Deckspace: Tropical Jinteki

Originally published at: Deckspace: Tropical Jinteki - StimHack

Discuss the latest StimHack article by @Nagnazul here.

Been wanting to try an iceless deck for awhile, but have only seen one other list (CI) that I thought was worth a shot. this one looks fun. definitely looks like it would struggle versus a competent player and certain match-ups, but the same can be said for Cambridge PE. I’ll definitely give this a spin. good points about the Always Advance package.

do you feel that some card draw may be worthwhile here? I reckon the more cards you can install the better, and the more full HQ is, the better, too. are Anonymous Tip or Gasp Corporate Shuffle worth considering here?

please say yes. I just want to play Corporate Shuffle.

Anonymous Tip is a legitimate alternative to Howard, as I mention in the article. Corporate Shuffle though is not the greatest idea; key operations (Neural EMP, Scorched Earth) accumulate in HQ over the turns. If you Shuffle those away, you lose your main victory condition.

Plus, 2 influence means cutting Scorched Earths.

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I built an ICEless jinteki deck a little bit ago. Doesn’t 3 Scorch just open you up to losing to Plascrete? If they have Plascrete, they can just let you tag them with Casts and remove it the next turn. I think I prefer the idea of playing the Mushin package and playing a few casts, and maybe one scorch, just to threaten the Scorch kill so you get them to take a brain or two. Do you find there is sufficient window to play Casts for damage even after they play Plascrete?

Looks fun! I’m surprised Astrolabe wasn’t mentioned as a counter to this deck.

I actually won FFG’s December monthly tournament last year with an iceless shell game deck. It would be a lot better with current tech like the list in the article, but I found that the deck performed quite a bit better with just a bit of ice (anywhere from 3-9) – at which point I was more or less running Cambridge PE.

Nice to see an updated iceless list, though. Cool article.

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I wonder what people might think about hostile infrastructure in this deck (or one like it).
while it is quite expensive, I bet there are a lot of scenarios where a rezzed HI or two would allow you to keep snares etc. in hand, or possible protect other nasty cards the runner’d like to trash. Plus, at 5 trash cost, even if you can never afford to rez it, it may tax some of the poorer runners.

in particular, I’m thinking of rezzing it right before a large multi-access to even futher cement the fear of hitting snares and shocks or even shi.kyus.

last but not least, rezzing right before an HQ access might be a great way to represent traps when you’re actually holding agendas.

Tried a similar idea with NEH with the only ice being Data Raven.

Core idea was to land a tag mid run and kill with Dedicated Response team.
However this deck went very wide with TGTBT, Berniece Mai, and ghost branches.
May be worth trying if you want a wider version of the Triopical Jinteki

Ah so this is what I’ve been playing against on OCTGN. Without Ronin or ice the work compression has trouble adding up to a flatline. Against no Ice you can run R&D two or three times per turn with a full hand fairly safely letting you score or trash most of the deck. Subliminals didn’t get a chance to return in any of the games, the best thing they did is halt my R&D runs for the rest of the turn when I accessed them.

Good catch; I never encountered it during testing, but it would definitely be a pain to deal with.

Plascrete certainly sucks to see, but you have other kills. Neural EMP is the main one, but Philotic sometimes comes through in a pinch.

I think one thing to keep in mind is to always allow the runner to make mistakes. While you have perfect information about your hand and deck, they don’t. Go ahead and play Cast while they have Plascrete on, see how they react. Runners in weird situations tend to have unpredictable reactions. Worst case worse, just Scorch them anyways, Plascrete be damned; you spend a click, they’ll spend four recovering. That opens up a scoring window.

Besides, what would you play other than Scorch? I’d argue it’s the best possible use of influence.

My influence was 2 Cerebral Overwriter, 1 Scorch 2 Archived Memories 3 Jackson Howard

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There’s something about this deck, at least with the idea, that still bothers me. You were initially trying to blank a lot of the cards the runner has, because they are focused on running through ICE and generating a lot of money, both of which are not needed against this kind of deck, but on the other hand, this deck taxes the runner on cards, not credits, so blanking their cards means they play less cards and have more to feed to damage. In the end, I believe this decks need at least some ICE, preferably the kind that forces the runner to break it, so they must get money, and they must install programs, so in the end, they use more cards than they would like to, because it’s needed to run your servers. That way, your card tax works better. I think that is why a little bit of ICE is better than no ICE (at least in testing, that has been what worked better for me).

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But you don’t get to unlock the achievement if you have ICE in the deck. :slight_smile: