Excellent! Let’s spam our Kim lists. Feliks I agree, I think you are very dependent on hitting Opus in the early game. whatisthistreachery, I think you don’t need 3x the cutlery, just go down several pieces of it and add about 3-4 more money cards! Prepaid in anything but Kate can be a hassle to set up.
Here’s my latest list. I want to play it like a Criminal, where just getting in and accessing is the main plan.
Supplier Kim
Edward Kim: Humanity’s Hammer (Order and Chaos)
Event (11)
3x Dirty Laundry (Creation and Control)
2x Special Order (Core Set) ••••
3x Steelskin (Order and Chaos)
3x Sure Gamble (Core Set)
Resource (14)
3x Daily Casts (Creation and Control)
3x Earthrise Hotel (The Source)
3x Liberated Account (Trace Amount)
2x Scrubber (A Study in Static)
3x The Supplier (First Contact) ••••• •
I’ve never loved UWC, and I really don’t like Dyson much myself. I get it helps with Zu memory…but why not just run Grimoire? It’s cheaper and you have enough Viruses to warrant it IMO.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate Dyson with a passion, but if you’re going that route, you might as well. With supplier both aren’t so bad…though I’d run inject to help find the parts way faster,
I think I’d consider swapping out the 2 Scrubbers since you have 3x Imps, and cutting the 3 Hardware.
With the 5 slots, I’d consider:
2/3 Grimoire
2nd Medium at the very least since no way to find it
Consider swapping Cujo into a 2nd Mimic (you already have Femme + Sucker for pumpable Killer and Suckers work fine w/ Mimic as well)
Add in 1-2 Wanton Destructions or Nerve Agent for some sort of HQ pressure
I don’t think you ever want to run Opus in Anarch. There’s no tutoring, so you have to get lucky to find it early. Then you need to keep it safe, and find memory for it. That’s a lot of faffing around and cardslots. You may as well use all that for Liberated Accounts/Day Job - which is just as click efficient, but doesn’t involve the install cost, influence or memory issues.
UWC is just not good. I don’t have time to worry if the Dyson will come out. Dyson isn’t essential, but in longer games it will allow, especially with Zu not counting against my limit, to allow me a ton of MU for viruses. I wouldn’t install it without help from the Supplier.
Also helps against unexpected traces that might give you Spinal Modem BD…
I like Spinal over Grimoire here because I think it is an underplayed card that really helps Anarch in getting as many accesses as it can. This deck is about getting in and trashing everything, be it with Imp, Scrubber, or Kim’s ability.
A second Medium could be OK. I think Kim’s ability with Imps is great HQ pressure enough. We’ll see though, this hasn’t been tested… just theorycrafted for about 3 months.
I was trying Prepaid simply due to all of the events costing 1-2c. I don’t have the Barrier cutlery due to Corroder just being good, but I really feel Prepaid outside Kate isn’t too bad. The simulations provided by the recent article showed that it was just about 1 slope unit less than Kate.
I ran some deck draw simulations and you’d be surprised how clean it goes. Play your programs, play your econ events, and you quickly have a nice non-overflowing hand of cutlery events to cut through code gates and most importantly sentries.
Memory might be a problem but thats yet to be seen.
Edit: just realized I had Knifed instead of Forked.
I’d like to see desperado, grifter, eater, clone chip, cutlery, with NA and medium in memstrips. Run till you kill the ice, building up suckers and virus counters, clear the ice, and make an open run.
This depends on how effective Eater + Ice Destruction will be. I suspect it will be hard to get enough consistent accesses to really use Kim’s ability. This idea may work better in Valencia, Reina, or MaxX. I also like the idea of Desperado with Eater, but most Eater decks should seriously consider splurging on Siphons. Vigil + Masanori should combo well enough with Eater and credit denial that you can save your influence.
I think Kim’s primary strength is having built in flatline protection, scarier pressure on R&D early, and more powerful late-game Medium digs. He also could help prolong a credit denial strat by hitting Hegde Funds, etc when the corp is down. I wouldn’t count on sniping a lot of econ ops out of HQ though.
Eater may actually be pretty good in Kim, but bring your Siphons.
I think eater + siphon + vamp is the key to the deck style. I’ll post a list once I’ve playtested it more, but eater + siphon recursion is a nasty combo. The reason I think it’s ideal with Kim is actually because it allows us to snipe the economy cards that accumulate in hand or R&D that they can’t play following a siphon. I feel like siphon is much stronger when they can’t dig out to the point of hitting their hedge fund a couple turns later. It forces them to click for credits, especially with imp to handle unprotected asset economy. Similarly when they rez ice or assets to stop the siphon, that gives us new targets for imp/eater.
The only other breaker I’ve been running is overmind, which seems to work nicely (though might depend on swordsman’s use or if ai-breaker hate becomes more popular). That way you can access cards in R&D or HQ once you’ve bankrupted them or destroyed all their ice.
Also with Kim + Ice destruction you’re sniping operations, they’re trying to draw for ice, and i think it creates a logjam in HQ and you’ll see a lot of clicking to draw or early/ineffective jackson moves.
I practiced some E. Kim on Sunday, mostly using my MO build above (with changes) but with a few other variations as well.
Against standard NEH-FA it was pretty interesting. HQ was a big target as I could hit Biotics and Fast Tracks in there while they were vulnerable. If they protected HQ too much I was able to swap to R&D and get to work. Not drawing Imp was painful because I want to trash Pad/Marked/SanSan/DBS, but when I had it I could run pretty rampant. Mangum Opus in opening helped, but I won a few games without it.
RP was impossible if I didn’t draw Opus in my opener, and it was pretty hit or miss if I did. They just don’t rely enough on Operations for the ability to be very relevant unless you happen to get a Celebrity Gift. Having Imp and Parasite were the biggest boons and those are hardly specific to E. Kim or my deck build. Steelskin is pretty cool in this matchup though.
I feel that the only way Edward Kim can be strong enough for a varied meta is to go full out Tag Me with Joshua B and aggressive siphon play. If the corps decks don’t rely on operations then you’re still very powerful due to your Account Siphons. And if they do, you have a built-in ability to counter it. It’s not guaranteed to save you from being flatlined, but with Steelskin it seems fairly unlikely you’ll be in danger. Of course, then the problem is getting in often and reliably which means cutleries + eater may be a good choice.
That said, I haven’t played Anarch and Joshua B enough to know how much of that is a viable strategy that cards like Day Job would be an auto-include so you can run straight after Day Job with the extra click. Playing the cutlery + siphon + imp + tag me + having a good enough econ is obviously far too many cards for a single deck too. So I’m not sure how to put that deck concept together just yet but I’m definitely the most interested in trying out Kim among the new anarch IDs.
siphon recursion can be strong in any anarch deck. Kim wants access and siphon+eater seems counter-intuitive. If you’re hope is to deny combo cards or op-econ wouldn’t you accomplish the same thing with keyhole?
I wonder if pheremones wouldn’t actually be appropriate with this guy. it’s tutorable, reduces your access cost to a place where combo cards accumulate, and can provoke a wipe.
I feel like with Pheromones you’re spending influence for a less versatile Datasucker. The credits are recurring, but harder to build up and less usable in other places. Seems like a tough sell to me.
Keyhole is counter-intuitive with Edward Kim as well which I did think about before, plus you’re not exactly denying them as much due to the shuffle.
The reason why it’s not counter-intuitive because cutleries opens up servers for multiple runs while siphons keeps the unrezzed ice unrezzed… theoretically.
All runners ultimately want access. I don’t think the point that Kim wants access runs against siphon+eater. Eater is largely a strategy for landing cards like siphon and vamp, bankrupting the runner, and then hitting with accesses that eliminate operation economy from hand / hq. Ice destruction along the way keeps the opponent drawing and playing ice will other cards / operations accumulate in HQ.