How far can you push Amped in a single turn? It doesn’t matter if you’re well into negative hand size if you’ve won already, right? For reference, the spoiled version of Amped reads like this:
Amped Event(1). Gain (Click), (Click), (Click) and take 1 brain damage.
Let’s assume an unrealistic situation: full grip of 5 cards, infinite credits, 20 cards in stack, 3x Trope@5 and 3x SoT on the table. I’m going to be intellectually dishonest here and assume that the cards I brain away are never the ones I want:
- Start is Amped → Duggar’s. You’re left with 2 clicks, 13 cards, 1 brain damage.
- Then if you Amped again, you have 4 clicks, 11 cards and 2 brain damage.
- Amped again: 6 clicks, 9 cards, 3 brain damage.
- Each installed SoT is net +1 click, -1 card, +1 brain damage, so that leaves us on 9 clicks, 6 cards, 6 brain damage.
- Duggar’s again: 5 clicks, 16 cards, 6 brain damage.
- Each Deja Vu in hand gives you a net +1 click, -2 card, +1 brain damage: 8 clicks, 10 cards, 9 brain damage.
- The stack is now empty. We can start recursing Tropes for 3x Amped, 1x Quality Time and 1x some other chaff. So the play is:
- Click Trope: 7 clicks, 10 cards, 9 brain damage.
- Play QT: 6 clicks, 15 cards, 9 brain damage.
- Play Amped: 8 clicks, 13 cards, 10 brain damage.
- Play Amped: 10 clicks, 11 cards, 11 brain damage.
- Play Amped: 12 clicks, 9 cards, 12 brain damage.
- So that’s a net +4 clicks, -1 card, +3 brain damage. We can do that with the other two Tropes to get up to 20 clicks, 7 cards and 18 brain damage.
- I think that’s all the available recursion exhausted at this point, except for the Big Green Reset Button - play Levy AR Lab Access: 19 clicks, 5 cards, 18 brain damage.
- Stretching the limits of plausibility, let’s Duggar’s into triple Amped: 21 clicks, 11 cards, 21 brain damage.
- SoTs won’t be any good this time around, Trope’s been exiled but we can still do the Deja Vu → Amped play 3 more times: 24 clicks, 5 cards, 24 brain damage.
- So Levy-ing gets you +6 clicks, sets you back onto 5 cards and +6 brain damage. Doing that twice more gets you up to 36 clicks, 5 cards, 36 brain damage. I’m sure it’s possible to win from there using a combination of DLR and Hades Shard and whatever else. But it requires a big bucket of money and the-stars-are-now-right levels of luck to stop yourself braining away anything at the wrong time. If there was a runner version of reclamation order, I’d be a little concerned. If there was a card that let the runner pick what to discard, I’d be very concerned. But I don’t think we’ve got a game-breaking infinite click engine yet. (In O:NR, Preying Mantis/Poisoned Water Supply decks could use Emergency Self-Construct to clear brain damage - we can’t do that. Preying Mantis - their version of Joshua B. - wasn’t unique and gave a brain damage at the end of the turn instead of a tag.)
More realistically, what can you do with all these extra clicks if your hand is getting blasted all the time? You need programs/hardware/resources with (click) abilities. The only things I can see with abusable-looking (Click) abilities are Duggar’s and DLR. If you’re not planning on a single turn of going off, a lot of the others become interesting (MOpus, Mr. Li, ProCon, …) It’s a good thing that there’s that 3x limit on any card; otherwise we’d be seeing decks with a pretty good chance of winning on turn 1. Something like:
18x Amped
6x Duggar’s
5x Easy Mark
3x Sure Gamble
3x Same Old Thing
3x Levy AR Lab Access
3x Data Leak Reversal
3x John Masanori
1x Hades Shard
Should do the trick.
