Controlling the Couriers

callforjudgement 684

This is a jank/combo deck that's been doing surprisingly well for me on jinteki.net. Some people asked to see the decklist, so here it is. Note: this deck probably doesn't work if the opponent knows what's in it, but does seem to work well if you can catch them by surprise. Maybe you could change around a few cards and win that way?

The basic idea is to play out a PAD Factory and put advancement counters on absolutely everything, starting with the things that are least likely to be trashed (e.g. your own ice, the runner's console, the runner's key economic resources). That allows Mass Commercialization to make you all the credits you're likely to ever need. You can use these to win in the usual NBN way, but more commonly, you win via Red Planet Couriers onto Project Beale (sometimes even scoring it as a 13/7 and winning the game on the spot, although more often you'll have fewer advancement counters but need fewer counters because you had some agendas already scored). You can do this from hand using the singleton Biotic Labor, or else install a Project Beale "overnight" while the runner is distracted (most runners don't check every face-down card installed by NBN: Controlling the Message, and you can distract them still further using cards like Hard-Hitting News).

Normally, what little ice you have will be focused on centrals, with a small amount on remotes to protect your PAD Factory, to rush out agendas behind Wraparound, or just to generally shell-game until the runner gets fed up checking your remotes. Ghost Branch is useful for this purpose, making the runner more cautious about checking remotes and acting as a repository for advancement counters at the same time.

This deck has no influence left for out-of-faction tag punishment, but you'll be making so many creds off Mass Commercialization that SEA Source into Closed Accounts into The All-Seeing I is likely to work and leave the runner incapable of running through for a couple of turns. That's enough to pull off a combo and/or score out (Bellona is particularly useful for this purpose). The tagging and tag punishment cards tend to accumulate in hand over the course of the game, so I haven't so far found the need to run multiples (adding more ice would probably be a more helpful change to the deck).

This deck is fragile enough that I wouldn't recommend playing this deck in anything important, and it's not a great deck casually either because it isn't much fun to play against (unless you don't know the combo and are having fun figuring it out), so I'm not quite sure why I made it. But it can be a lot of fun for the spectators, and there's enough interest in the decklist that I'm posting it here so that people can see exactly what was going on.

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