Tempo Mti

So you want to play jinteki. Now, you can rely on Pālanā Foods: Sustainable Growth to make you 20 over the course of the game.

Now look at Mti Mwekundu: Life Improved. If you want to justify this over Palana, you need to get more value. There are two ways to get this kind of value.

One school of thought is that each install nets you a click. Now, since the runner doesn't always run every turn, to compensate for that consistent 1 cred of value, you get value from not having to pay the install costs. Now, when is your fourth ice worth the and 3 to install? When you have a Surveyor, and when you can get incidental value out of installing ice to the bottom so you can Mumbad City Grid and use surveyor one more time.

The other way to get value from the ID is that it gives you a "phantom" layer of ice on all your remotes, and one that the runner has to respect because if they don't, you can rez your nastiest facecheck in their face. FFG has gotten into the habit of printing ice that both tax effectively and facecheck for about as much as they cost. Looking at you, Fairchild 3.0, AnansiDNA Tracker. Bad game design IMO, but I'm not going to complain. This might not seem like much, but if you have 7 servers over the course of the game, that's 7 clicks to install ice, and 7 ice you don't need to actually have or install and can pad HQ.

What this means is that tempo isn't that much value over the course of a long game, so you're looking to rush.

As you can see by the high number of assets in this deck, we're going by the second school of thought. The assets are all fairly high value by themselves, and Jeeves Model Bioroids gives you a never-advance threat with your 2/4s.

Footnote 1: Like a lot of other Mti decks out there, we run Nisei MK II and Excalibur. You know what that means.

Footnote 2: Employee Strike is painful, but does most of it's damage on the turn it comes down. After that, you can score through it like normal glacier. The Strike matchups tend to be the resource matchups, and if you play early scarcity, they may have to strike to clear your current, which means no strike to surprise you.

Footnote 3: Don't be afraid to IA a Corporate Sales Team with a Thimblerig in HQ turn 1, even if you know they are running strikes. Reasons: The agenda in your hand isn't going anywhere. Strike is going to come down sooner or later if they have it. They are least likely to have the strike or the decoder on turn 1.

Footnote 4: In the same vein, IAing an NGO turn 1 is a great play. They might run it to force out your gearcheck, or run a central under the belief you'll save your Mti for the agenda. Then you drop down a nasty ice, rez it with 5 credits the runner doesn't think you have, and that's just value.

Footnote 5: Heck, IAing NGO is often better than IAA even going later in the game. IAA is fine if you're on 4 AP, but aside from that an IA is often more believable as an agenda because it wouldn't leave your economy completely gimped like it might if you were to score a food.