Hey guys, I’ve been playing around with Harmony Medtech ever since GFI was spoiled and I think I’ve finally gotten a good list out of it. It plays a bit like a cross between glacier and rush–it’s primarily glacier since our plan is to score out 3-pointers, but it can go very fast since we only need to score two. Here’s the list I’m at (after many iterations):
6 Agenda Glacier
Harmony Medtech: Biomedical Pioneer (Honor and Profit)
Agenda (6)
- 3x Global Food Initiative (Data and Destiny) •••
- 3x The Future Perfect (Honor and Profit)
Asset (3)
- 3x Jackson Howard (Opening Moves) •••
Upgrade (5)
- 3x Caprice Nisei (Double Time)
- 2x Marcus Batty (The Underway)
Operation (14)
- 3x Celebrity Gift (Opening Moves)
- 2x Green Level Clearance (A Study in Static) ••
- 3x Hedge Fund (Core Set)
- 3x Medical Research Fundraiser (Honor and Profit)
- 3x Restructure (Second Thoughts)
Barrier (5)
- 3x Ashigaru (Up and Over)
- 2x Himitsu-Bako (Opening Moves)
Code Gate (7)
Sentry (4)
12 influence spent (max 12)
18 agenda points (between 18 and 19)
44 cards (min 40)
Cards up to Data and Destiny
Deck built on NetrunnerDB.
A pretty simple structure, it’s just econ, ice, and psi-game upgrades.
Agenda suite is obvious, and is the whole basis of the deck. By running 6 agendas, 3 of them GFI, we only need to score twice and runner has to usually score 3 and win a psi-game or two. This makes R&D density low as well as HQ density.
The ICE suite is polarized between cheap taxing ice (the cheap binary ice tax runner to find a breaker) and big tough to break taxing ice. The idea is we cheaply defend R&D with taxing ice because agenda density is so low, we gear check HQ early on while the agenda/asset density can be high. Later in the game we can layer more tax on R&D and with HQ we either abandon it (we can often keep just 1 TFP in our hand so effective agenda density vs no film critic is 1/15 + a small tax 1/5 times) or we can reinforce with either tax or big ice–vs siphon spam we probably want to get something big there. Big ice tend to live on the remote, especially Ashigaru which is a nightmare for many runners to deal with. By saving money on central defense we have money to rez big remote ice fairly early and push out agendas. Generally our scoring server will end up having at least 2 big ice (toll-booth + ashigaru for example), though sometimes a couple small taxers or a third big ice are necessary.
Assets are kept to a minimum to make R&D and HQ less dense, but 3x Jackson is critical–he functions as economy very often since we have a protected remote for him a lot of the time and draws towards operation econ. Of course reducing HQ agenda density is crucial at times too, late game he can be used to shuffle back operations to decrease R&D density. I think dropping any copies of him is a clear mistake. 3x Caprice is obvious and backbone of the deck. 2x Marcus are there for redundancy and as a late game combo with caprice since you can rez and use both during one run–this combo forces runner to have at least 4 creds upon access (otherwise you can bid 2 then 2 and lock out) and even then if we have enough money to randomly generate our bidding it results in a 1/9 steal rate. Often Marcus can be enough to ensure a (2/3 chance) score though since usually runners are unable to run the remote twice in one turn.
Econ is maxed out operation based. The idea of operation econ is it makes R&D less porous, and stops the runner from being able to lock us out of econ. This deck just constantly hungers for cash between the giant ice and all the psi-games you need to be able to afford to play–plus just scoring the agendas costs at least 10 creds!. Every early iteration I’ve had was always tight on money, finally with this much econ the deck functions. It’s as much as I could fit between influence constraints and quality of econ. The weird choices are medical research fundraiser and GLC. MRF is really solid in this deck, despite us trying to be taxing, since it enables big ice rezzes that take back the money. There are times where you want to delay firing it (for example to not allow runner to get to Sure Gamble money easily) but it usually functions very similarly to hedge fund and restructure–it costing 3 is a big benefit too since it can get you out of tight money situations and get you into hedge fund and restructure money quicker. GLC is a late addition but I’ve been pretty happy with it. The minor econ bust can get you into money range to fire off other econ and the card means it’s very useful early game to hunt for ice/econ. In this deck drawing a card is likely worth a bit more than a credit so it’s almost hedge-fund except more flexible. This deck is often tight on clicks and often needs to control how many cards it’s drawing so BLC would likely be very poor here.
And that’s it! Pretty simple shell, no frills, but is very effective. We do live/die a bit on psi-games, but often the big ice early enough + caprice can shut runners out of the remote very effectively. We can often score out fairly quickly so there’s a ton of pressure on the runner to get set up fast. On avg in our remote we will lose psi game about 1/3 of the time so if we force out 3 agendas our expectation value is to score two of them–which is all we need. Because of GFI this means they can score that 1 remote agenda and another agenda out of R&D and HQ and still not win. So our game-plan on avg wins–but of course the psi-game adds quite a bit of variance.
Couple of quick thoughts on changes. I’m pretty convinced Mushin is a no-go. As much as it creates scores when combined with junebug and GFI, the 5-6 deckslots it uses are massive–even though it isn’t costly in itself, the opportunity cost of those cards not being econ is huge. It also creates another source of variance in an already high variance deck.
At this point I’m really unsure of how to improve this deck, maybe you guys have suggestions? One change I’m considering is -1 Assassin +1 Komainu since Komainu is a bit cheaper and often a bit more taxing (plus some face-check tax). Interns is tempting but i used it in previous iterations and between being dead early game and slow late game I decided to run extra Marcus instead.
There’s some weird timing stuff to know about with this deck. First off rez caprice and marcus when last ice on server is (or would be) rezzed–that’s the last rez window. I know simple for you pros but I played this wrong for a while Second Himitsu-Bako with Ashigaru is fun. Please (please!) correct me if I’m wrong, but we can allow runner to break all the subs on Ashigaru then we can bounce Bako and force them to break one more after that–kinda fringe spot, but in theory vs Lady or Spike we can let them choose the subs, then add another after–so with 5-cards in hand we can force 3-lady tokens, then force a 4th to get used after we bounce Bako since he’s already chosen the subs he was breaking and so can’t just use 3 total.
I’m excited to hear your thoughts! I’m not sure yet exactly how strong this deck is, or how much room there is to make it better, but I’ve had a ton of fun playing it and have had pretty solid results with it overall. There’s some room where this is “food coats but worse” but at the same time because it doesn’t rely on asset economy and can score out in mid-game rather than late I think it has room to be extremely solid in a metagame tuned against foodcoats–plus games don’t ever run super long so that’s a nice benefit for tournaments.