Emptied Mind

QUESTION: is Emptied Mind a playable card? It provides a powerful benefit but demands an incredibly specific deck. As I set out to build a deck that took advantage of EM, these card choices jumped to mind:

Magnum Opus is the best use of extra clicks, it's the one runner card that sticks out as "the more you this, the more likely you are to win".

Paige Piper prevents us from drawing unusable cards that would stick in our grip, such as extra copies of uniques like Emptied Mind but also unneeded extra copies of programs. She's the most essential piece to see early, so mulligan for her or Hostage. & luckily, since no one plays NBN or tagging cards or cards that trash resources, she will definitely not get trashed immediately & ruin the game plan.

Guru Davinder is a necessity against flatline decks, though a combination of Feedback Filter & Plascrete Carapace might be sufficient. We're clearly supposed to think Davinder works since he came in the same pack. I would not trash extra copies of Davinder using Paige Piper against kill decks that will try to trash him.

The Noble Path helps us clear out our grip when unwanted cards become stranded in it, such as if we start with 2 copies of Magnum Opus in our opening hand (only other way to ditch the 2nd copy would be to install over the existing one, #feelsbad).

Express Delivery & Making an Entrance help us find the cards we need quicker, which is vital because we set up very slowly. They're a sort of card draw without filling our grip. In an opening hand with this & Paige, you can rearrange your stack, draw a card that's useful early (hopefully MOpus), then shuffle away the rest by installing & triggering Paige.

Other Card Choices

The ID for this deck is flexible, other than build-around IDs like Noise you could use whomever is most appealing. Whizzard is probably best but Reina, Edward Kim, & Valencia also make sense. When Null comes out, he might make the most sense since he can productively dispose of cards in grip that cannot be played.

The breaker suite has gaps: Archer & Archangel will require significant (at least 2 virus tokens, 3 without Net-Ready Eyes) Datasucker support. D4v1d wants recursion, while splashing for out-of-faction pumpable breakers seems unwise given that we cannot afford both breakers plus the means to tutor them out of the stack, while we don't want to add card draw either. The core set breaker suite is the best way to build a sustainable Anarch rig while spending very little influence. Aghora could fill in for D4v1d as it handles some of the expensive ICE that challenge the fixed-strength breakers. It's the high-strength, low-cost ICE (again, like Archer & Archangel) that pose problems.

The rest of the deck isn't that interesting. Medium deep digs are our win condition. Progenitor lets us run a large rig while providing valuable insulation against virus purges. One could probably swap Grimoire for Turntable if so motivated.

The most flexible slots are Hostage, Express Delivery, Making an Entrance, & Progenitor. I'd start there if you want to add cards & need a place to cut from. Many of the 3x cards, like Emptied Mind itself, could safely go down to 2 copies to free up slots.

Other Opportunities

The other cards that deserve a look from Emptied Mind decks are mostly in Shaper:

• Bookmark could take the deck in a totally different direction as it allows you to have a kind of virtual grip hosted on Bookmark
• Capstone & Freelance Coding Contract let you trash stuff from your grip for profit, any card that does that deserves a look
• Earthrise Hotel might work depending on FAQ rulings; if you can check you grip size before the EH start-of-turn trigger, you can gain an extra click & then draw your two cards, making it one of the few forms of card draw that this archetype can utilize
• Express Delivery is the best card draw for this deck since it lets you get what you want without filling up your grip, at one influence we want as many as possible
• Personal Workshop lets you dump cards from grip without paying their install costs, but is influence expensive

Shaper may be a better fit for Emptied Mind but it'd be a totally different deck that would really miss the powerful Anarch filters like Paige & Peddler, which fit perfectly here.