My first attempt at Quetzal

Hello everyone!

I’m new to the forum and fairly new to deckbuilding.
I’ve played and toyed around the core decks, and now I’m doing the next step.
I haven’t played any league or tournament, but I will do it next month.

What do you think about this
Quetzal deck? Could you please give me some advice? Thank you very much in beforehand!

Quetzal - Free Spirit
Cards:47 Influence: 15

Icebreakers : 7
2 x knight
2 x yog
2 x mimic
1 x morningstar

Programs: 14
2 x d4v1d
2 x keyhole
2 x imp
2 x parasite
1 x nerve agent
3 x crescentus ***

Events: 12
3 x sure gamble
3 x Queen’s gambit
3 x retrieval run
3 x inject

Resources: 5
3 x liberated accounts
2 x Kati Jones
2 x the supplier ****
2 x wyldside

Hardware: 7
2 x E3 feedback implants
2 x clone chip ****
2 x grimoire
1 x plascrete carapace

Literally never played Quetzal but I can give a few thoughts on this list:

  1. Datasucker is an important supporting card in alot of decks, especially ones like this that rely on fixed strength breakers. It also makes it easier to instantly blow up pieces of ice higher than 1 strength. I’d recommend at least 2 datasuckers and maybe 3 if you can fit them in; I’d also run the full 3 parasites. It’s such a good card, and you don’t even have to pay influence to include it.

  2. I wouldn’t bother with Wyldside when you have no way to get rid of it when it becomes annoying. You already have 3 Inject, and can use Earthrise Hotel if you want more card draw.

  3. I don’t think the Retrieval Run+Morning Star combination is doing much for your deck. You’re already really good at dealing with low to midrange barriers with your ability, and Morning Star is a really clunky, expensive program that does the same thing. I’d replace with Corroder and not use Retrieval run at all. If you want more recursion, Deja Vu is available.

Anything else I’d have to leave to people who play this ID.

If you want some interesting ideas, there were a few extensive threads on Quetzal that got forgotten when everyone got excited about O&C spoilers: quetzal thread and fester Darwin thread.

For your particular deck, I agree with rotom that wyldside probably won’t fit as well as you like, I kinda suspect the same with the supplier. You may want to swap those for more simple Econ or draw cards, e.g. A third Kati, earth rise, or armitage. Clone chip with inject is really good, keep those. I’ve had good success with throwing grappling hook in to help with face checking against painful sentries and grail ice.

To get good use out of the fixed breakers, I think rotom is right that you really want datasucker, however this leads to knock-on deck design considerations,

  • Is there still enough MU to run Keyhole?
  • What if a blue sun player installs lotus field?
  • How will you deal with grail ice? Merlin is a 4 str code gate so you need to either knight it or get yog and a datasucker out.
  • How easily can you get your breaker suite out? There is only 1 Morningstar and no tutors, so two barriers could prove tricky to get past.
  • Crescentus is good, but 3 may be more than you need as it can be situational and it consumes yet more MU.
  • As is I think rotom is right about retrieval run, however you could modify your deck to get more use out of it.

As an example idea, you might play as much draw as possible and use more expensive breakers like torch or femme and try to get them into your heap quickly, so you can recur with retrieval run. However, I think using ai breakers is the most popular option with Quetzal, e.g. overmind, or Darwin, but again those cards need their own support, so the deck would be a bit different, you can check out the threads and see what other people have tried, for comparison this is my current Darwin backed build.

Everyone has their own take on things though, so I’d recommend sticking to the original concept you had in mind for your deck, and try to make it work as best you can.