[Kate] Redefining Shaper Control Decks

Deck Archetypes
840

Here’s my 45. I consolidated two R&D events into an RDI. I’ve always been an Indexing guy, but two Maker’s plus RDI has been fine for R&D multiaccess so far. We’ll see if that holds.

In Memoriam: Lysander Kate
Kate “Mac” McCaffrey: Digital Tinker

Event (21)
3x Diesel
3x Dirty Laundry
1x Legwork ••
1x Levy AR Lab Access
3x Lucky Find ••••• •
2x Quality Time
2x Scavenge
1x Stimhack •
3x Sure Gamble
2x The Maker’s Eye

Hardware (9)
2x Astrolabe
3x Clone Chip
3x Prepaid VoicePAD
1x R&D Interface

Resource (3)
2x Same Old Thing
1x Utopia Shard •

Icebreaker (8)
1x Atman
2x Cerberus “Lady” H1
2x Cyber-Cypher
1x Deus X
1x Mimic •
1x Sharpshooter

Program (4)
1x Clot ••
1x Parasite ••
2x Self-modifying Code

15 influence spent (max 15)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Valley

I stuffed a Breaking News with Clot on Monday vs Midway Grail and it won me the game. I also declined to stuff a Hostile Takeover vs Blue Sun, which felt like a mistake at the time and turned out to definitely be a mistake. I was reluctant, but so far Clot has shown some value outside the FA matchups. I’ll keep it for now.

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841

Influence was 2 lucky, 2 day job, 2 stimhack, 2 legwork, mimic, parasite. The list is buried in the tournament winning thread somewhere.

842

(warning, rambly, I do this a lot, sorry >>)

Personally I just don’t like Day Job much to begin with. Its nice in Anarch, but I splashed it in a shaper deck, found myself never wanting to forfeit the turn, and wishing it was just an Armitage instead.

But thats all without PPVP. If you use PPVP? Well… its at best 2.5 creds per click and you forfeit the turn. You can’t use Kati if you do that. If you anything else for economy, you get equal (at minimum) or better creds per click… and get to do other shit on your turn.

Comparing it to Lucky… Lucky caps at 4.5 creds per click, and is at raw power 1 cred less gain than Day Job… but with 2 clicks still available. Just clicking for creds makes it better and more flexible.

I think that you ‘could’ but its just worse. But if you are dying for the influence…? Also remember you cant SOT>Day Job without more cards to combo. Kinda a big deal.

I think I would rather keep Lucky in, and try cutting other influence first. Especially if you run a Corroder still (Snowball or Ladys >>)

And I think the appeal for Earthrise/Day Job is different. Its meant for when you play cards from hand every turn… Earthrise keeps that going. Quality Time gets things in the heap for you, and helps you find the thing you need right now. Steady stream that lets you avoid cards in the heap vs Burst that finds the answer ASAP. Really more like ‘Do I wanna keep every card I draw in my hand’ or not

I think Day Job and Earthrise are good. Just not as good in PPVP Kate.

1 Like
843

I’ve thought about your PPVP-less Kate builds since we’ve talked on OCTGN, and tried them, and have come to the conclusion that PPVP is worth it in Kate. She’s the only tier-1 Shaper because of her ability, and PPVP helps leverage her ID into actual credits.

I respect your playstyle and how you capitalize on the versatility of neutral econ like Armitage, but you’re giving up significant power with that card. Armitage is 1.57 credits per, and you need to get at least 5 clicks in to start getting that value. Day Job is considerably stronger.

I worry about Day Job after the Levy. Can’t imagine wanting to give up a turn for money at that point in the game. It also makes the third PPVP almost not worth installing.

844

I’m not sure that’s true. I think she’s the go to ID because her ability is simple, easy to use and understand and powerful. Most of the green IDs are good. They’re all harder to leverage than Kate, but they’re all good.

2 Likes
845

I’m talking MaxX, Andy, Noise (and maybe Leela) elite tier 1, not just good. To evaluate runners, take advice from Bill Clinton’s campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Only Noise has innate raw power, but he was garbage until Cache came out. Leela’s a criminal, the “econ-faction,” and she taxes the corp’s econ.

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846

Noise was garbage until cache came out?

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847

Gonna say something and expect to get torn apart for it. But its my logic, so you can take what you like and roll your eyes at the rest.

I play economy cards on a ‘Raw Credits Gained Per Card’ level. I view PPVP as a boost to other cards, and a efficiency when combo’d with non-economy events. But I want every card to be good right away. No dead/weak draws, no need to draw ‘in the right order’. So all the econ I choose kinda falls into that camp. Armitage is 5 creds bonus (ignoring how long it takes to get), so is Daily. Lucky is 6, so I play it raw. Sure is 4. I only run Dirty Laundry in my current build because I have no more cards that are better at the Raw Gain level.

And since the events I prefer to run are mostly free… PPVP doesn’t help. The flexibility of not needing cards in order lets me make a lot of hard plays that fits my style. I dont expect others to play it, nor do I think the answer is the correct one. I think PPVP is stronger… but it doesnt fit how I play. Playing with Day Job made me realize how much I like my economy to be versatile.

If you don’t run Levy, and don’t run events that cost credits, and don’t run Same old thing… PPVP isnt for the deck. I made my choices in a vacuum of what I wanted, and PPVP just doesn’t fit. I played it PPVP for a while… and cut them PPVP and DL for Armitage and Daily and loved the deck much more.

Rambly. Bleh. I can’t not articulate my thoughts about Shaper that well. ~_~ I should work on that.

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848

Noise was garbage after Jackson and before Cache. I think that’s accurate.

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849

I think it’s worth thinking about why you do this, though.

I don’t think most decks can afford to sacrifice early game cards and money for later money. It opens up scoring windows or worse - the corp gets rich, or deploys assets you now can’t afford to trash, and so on. Tempo matters.

Kate PPVP pays 2 credits, 1 one which is quickly refunded, to get very powerful long term source of money - often 1 credit per turn… With a deck chock full of burst draw, burst money, and tempo plays, this is probably the best and maybe even only place you want to sacrifice a small amount of your early tempo and money for a powerful longer term option. It’s hard to think of a card that can net you more than PPVP without sacrificing even more tempo - Daily Casts costs more and runs out, while other cards require significant click investments that you can’t (and don’t want) to pay.

All that said, I’ve seen plenty of PPVP Kate decks stall badly and hard when the money cards haven’t come out/in the right order.

850

That sounds like it won’t have the slow, painful matches PPVP Kate can have when not finding the PPVPs, or finding the PPVPs but no econ. Still, PPVP is an insane econ engine, and I think it will be better on average.

851

I would agree to look at the economy package I run hard… if I ever had bad periods of no money in my deck. I never do though… I can always trash everything I wanna trash, and I have Stimhacks to take advantage of what looks like a point of weakness.

I have analyzed my choices, and I like what it offers. I feel like I trade a little bit of late game power for a bit of early flexibility.

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852

What is your scorch prevention strategy? Out money the corp, I assume…but what about a rich blue sun?

853

In reference to who?

If me… I run 1 Plascrete, 1 Utopia Shard, and 1 Emergency Shutdown… and I typically can have more money with how I play the matchup.

854

This argument is based on a fallacy so I want to kind of break it down a bit and explain why it’s wrong. This is of course in regards to optimality and it’s perfectly okay to just ignore it if you don’t care about having an optimal deck, but there’s a lot of misinformation going around about running >45 cards.

I don’t mean this as a personal attack, I respect you greatly as a deckbuilder, but I do feel like I should address this argument because it’s easy to fall into traps during deckbuilding.

This is just saying that you’re not bothering to, without giving a good reason why.

You have roughly (rounded up) 1% lower chance to see each card in your opening hand. That’s a lot. For a competitive deck that you want to win every single game, 1% worse is not “too low to care”. Even if it was, for some reason, I’m sure if I cut an Account Siphon from Stealth Andy the winrate wouldn’t change by too much far from 1%, but that doesn’t mean it’s not wrong. Every single individual card choice is only a very small winrate increase overall, and these small numbers add up and differentiate a bad deck from a good one.

You do not get more flexibility, you see cards less but it’s a lazy way to get around it instead of just making cuts. You’d arguably get more flexibility if you split three-ofs into more two and one-ofs, and that’s actually a reasonable argument. Imagine if your deck was 1000 cards big, 500 of them were one card, 500 were the other. That’s not very flexible! Now imagine if it was 1000 cards that were all unique. That’s a lot more flexible. Now imagine if there were 2000 cards that were all unique. There’s the same amount of “flexibility” in each draw, just one is doubly more consistent than the other.

Seeing the cards you want to see earlier rather than later is a big deal, especially when you don’t gain anything you wouldn’t have got by cutting cards. There’s actually an off-the-beaten-track Criminal ID that draws nine cards at the start who’s quite good because of it…

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855

I don’t do stats and all that for deck making, as far as draw % goes anyway… but I sometimes have (and run) a 46 card list.

It comes down to this, when I try to get that final cut in.

Do I have any 3 of’s I want to reduce to a 2 of?
No, because I included 3 to either see them ASAP, or see them as often as I can.

Do I have any 2 of’s that I can live if it was only a 1 of?
No, because I usually have things at a 2 of when I need to see one at some point in the game, but I can wait for a little while to see it.

Do I have any 1 of’s that I can cut entirely?
No, because it helps xxx matchup too much, or its something I can tutor, so having only 1 means I can use it, no matter how rare it would be to draw it straight up, or its a need I need to fill more and my first choice of card for that need is already a 3 of (A quality time and 3 diesels, for example).

If I make an entire deck, and its 46 card… and all 46 cards fall into that area of thought… I leave it at 46 until playing the deck more changes my mind about something.

Not being minimum just means you need a real reason for doing so.

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856

Though this is more conjecture than the real arguments I used in my last post, I’d imagine that for every 46 card deck, there exists at least one card that can be cut to improve the winrate of that deck. Of course, this only matters for decks that are trying to be competitive and the best they can be. Formats like Commander in Magic (99 card decks with only 1-ofs allowed) are built to be high variance because that’s the point.

The reason you’re at 46 in your scenario (and in my opinion, all similar scenarios) is because you haven’t found the optimal cut yet. Again, this is most certainly conjecture, but you say yourself that you’d find a cut if you played the deck a bit, and I do strongly feel like that would be a better deck.

In my argument above to refute Calimsha’s point, I didn’t prove that 46 card decks are suboptimal. I think they are, and there are lots of arguments to support it, but the fact that somebody’s argument for having one rests on some easy to disprove fallacies shows error in at least one case.

857

I just want to point how much I appreciate this use of language.

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858

Except for the brief stretch where it won a Regional in an early Anatomy shell.

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859

I’m in the 46 camp for calim kate. I think we can all agree that a 1% consistency difference on the opening is important, it’s just a question of how important relative to mid-game flexibility, which in my mind means (a) having all the 1-ofs in the toolbox and (b) having a high enough density of cards that you need to see 1x or 2x of by the midgame.

The key thing about calim kate that makes this ok is that it’s an overdraw-happy deck, which means you will get to see every single card in the deck if you so choose (against non-NEH corps). In the best case, it doesn’t slow you down at all; at worst, it slows you down 1 click as you draw past the card you would have cut. I’m ok trading that fraction of a click to not be missing a piece of the toolbox or compromise on econ/multiaccess density.

To illustrate, let me actually justify every single slot in a (pre-clot meta) 46 card calimsha deck. Some of the below reasons may not be 100% convincing, but in each case, I find them more valuable than that fraction-of-a-click slowdown.

3 lucky 3 gamble 3 laundry 3 prepaid – Obviously can’t cut any econ.

3 diesel 2 QT – This being a deck that clicks to draw whenever it has a spare click, draw accel makes it faster, not slower. I might even run a 3rd QT if I freed up a slot somewhere else.

1 levy 2 same old – One of each is obvious. The 2nd SOT is part of the “toolbox”, and it wins many unwinnable games where you’d otherwise be stuck with no econ, or just need 1 more multiaccess event when you know it’s the last turn of the game. It forces the corp to play more conservatively whenever you have indexing in the heap. (For another example, SOT stimhack let me win SHL2.)

2 astrolabe 2 legwork – Most important cards you need to see early vs NEH

3 maker’s 1 indexing – The 1 indexing is part of the toolbox as discussed above. The full 3 makers is important because vs NEH, you’ll need to connect with 2 of them to get enough points to win (and won’t find all 3 in time), and vs glacier, it’s ok to waste 1 just to force an ice rez to pressure their econ.

1 shard 1 stimhack – Toolbox.

2 scavenge 3 clone chip – Sure there are games where I’ll discard a useless first scavenge early, but there are others where I need to SOT it. Especially against blue sun you need a high density of these so you can refill ladies and cope with bouncing code gates at the same time.

2 lady 2 cycy – Plenty of times, you actually need 2x of either installed simultaneously.
1 mimic 1 sharpshooter 1 parasite – Obvious, important rig pieces
1 atman – So you don’t get randomly hated out by changeling or susanoo. I understand those are popular hosers in europe.
1 deus X – These days, thanks to IHW, you can cut this. But before the O&C meta was mature (i.e., before people gave up on PE), or going into an unknown meta, it’s better to have a complete toolbox than to be greedy. Also, before RP moved away from 5x-6x komainu+tsurugi, it was important to enable more aggressive face-checking.
2 smc – It’s already kind of greedy not playing the 3rd one of these.

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