[Kate] Redefining Shaper Control Decks

Whilst shrike has a steep initial install cost, it just does so much work against a large range of sentries, I’m not sure how to say how good it’s been for me, but try it out and see what you think. Mimic and datasucker are definitely an option again with the new mwl, and a likely greater prevalence of different code gates rather than sentries to worry about. But shrike’s been good to me.

Probably some way to squeeze parasite back in, again, with mwl changes there are definitely flex choices (such as mimic v shrike, lucky find v something other than a lucky find). That being said, I don’t make a ton of runs with the deck. Unlike crims where the economy is based on runs, this deck is generally happy to just draw cards, make money, install your clone chips and breakers on the cheap, maybe get into HQ sometime to set up a pol op, and otherwise run to make them spend their money and reveal what ice they have to set up indexing/maker’s eye runs, whilst camping the remote.

Locally I can still play pro co for now so drawing always feels good, but yeah. Kate isn’t some super aggro deck, as long as you have clot access and are making money as quickly or faster than the corp, you should be able to camp remotes (and again sometimes poke HQ if they are throwing all their ice on R&D, otherwise the opposite) and not be forced to run often.

In my experience it never feels too bad. If by sluggish you mean it has a slower start then yeah, but given the number of draw cards in the deck you should be able to dig through it fairly quickly. Sometimes you get a bad start (but really not that often) and you can afford to pitch a lot of programs so that’s not often a problem. Not sure what situations you’ve come across where you’ve really struggled that can’t be explained away by variance, less likely to affect the kate deck because of the cards it plays (diesel, QT, deuces, symmetrical, beth, smc, clone chip, pro co though that’s just me) than a lot of other decks