First Deck Test - please help!

I STRONGLY suggest you play the game a couple of times with other people's decks before getting into deck building yourself. Your deck building should be fueled by your game experiences. Otherwise, if you lose you'll have no way to tell if it's because of your inexperience or because of your deck building.

As for the deck - It's ok considering you never played the game. You generally want to have 3x Sure Gamble. Easy Mark is a poor substitude. You are lacking economy. Crypsis and Darwin can be both very expensive. I've never seen Freelance Coding Contract generating a satisfying amount. At least get those Armitage Codebustings in there.

Scheherazade is not doing much if you already have Djinn.

You are very vulnerable to virus token purges. The corp can shut down everything you do by purging virus tokens. Might be worth spending some of that influence for cards that will allow you to act without virus tokens.

Good luck!

Firstly i completely agree with @krystman also may i suggest datasuckers, parasites are next to useless with out them and will help with darwin and crypsis for saving creds.

Squeezing the fixed breaker suite in will help when u have no virus counters as they can still get through most ICE without datasuckers. Id also run some special orders to go get the breakers u need.

@krystman & @Pinkwarrior, thanks for all the input. at this point i'm engaging in more of a mental exercise trying to wrap my head around some of the more intricate concepts of the game, rather than trying to make my first real playdeck. thats why these comments are so helpful.

after browsing through the Corp cards, i've notice LOTS of effects that make tags on the Runner. Is this an issue that runner decks typically need an answer?

In a way yes you need to be conscious of cards like scorched earth, the easy solution to this is Plascrete carapace. Its worth remembering that they can trash your resources when your tagged too but alot of the time you can just remove the tag.

Welcome :)

Some thoughts, many already mentioned above:

-Most people run 3 x Sure Gambles.

-In addition to Sure Gamble you'll probably find you need more money than you currently have. Armitage Codebusting and Daily Casts are standard money cards.

-Datasucker is one of the most powerful cards in the game and works so well with parasite, AI breakers and Noise. You should have them :)

-Scheherazade is probably best avoided. It's a trash risk and you have Djinn which is 100 times better.

-Ice Caver and Grimoire are great :)

-A major strategy that developed early on in the game's evolution is "tag and bag". The corp will try to tag the runner, then play two Scorched Earth for 8 meat damage in order to flatline you. You'll probably want at least 2 Plascrete Carapace to prevent this as it takes great skill to avoid being blown up without plascrete.

-If you don't include a fracter breaker, the ice program "Wraparound" will be a problem. It's popular at the moment for catching runners relying solely on AI breakers.

-Your breakers are ok and can break nearly everything, but both have the drawback of being slow and / or expensive. You'll want to keep trashing ice with parasite (and data sucker!) if you want to run with just these breakers.

-You have a lot of unspent influence which could be used to pull in money cards like Lucky Find, Bank Job or even Account Syphon - the latter is very good at keeping the corp under pressure.

-Clone chip is another great splash for Noise : allows you to reuse parasite and in the middle of a run if need be.

Have fun anyhow :) Thanks for posting.