Professor, the MWL, and Rebirth: A match made in heaven

Fellow professors, our time has come.

We have waited so long for this day. We have been so patient. And now finally, our favorite academic is ready to shine. Now, finally, it’s time for the world to see how great the ol’ academic truly is.

…or at least it will be, once rebirth comes out :smiley:

All joking aside though, things are really looking up for the good old Prof, so I thought I’d share my deck with you all, as well as talk about how rebirth will affect the Professor.

Schooled

The Professor: Keeper of Knowledge
49 cards
Influence: 1/1 ●​○​○​○​○​○​○​
Event (15)
3 Diesel
2 Modded
2 Quality Time
3 Scavenge
1 Stimhack ●​
2 Test Run
2 The Maker’s Eye
Resource (6)
3 Personal Workshop
1 Same Old Thing
2 Technical Writer
Hardware (9)
3 Clone Chip ○​○​○​
2 Dinosaurus
2 Plascrete Carapace
2 R&D Interface
Program (19)
1 Cerberus “Lady” H1 ○​
1 D4v1d ●​●​●​●​
1 Datasucker ●​
1 Faerie ●​●​●​
1 Imp ●​●​●​
3 Leprechaun
2 Magnum Opus
1 Medium ●​●​●​
1 Mongoose ●​●​
1 Multithreader ●​
1 Parasite ●​●​○​
3 Self-modifying Code
1 Sneakdoor Beta ●​●​●​
1 Yog.0 ●​○​

(Stimhack to be replaced by Rebirth when it comes out)

I’ll explain a few of the choices here.
This is basically a modified big rig deck, so Opus is the main economy around here. Get it out early, on a leprechaun or otherwise, and you’ll be fine. However, workshop is the main card you need to see in your opening hand, or you’re gonna have to dig hard for it. It just makes everything so much cheaper.

Leprechaun might be a bit of a tough sell but trust me, these Irish gentlemen will make your memory problems so much easier. Yeah, program destruction, but often you’ll only have Opus and SMC on them, so it’s basically the same as if the opus was just trashed. They also are the only things making sneakdoor possible, which should be commended.

Dinosaurs is a niche console, but the cost makes it the perfect workshop project, and you don’t need the MU with leprechauns anyway. Since you have 3x scavenge, things are going to be popping in and out of your rig a lot, and it isn’t too hard to switch whatever you need onto the dino when you need it to be there.

Basically, this deck revolves around being flexible. Hit R&D a few times, then scavenge the medium for a sneakdoor when more substantial ice comes down. Swap again if you need to hit a remote.

So yeah, what do you think? Is professor the new Kate? (Probably not, but we can dream, right?)

2 Likes

I find it hilarious that the biggest positive change for The Professor entails not being The Professor as soon as possible.

16 Likes

Yeah, that’s pretty funny :smiley:
I mean to be fair, lore-wise, I think the professor would prefer not being the professor, ruined reputation and all that.

3 Likes

And then I stopped reading.

In all seriousness, The Professor is fun, but not top tier unfortunately.

3 Likes

I think you omitted the resource section? You reference workshop several times but I don’t see it there…

Oh yeah, oops XD

Yeah I changed that, sorry

What’s wrong with 49 cards? The Professor has such a large box of tricks, it would be a shame not to use 'em all really. 3x Diesel and 2x Quality time gives you a large enough draw engine to get the non-programs you need, and SMC + Test run does the rest. Seriously, if discounting a deck at the size alone was such a big issue, Valencia and Sunny wouldn’t be played at all.

I am really looking forward to slotting in Rebirth into my current professor shell, which is a Scheherazade/Sahashrarah build that uses Aseop’s kinda like noise does.

Works alright enough. I especially like the synergy with ProCo, which almost gets you the same efficiency as Wyldside does BEFORE Pancakes.

Its a shame there isn’t a card that gets you an extra click for shapers that is playable. Of course if Collective had been printed, you could proco three times and still have two clicks, which is better efficiency than WyldPancakes.

But yeah, pretty much there are only two directions for Professor right now. Program spam and Stimshop. I like spam a bit more because your economy isn’t as reliant as it is on Stim, but you are forced to play programs over some great hardware.

Rebirth has been talked about before, but I wanted to mention that I don’t think it’s that great for Professor. I’d probably still play Stimhack.

Reason being, with no way to tutor for it you are not guaranteed to get it early on. Later on, there’s really no Shaper ID that provides a good, reliable mid/late -game boost. Kit might be situationally good, but that’s about it. Most IDs like Kate or Hayley give a small trickle throughout the whole game, so you need to switch early to benefit from it. So it ends up just being a very unreliable sort-of-economy card. I’d rather play stimhack, at least if I’m also playing Personal Workshop.

The problem with 49 cards is you’re trying to find many single cards. Heck, you’re specifically relying on finding the one copy of Rebirth in your deck - the more cards you have in your deck, the harder it is to find that one copy. Valencia and Sunny are played because their abilities are really, really strong (hence why they have the downside of increased deck size)- the Professor’s ability is most certainly not strong enough to warrant it - I wouldn’t say that any Shaper’s ability is, actually.

Furthermore, most Shaper abilities are ones that help you get setup efficiently / quickly. Kate saves you money as you build your rig. Hayley speeds up how quickly you can build your rig. Chaos Theory lets you build your rig efficiently (due to deck size) and without needing to worry about MU. Nasir lets you get credits to build your rig in the early game while the corp is still rezzing ice. ALL of these are early game abilities. Rebirthing to any of these IDs is pointless unless you can do it really early in the game, otherwise you’ve missed your chance to even use their abilities. In a 49-card deck, you can NOT rely on getting the ONE card needed to make use of their abilities.

Looking at the rest of the IDs: we have Jesminder and Exile, both of whom generally rely on specifically built decks in order to function, and Kit. Kit is the really the only good choice for who you can Rebirth into, because it’s okay to get her late game as well as early, but at that point you may as well just build a Kit deck in the first place, or use Kate / Hayley in order to speed up building up a rig and then swap to Kit once their abilities stop being profitable - this will probably be in the mid-late game, giving you much more chance to draw your lone Rebirth, as well.

I don’t think Rebirth is right in the Professor. I love the Prof, honestly I do, but Rebirth isn’t the right choice. The Prof’s “lack” of an ability isn’t his weak point, it’s his inconsistency and limited tools due to lack of influence. So you rebirth Prof into Kate or Kit or Hayley in the first turn or two, so what? Now you have a janky shaper deck that has very little of the tools you can normally import in.

2 Likes

I see your points, but I’d still take Rebirth over Stimhack for the options you can get out of it, as well as the surprise factor. The main advantage Professor has over all other Shaper IDs is surprise factor. His box of tricks is so large, and has so many programs in it, that it’s impossible to plan for them all. I’ve played against corps who’ve rezzed archer and forfeited 2 points to ‘catch’ me, only for me to SMC into faerie and eat it for only a few creds. Imp, sneakdoor…all stuff you wouldn’t expect from shaper, and find it difficult to plan around.

Rebirth only increases that. Click 1 rebirth gives you 3 free clicks to do whatever the heck you want with an ID the corp hasn’t planned around. Run through data ravens with Jes. Smash through ice with Kit and a yogsaurus. Do crazy clone chip mid-run installs with Haley. The sky’s the limit, and that’s why I love professor really. You just have so many tools to use, the corp ends up getting overwhelmed.

Sounds good, but 'cause I use leprechaun Sheherazade would be useless

If you want to cruise through Data Ravens, you can use New Angeles City Hall - you can even include more than 1 of them in your deck! And Shaper has the built-in synergy with Film Critic. If you’re going to Yogasaurus, the corp is probably going to expect a rebirth into Kit, completely defeating the point of the surprise. For crazy mid-run clone chip stuff with Hayley, that means you NEED to get the rebirth early, which is pretty unlikely in general, and gets even LESS likely with a 49 card deck.

Also, Stimhack is the sole definition of “surprise factor” for runners. an instant 9 credits without spending a click is insane.

It’s not that the cards arnt accessible, it’s just that this deck could be trimmed down without making many sacrifices and become far more consistent, comparing this to like Val or Sunney is like playing one of those ID’s with 54 cards.

What do you recommend trimming? I’m open to ideas at this point.

To be honest I’m not sure if this will work all that well, but there can be an element of mindgames involved with rebirth. Like, if you play yogsaurus early to smash through a lotus field etc, then the corp is expecting the rebirth into kit the whole game. So they’ve built up their servers to avoid putting code gates in.

Then you can completely fake the corp out by rebirthing into someone else, like Nasir for a low-credit run at a server during what the corp thought was a scoring window, or aforementioned Haley shennanigans. Just throwing ideas around, and I know it sounds niche, but Prof was always going to be niche anyway.

I would go a different direction, but assuming you want to stick with what you’ve got so far, Test Run does not seem nessecary. You’ve got no giant programs you can combo with Scavange, and you have enough recursion with Scavange and Clone Chip. 2 Makers Eye could probly turn into a third RDI, with Workshop and Tech Writer, you have more synergy plus you save a slot. Multithreaded, however cool it may be with SMC, has limited use in this kind of list.

And that’s it! You are down to a nice, clean, easy 45. In my personal opinion, ProCo is better in this sort of deck than Opus, because you can cut QT and save slots, and your lack of Sure Gamble and Faust is troubling. You could cut 2 RDI’s and only have one, but you will end up leaning on Medium (which is what I would end up doing anyways). Dino seems suboptimal to me, and Lampary is a good shout in Professer. Those are just my personal choices, however, your playstyle may dictate what you do in these situations.

Thanks for the suggestions man! I think I will cut the test runs, but I like the maker’s eye powerplay with an RDI or medium out, as you can get the corp to focus too heavily on protecting remotes or archives (vs sneakdoor), then hit them with the multiaccess. One thing I’ve noticed is that this deck is very good at getting into a server…once. Then you need to build up again. That makes Maker’s eye pretty nice for an extra 2 accesses before the gate slams shut over rnd again and you need to build up.
I put in multithreader because of crazy modded combos, but without it its pretty much dead weight so that’s probably going. That takes me down to 46, which I think is good enough for now.

On faust: I really don’t like it. I just don’t like the card, and in a deck designed to creating a huge rig I almost never have enough cards to fuel it anyway.
Sure gamble is a bit of an omission to be sure. I guess I never really found a place for it to slot in, and thought tech writer/opus would give me all the econ I needed.

I get the idea with ProCo, but in my opinion I like opus more because it can be tutored, as well as give a nice bit of burst econ when the agendas hit the table.

If the deck is really good at getting in only once, why not just cut the RDIs entirely and just throw in a third Maker’s Eye? You could probably cut the Datasucker as well, as that really relies on getting a large number of Central server accesses.