading and Always Be Running!

8 comments
22 Nov 2021 Goeshi

Congrats on getting highest Shaper!!!

22 Nov 2021 harinezumi

Number 1 Shaper - Huzzah!

I still think you should have gone for the 2nd wanton.

  • Kagolskab
22 Nov 2021 DoubleK

I like that Inversifi-Gebre Kit is the world's top Shaper. Janksters rejoice! :D

2 Wantons would definitely make sense. Kit has so much influence with all the good Shaper cards that I don't know what to do with the influence anyway...

22 Nov 2021 internet_potato

Love to see it. I might do 1x Pelangi to help deal with voidworks.

Mystic Maemi is an inspired choice, I found myself constantly a credit or two short when trying a similar engine (ppvp and annicam) out of ayla.

22 Nov 2021 DoubleK

@internet_potato Yes, Maemi is essentially a 4th VoicePAD and gives more consistent starts for the econ engine. Later on Prepaids always get used first while Maemi can pile up for that sweet "click to net gain 9" play with Sure Gamble.

Don't stop playing strange Shaper stuff, the world needs us :)

22 Nov 2021 shruthless

The Wanton include is just mwaah. I'll be very sad when it rotates out.

22 Nov 2021 koga

Curios about a possible 1x DJ Cambridge in here... Wonderful list, I absolutely love it and it 100% deserves the top Shaper. Congrats!

22 Nov 2021 DoubleK

@koga Thanks! Really liking your Wu list too. I could see DJ Steve doing some work here to recur some of the events together with the AR Therapies and putting more pressure on HQ with the run economy events. Good idea!