Only if they have 4+ credits. Temple can’t fire Snare!, and real money can be pretty slow to come by if you can’t get multiple turtlebacks.
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I was actually considering this the other day after the Madison, WI regionals where I ran into quite a bit of IG. In swiss rounds of a tournament, you could bank on probably getting the timed win from this strategy.
What I want to know, is hypothetically if a deck like this made it to the finals (untimed) what happens? It seems like you could relatively easily force a stalemate where neither player is actually going to make a move and effectively make the game last for an infinite amount of time.
Depends on if you are in any way progressing the boardstate. If you are netting credits each turn, you could argue that you are preparing your credit pool to be able to be safe from Ronin, Snare, ect. If this is your legitimate strategy, you would have to be a pretty good orator to dodge Stalling charges. Then again, so would the corp. By gathering credits, you actually put yourself farther away from losing, which you plan on using later in the game to score agendas. The Corp, meanwhile, could merrily install every asset in their deck, and would be no closer to winning. You would have to stall the game to that point, though.
Either way, you’re playing with fire here. And by fire, I mean unsporting conduct: stalling. You will have to be able to prove to a judge that you are progressing your position towards winning in some fashion. Similarly, the corp player would have to prove the same thing once you reach this boardstate. I honestly don’t know what would happen here.
I had a game like this online, where I was playing Sunny Lebeau, and managed to drip 8 creds and Kati Jones, along with Feedback Filter. The game lasted little over two hours, as it was a never-score IG without Ronin. Eventually, the corp player conceded. It felt like a victory, but a very dirty victory.
I’m a little confused as to why people find IG decks so dominant. Admittedly, I am on Dumblefork and DLR Val these days, which are pretty good vs it, but I still think my win percentage against the deck is inordinantly high.
My general strategy as Whizz is to focus on trashing the only cards that matter: Bio-Ethics and Hostile. Museums if I have a little extra cash. Other targets can be MCH early game, Jackson if I find him, and Pavilion when it is annoying. More stuff goes when I’m really flush with cash, but sometimes I just build with it.
Runs that aren’t for trashing are limited to one or two a turn, and mostly are for a single access. Even with the low density in the deck, this is very often how I win. Medium only comes down if they have low cash and can’t trigger Snare!s I might access.
IHW stays in hand to protect vs Bio-Ethics that slip by me. Cool thing about that is that if a Pavilion is up, them hitting one on Corp turn lets me get cards. It ain’t full three, but with the clickless Wyldside cards it is pretty great.
I feel I should also note that, in general, there are a lot of things in the deck that just don’t matter and I just leave: Temples, Turtles, PADs, etc… Econ in general is not a worry since they have just a few ICE I can murder easily and they have no way to convert even 1000 credits to victory.
Speaking of shit that absolutely doesn’t matter: Letting some Museum triggers slip. They have to spend time finding and reinstalling whatever they shuffle in, so getting big threats off the board is more important that worrying about them cycling back. If Museum can be trashed, I do, but it actually isn’t what loses you the game.
AND LASTLY, you don’t need hate cards. Except Corroder, since the good players are slotting Hive. But that’s it. All the suggested hate is just a bunch of shitty cards you won’t want once you know how to tear this deck appart.
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Genetics Pavillion only affects draw on the Runner’s turn. Feel free to draw the full three! 
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Holy shit. I need to RTFC. I have played this wrong in literally every game I’ve played. I could have been winning harder!
You know, rereading my post, it sounds like an overly cocky NRDB writeup. I suppose I should say this:
I don’t mean to claim I an expert at beating the deck. I do lose to it. However, I have found success in my general strategy, don’t feel unhappy facing the deck, and don’t feel it is going to be ultra dominant in Regionals meta.
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Playing kate film critic, indexing and astrolabe all do major work. My main problem is hive, specifically triple hive on RnD- lost all the games I did lose (over half I’d say) at 5-6 agenda points. Slotting a HQ interface singleton instead of a legwork would let me apply more consistent HQ pressure so very much considering it.
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“AND LASTLY, you don’t need hate cards. Except Corroder, since the good players are slotting Hive. But that’s it. All the suggested hate is just a bunch of shitty cards you won’t want once you know how to tear this deck appart.”
Can’t parasite take care of hive?
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No, it doesn’t. It depends on if you are taking your turns in a timely fashion. You can be selling your entire board to Aesop and pumping breakers fruitlessly if you like, but as long as you do it in a timely fashion, that’s not stalling in the sense of a rules infraction.
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mm played v this monster tonight in r2 of our gnk (with stealth andy) and sec test desperado + kati were enough to grind out the early game, throw in an employee strike, and suddenly the IG player starts panicking. Lots of remote checking, and early on I ran archives sort of often, despite him having two shocks in there on turn 2 (lol so lucky). So yeah desp sec test, and then a bank job and kati made sure I comfortably won that game
EDIT: As other hate cards I do play 1 film critic right now, but did not play it in that game (though it came in useful v some midseasons titan deck r1)
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This is literally why I have an IG deck. on Jinteki. I don’t enjoy playing it (I make a point to apologize to people I play against), but it is easy to see the ways the deck can lose by going out there and losing.
I still don’t like the endless slog of recycling the deck and setting up a slow grind to death, but I’ve learned a lot about how IG loses.
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That is the best point about R&D ‘lock’ against IG, they don’t really care about seeing agendas, most of the time they will get dumped into archives, this is why Hades Shard is such a strong tech card against IG; there will often be agendas in archives to steal.
I’ve been experimenting with an IG build that includes Mushin and Cerebral Overwriter. Since the runner ‘knows’ that IG doesn’t score, I’ve had some luck scoring TFP on mushin, then trying a never-advance to score out. I like that I can install Snare as a bluff, then overinstall the Snare to recycle it through archives into R&D.
To anyone curious about my experiment, it’s been a refreshing change of pace for me, but just sticking to the grind is typically a safer bet to win the game as IG.
Yeah - this bit me several times in cambridge… IHW and Astrolab are great ways around the Pavilion lock.
I ended up with stuff that’s already been mentioned with different amounts of success. Film critic and seeing 20 random cards (accounting for GFI but also assuming the cards on the field aren’t agendas, 20 should put you solidly above 50% chance of winning) seems a good baseline. You are given the time to grind that number out.
Otherwise, currents, sec testing, sure. I’ve toyed around with globalsec security clearance (avoids running through a stack on r&d every turn, again, time is not an issue). If the IG player is so silly to ice archives, eater becomes a counter (you get to “access” so all cards turn face up, then cannot actually access the shocks). Not saying you should include one eater, but should one play an eater deck, it’s a thought.
And with this pack, through freedom of equality the runner deck that ups the pace by including more points on his side comes a little closer again. Maybe it’s time (and maybe that actually might not have to give up it’s NEH matchup to win here).
IDK, basic play with a film critic will get you places, and I’m sure whizzard can work his magic (though I haven’t seen him lately), but I’d be surprised those were the only answers out there to such a new type of corp threat.
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As I recall, you were the one who pointed it out to at least some of your opponents.
For someone who brought an unpleasant deck to regionals, I generally prefer to take the “friendly” approach to game play. I’ll let folks take back missed triggers, etc.
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This is far more fun, IMO. I get an overwriter to land in at least half my games due to them either thinking its a Ronin or an agenda. And that’s the thing. Sure, my primary win condition is to kill, but if you are never going to run my Mushin targets for fear of traps, you bet your ass I’ll be scoring SOMETHING to reduce the remaining agenda density. And that just ups the ante on the next Mushin install.
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Indexing is super good.
So, what exactly would be the hierarchy of must trash assets in this deck? It seems like the best way (Outside of silver bullets) to play against modern IG is to trash key assets, ignore the rest, and make calculated runs on various centrals. Obviously Bio-ethics and Hostile Infrastructure are biggies, and Museum when you can afford it, but say all three are out and resized, and you can only afford to trash one, which takes priority?
If there is one of each and nothing else going on (e.g you aren’t about to trash an ice with parasite, etc), trash the bio.
If there is more than one bio, trash one of them.
If there is more than one hostile, you’re probably in trouble - and it is quite possible the game has already gotten away from you, so you might just want to run centrals to score while soaking the bio damage. If you think you can actually dig back out, your target this turn depends on your expected line of follow-up - if you will be doing more trashing next turn, hit one of the hostiles. If not, hit the bio and go back to centrals.
I top 8’d our store champs (42 folks) with a pre ethics IG that used mushin, Ronins, Emps and cerebral casts + scorched to set up burst kills (sometimes with allelle repression). The deck was really strong and also great fun (for me).
I mainly moved away from it due to all the hate around ethics lock, but I would strongly reccommend the deck especially as it’s more resistant to a lot of the hate by making it scarier to run facedown assets and having more ‘reach’.
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