Paragon Smok (1st @German nationals, 6th after swiss)MWL 2.2

Pinsel 2548

This is the runbased smoke, made by Jackmade, that I played at german nats. The only change i made was changing a ghost runner for beth. It lost twice in swiss and was undefeated in the cut.

Most cards are just the standard smoke engine, but i want to talk about the notable includes, that had a huge impact:

Stimhack: This card accelerated the setup a lot, being able to contest stuff with less credits and was very useful in fetching paperclip, which is by far the hardest part for smoke to do early. It also made it easier to trash illegal arms factory, jeeves, jinja city grid...

Paragon: considering that you usually make one run per turn, it is almost like desperado. The scry is incredibly powerful. It works well with net mercur, being able to draw the card you scryed last turn mid run. It also allows you to plan your next turn aswell. Most importantly, it removes the cards that are not useful immediately. I often put clone chips, breakers, unnecessary tech cards, second copies of uniques or even the first beth away, leaving just enough pieces to beat every gearcheck, thus getting way faster through my deck to assemble my engine and pay for it. Combined with 40 cards, clickless draw and diesel, your engine is up and running really quickly quite consistently, keeping up the pressure the entire game.

Security Testing: Even though it is just one, combined with paragon you often get it by the midgame. Being smoke, it is really hard to turn this card off. Piling up lots of succesful run triggers also makes for a very efficient engine. It also helps with the issue, that sometimes you need a lot of real credits to beat stuff (asset spam, multisub ICE, HHN,SEA source, seidrs...)

Atman : beats excalibur and MoGo tricks.

cloak : because it can be tutored, i didnt have to play ghost runner for consistency.

clot : with clone chip being unrestricted, this was great to beat FA Titan and generally lock the corp.

Now for the the card that blew my mind the most:

kyuban : This card was amazing in every round. The simplicity of the card makes it very versatile and it synergizes with basically half your deck. It hampers a lot of common corp strategys to beat smoke. Just to list a few applications: it easily gives 6 credits for an indexing turn, it turns gearchecks into insane liabilitys (net mercur+kyuban makes a super opus), it makes a lot of real credits to trash assets, it disables spicy outer ICE to farm TTW counters for free, it makes multiple runs against ash/nisei MK II affordable. Mumbad City grid is very sad. It allows you to put a lot of pressure on HQ while mainting a high credit level to lock the remote. And best of all, it can be tutored, you have up to 4 with cc and it can be installed at instant speed with cc/smc!

After the engine (paragon, SecTest, kyuban, net mercur) is assembled, you can make up to 6 credits and scry in 1 click. For example, with kyuban, paragon, net mercur, i could repeatedly get booped into chiashy by AgInfusion, practically losing just 2 credits, but turning on indexing.

7 comments
3 Sep 2018 MazeBerlin

Best Smoke ever

3 Sep 2018 Cpt_nice

This warms my shaper heart

4 Sep 2018 themeanlady

What do you do against Mti early?

4 Sep 2018 BizTheDad

Got crushed by this numerous times on J-Net prior to this weekend.

4 Sep 2018 Vortilion

Insanely strong Smoke and so far my favorite Smoke build. Nice one and congratulations to the title! It was a great event.

4 Sep 2018 Pinsel

@themeanlady you set up a bit longer (gamble, cast, beth, smc, cc, critic, stimhack) without running, but still try to contest rashida so mti doesn't run away. You want to find smc/dagger/refractor and a net mercur/cc/smc/cloak for DNA tracker/anansi and then you can run more aggressively because mti doesnt have money quickly enough to secure all centrals with big ICE. if mti keeps you out with gearcheck, use kyuban to make a lot of money from it and from there you have enough money to assemble the rest of the rig. Reuse kyuban later for indexing, the scoring remote, or to farm stealth credits

16 Sep 2018 hafgrim

Is it correct that there is no window to fetch Kyuban after the corp has said no rez on an approached ice?