[Express] Disappeared Clone: The Ken Tenma Experience

Running all the time and 0 meat dmg protection seems to be a glaring weakness with this deck. It’s dependent for sure, but seems like an issue.

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Indeed, it’s got the drug dealer to get to 6 cards, but 2xSE is an issue for it:

If yellow meat damage remains popular I may reverse my decision to run no scorch protection at all

My experience with this HSJ-fueled Kenny is limited to one big SC and a couple of pick-up games afterwards with slight tweaks for MWL. I’d picked the deck up literally the day of, figuring I had a) a good read on the meta, and b) lots of experience playing crims :slight_smile: – though it was only a coinflip away from from beating the sole yellow butcher I’ve faced with it.

If the increasingly annoyingly named 24/7 thingyshops are still prevalent and/or damage Weyland makes a comeback, plascretes are necessary (as in all decks) :slight_smile:

I ran Medium out of Andy at worlds this year, and prepped for worlds with Medium/Gang Sign Leela, so definitely intrigued by this. There was (and still is) a ton of CVS in the meta, so… I dunno. It’s tough. I never had fewer than 6 agenda points at worlds, but Medium Andy went 4-3, because I couldn’t close games out after purge. HSJ Kenny is way richer than that Andy build though, so might have more time to build medium back…

The best Medium crim decks I think will be Testing based decks. The synergy is just too high. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time (pre MWL) playing Medium Andy with Multithreaders, although that deck was a bit slow with Dyson mem chip, the Sunny sentry breaker, etc. Maybe Mongoose helps with that.

Ok, more testing, more tweaks. Thanks to @hhooo and @rojazu for advice, this inside-medium Ken list is coming nicely I think.

Ken “Express” Tenma Disappeared Clone
15 influence spent (max 17-2☆=15) •••••••••••••••
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Kala Ghoda

Event (21)
3x Account Siphon
3x Dirty Laundry
1x Emergency Shutdown
3x High-Stakes Job
3x Inside Job
2x Legwork
3x Special Order
3x Sure Gamble
Hardware (5)
2x Desperado ☆☆
3x Public Terminal

Resource (11)
2x Earthrise Hotel
2x John Masanori
2x Kati Jones
2x Same Old Thing
2x Security Testing
1x Utopia Shard •

Icebreaker (6)
1x Corroder ••
1x Eater •••
1x Faerie
1x Femme Fatale
1x Gordian Blade •••
1x Mongoose

Program (2)
2x Medium ••••• •

first off, the ridiculous hostage package had to go, and good riddance. with connections no longer important, I took @rojazu’s advice and switched from drug dealer to earthrise, which so far has been a good change.

second, 3x special order is a must. I can only afford this ridiculous rig (and it is ridiculous) by sticking to one-ofs, which means finding those first crucial breakers can be tough…

On the note of breakers, swapped a faerie for a mongoose on a whim, and I have to say it’s doing a lot of work. with architect a bit sparse these days many corps are spreading their sentries pretty thin, and it’s very rare that I even need the femme or faerie as backup. I’m considering putting more copies in, perhaps in a test build without eater. I’ve been finding that I tend to either install eater and barely anything else, or I find most of my rig early and don’t bother with/miss eater. It’s tough, because in some matchups ice goes down quickly and I need a way to land HSJs and DL’s like, right now, and in others an open arrchives or remote will keep me rich and threatening while I dither around building up my rig.

anyways, the heart of the deck is still inside job (criminal’s best AI, don’t you know?)/medium, which is doing a ton of work scaring the pants off corps and making for easy siphons and weak remotes due to a split in the ice focus.

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You’ve got no recursion, is running 1-ofs on breakers really that great of an idea? A Markus Batty, Kegan Lane, or even just unfortunate net / meat damage can snipe out your Corroder or your Gordian, and then you’re in a really rough spot.

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This is where im landing right now. I dropped the recursion, so 2 rex just dont cut it by themselves so i have imported a passport for centrals. With only one plascrete i am looking to test dealers over eathrise as psuedo damage protection.

Ken “Express” Tenma: Disappeared Clone (Honor and Profit)

Event (22)
3x Account Siphon (Core Set)
3x Dirty Laundry (Creation and Control)
2x High-Stakes Job (Kala Ghoda)
2x Inside Job (Core Set)
2x Legwork (Honor and Profit)
2x Quality Time (Humanity’s Shadow)
2x Special Order (Core Set)
3x Sure Gamble (Core Set)
3x The Maker’s Eye (Core Set)

Hardware (6)
2x Desperado (Core Set)
1x Plascrete Carapace (What Lies Ahead)
3x Public Terminal (Honor and Profit)

Resource (8)
2x Bank Job (Core Set)
1x DDoS (The Universe of Tomorrow)
2x Earthrise Hotel (The Source)
3x Same Old Thing (Creation and Control)

Icebreaker (9)
2x Cerberus “Rex” H2 (All That Remains)
2x Corroder (Core Set)
3x Faerie (Future Proof)
1x Femme Fatale (Core Set)
1x Passport (Honor and Profit)
15 influence spent (max 17-2)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Kala Ghoda

Deck built on NetrunnerDB.

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Any thoughts on swapping the Medium for a Keyhole? You’ve got the Eater already and the money to feed it. Biggest issue would probably be the 2 MU it takes.

I think at that point you’re better off with Andy or maybe Leela. The point is to use Inside Job to trigger Tenma’s ID ability, and to provide insane pressure + R&D lockdown with Medium. Keyhole wouldn’t trigger Ken’s ID, it wouldn’t provide the R&D lock, and it wouldn’t provide the same pressure since it doesn’t require as much ice on R&D. That being said, I am a little surprised he’s spending 3 inf on Eater - it mostly seems there for Account Siphons and maybe High-Stakes Jobs.

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I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s an MU hog in a 5 MU rig, and proper R&D lock with Medium is a more threatening.

Eater seems to only work for a couple effects, including High Stakes Job, but you might just straight up get more value out of Faust just because you can access alone.

Faust is better than Eater in this deck, for sure. That being said, I do still like just having regular breaker redundancy more.

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currently sleeving up a version along these lines for testing tonight - I think eater may be an unnecessary leftover from previous builds

[quote=“tzeentchling, post:27, topic:6733, full:true”]
Any thoughts on swapping the Medium for a Keyhole? You’ve got the Eater already and the money to feed it. Biggest issue would probably be the 2 MU it takes.
[/quote]as others have noted, the key to the mediums is that they can provide extra value from your “just for money” run events (DL and HSJ) as well as comboing with inside job. eater/kehole is a whole different archetype (not necessarily a bad one), so i’m more likely to drop eater than add keyhole (also, as you point out, the memory sitch is not great either)

I missed playing PrePaid Kate, so I thought I’d make a Ken deck and try and relive old memories. I was brousing through the thread and looking at some builds to get some ideas, and more or less stole what I liked from various decks, and added some random crap I like. I won all my games at league tonight, but man shit gets expensive sometimes. I tried to make it resource-light for going tag-me; not sure if that’s a mistake or not, but it seemed okay. I dunno. Here’s where I landed:

Ken “Express” Tenma: Disappeared Clone (Honor and Profit)

Event (22)

Hardware (7)

Resource (5)

Icebreaker (9)

Program (2)

  • 2x Medium (Core Set) ••••• •

15 influence spent (max 17-2☆=15)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Kala Ghoda

I really liked the idea of Medium for the single-access events in order to give them more weight. You can’t Maker’s Eye and Dirty Laundry the same run, so it’s nice to still see a few cards on the 'Laundry runs if there’s no remotes you’re curious about. 2 Desperado feels light, and 3 might be better, but it was surprisingly okay. I’ll have to try and fit another in there and see if that’s better, worse, or same-ish.

Either way, Terminal feels better now than it used to, and I think part of that is the High-Stakes Job. That thing is a beast. Playing it for 4 and getting a credit back from Ken makes the payout nuts, especially with Desperado in there as well. It almost makes the corp not want to play new ICE, for fear they’ll give you a surprise payday. It was pretty nice against HB, where I was able to fire it off blind sometimes on click 1 if I had reason to suspect a Bioroid I could click through.

Mongoose was a great card, which I switched a Faerie out for. It was nice to have something to break Sentries other than Faerie and Femme, but was also in faction. It’s a very nice mimic replacement, in my opinion. Slightly more expensive, but it got me a Stimhack in the deck, and that makes me happy. Stimhack was and is a champ, and made the remote game a little stronger. Being able to threaten SoT Stimhack is always great.

Had a great time! Didn’t play any RP, so not sure how that’d go, but what I did face seemed okay, actually.

funnily enough im pretty much landing here is as well! the medium idea in this thread is inspired. my question is how does the rig look like once the medium is installed?

corroder - passport - rex - femme - medium

is what I was thinking leaving no space for mongoose, hence sticking with 1 femme.

I played Niles’ deck last night for the first time and I was pretty impressed with it. I think you’ll definitely need a Plascrete if you think yellow Scorch decks are popular, but I was able to win some games without it just by keeping their money below 6 and getting out a Dealer, so a single Plascrete really ought to take the match up from iffy to pretty good.

I’m not a fan of FIS, an opinion probably reinforced because I was playing a lot of Yellow decks last night. The thing I was drawing for each time were my breakers anyway, so I cut the FIS for the second and third Special orders and the third Drug Dealer. I also think finding your breakers right when you need them is really important as well.

The other card that didn’t do very much for me was Ret Run. People would ICE up archives if they saw me discard a Femme so it lost it’s primary value. I would consider putting in another Scavenge for it cause that was a lot more useful and fills the emergency recursion role just as well. In fact, the one time I ended up using Ret Run last night was as a crappy 2 click Scavenge to reassign a Femme that I overwrote with a Faerie. You lose a run event if you cut it, but that’s really not a big deal and scavenge is much better with Rex.

The economy in this deck is really good, and HRJ is a great card when supported with Public Terminal. A lot of the time it says, spend 4, Gain 14 for a single click. That’s really good. Pair it up with Bank Job and it says pay 5 and 2 clicks to gain 22. I want to put in another one because I think the opportunities to play them for full or close to full value (ie when they have ICE they can’t rez or is really cheap) are there. Don’t know what to cut though.

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Eh, I don’t really have enough games with it to have a “usual” rig. Sometimes Passport is enough, and I never need Rex. Sometimes I only need Mongoose and Faeries, and Femme never comes out. Heck, I only found Medium once in the 4 games I played with it last night =P Not for lack of trying; I got almost all the card draw in all the games. It was just hiding on the bottom.

I really do like Mongoose though, much more than I would have thought.

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Imo, dropping TME and one QT for a Gordian to replace Rex or passport would be a good swap- I’ve been feeling really good about having a real breaker to install in that slot, and imo mediums make TME a waste of influence.

I played @hhooo’s deck straight up at my league last night. I had one warm-up game to remind myself about basic Criminal stuff like taking your Desperado credit, which I managed to win anyway, and then went 3-0 with it in the actual league (5-1 with the 3 friendly games I played added in). It felt pretty good to play, a lot like the old Blitz Kate with Siphons – good HQ, R&D, and remote pressure applied at times that make the Corp uncomfortable.

Unlike @Basoon, I found FIS quite useful, but I only played two yellow decks – MN trace hell and NEH Glass Shop. The Glass Shop game doesn’t count for anything since I ran an open R&D four times in the first 3 turns and got 8 points. The other two were against Biotech Rush and cheap ice RP with Targeted Marketing. I made a point of holding FIS until it was inconvenient for the Corp – force a Jackson pop, Maker’s, then FIS the next turn to get fresh R&D accesses; Siphon them to poverty and then FIS next turn; or FIS -> Legwork -> Maker’s as a sort of last resort if I was feeling pressured to get my last couple of points before they could recover and set up to score again.

I felt like I wanted a second Special Order, but was never actually punished for not having the right breaker. I had to Scavenge a Femme onto a Yagura and play the second one on Crick (both on R&D) in the Biotech game when I couldn’t find a Rex or the Special Order, but that worked out fine.

I never played or even wanted to play the Emergency Shutdown, but that does seem like the sort of card that’s very useful to have around as a singleton. I played two more friendly games against the Glass Shop player since our round was over in 10 minutes, and breaking his HQ Tollbooth with Rex made me very sad… but on the other hand, I only broke it because it was a Legwork run when I was on 5 points and was sure he had at least one agenda in hand (he had 2), and I won on that run. I think in principle I like having 3 solutions to nasty ice (2x Femme plus ES). (He flatlined me in the other game when I kept Siphon tags on turn 2 with him at 3c and he had TA + Scorch in hand already.)

The RP player played around Drive-By against me, which I think was right even though I didn’t have one. I think that’s a card that I’ll bring in and out of the deck to make sure the threat is live, maybe swapping it in and out with the ES.

Drug Dealer was fine. When you’re getting borderline on credits it can get awkward, but you can burst back up so quickly that I found it only cost me about a turn of tempo, and it had gained me a lot more than that by the time it became a problem. I’m sympathetic to the Symmetrical Visage alternative, since I clicked to draw a lot just like a true Criminal, but with Visage I’d also want a Plascrete and then you have deck slot problems.

I never needed all 3 Faeries. I ended up using them to save money by breaking Pups for 0, which worked out okay since it let me take 3 cracks at the Biotech player’s Caprice + Nisei token remote instead of 2, which was what I needed to win the game. So I think the third Faerie stays for now, or if it goes I’d put in a Mongoose rather than another Special Order.

So ultimately I think I’m not seeing a slot for the second Special Order, even though it’s a card I want in the deck.

On the subject of Medium, I found I liked the targeted running style quite a bit, but that’s probably because I’m coming from playing a ton of Prepaid Kate. So while I’m intrigued by the Medium concept, I think I’ll stick with this version for now.

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I cut one FIS to get to 45 and took it to the Mead Hall SC today. I was 2nd seed out of 48 players after 5 rounds of Swiss, but went 1-2 and fell to 5th after the cut.

The deck is definitely good. The RP matchup is awkward, and unfortunately I played 4 RPs on the day, including Ian Birdsall’s Hostile Infrastructure RP once at the end of Swiss (loss) and once after the cut (loss). Both losses were winnable, and I beat the other two RPs, but the matchup never felt good. I actually chose to Corp in the first round after the cut in order to avoid running against yet another RP deck, so after winning that game I was pretty disappointed to find out that I’d have to play Ian again. :stuck_out_tongue: Then after losing that RP game, my NEH coughed up its first real dud of the day against Noise, and I was out.

In addition to the two RP wins, I also I beat NEH Glass Shop and Museum IG with Casts / Scorch. Beating IG felt pretty good, because I really struggled against that deck as Shaper.

One thing that was surprisingly annoying was how powerfully I was disincentivized from running Archives after RP iced it. It isn’t always a Crick, sure, but if it is, that’s 5c with Rex just to find out that it’s a place you don’t really want to run. Once they iced Archives I pretty much stopped running there, and that cost me at times. Not sure what the solution is, since Passport and Gordian both cost 5 to break Crick as well.

Given the RP problems, I think -1 Emergency Shutdown, -1 Faerie, +2 Political Operative is in order when the next pack drops.

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grats on the finish! sounds like that list was doing pretty well for you (barring the tough luck on matchups).

seems sound - especially given pol-ops flexibility against so many other cards as well.

re: crick, this weekend I found myself with an open influence and on a whim bumped my gordian up to a study guide, and it actually felt pretty good. Ken can get some money early on, so getting it boosted up for cheap-as-free crick and turing breaks was actually pretty easy. It’s pretty freakin weird being a criminal who can just, like, break any codegate whenever. I did just so happen to be facing IG and rush HB though… long term I’ll probably end up going back to gordian + stimhack or something…

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