This topic deserves a long and thoughtful article on a website somewhere, but I don’t have a website and I’m not really all that thoughtful about this game. But I do think this might be a useful conversation for some of us.
So, when you go to build a Corp deck, how do you start? What are the initial steps and foundational decisions you make?
For me – in all honesty – the answer is that I netdeck. I have found that I am not very good a deck building. Nearly every deck I play when I am trying to win games is a netdeck of some sort.
But here I how I would answer my own question:
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Find some cards I’m interested in. Usually this is an ID, but it could be something else in the card pool that I’d really like to try to build around or experiment with.
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FInd a win condition. Am I trying to win by scoring out? If so, how? Fast advance? Behind ice? Exchange of Information? Or is my goal to kill the Runner? Again, how?
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What tools do I need to achieve No. 2? Ice? Kill package? What FA tools? Defensive upgrades?
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How will I get enough money and cards? After Hedge Fund what else goes in the deck?
At this point, I try to play test on Jinteki with the deck, and usually discover the deck has glaring flaws. I hold off trying to slot “tech” cards until I feel like the Corp has a chance of achieving its win condition.
As I say above, I’m a terrible deck builder and have never built a deck from scratch that I thought was nearly as good as netdecks. But here is the state of my current bad process.
How about you?
How do you build Corp decks? What lessons can we learn from your efforts and process?