It’s a power shutdown combo deck. It wins somewhere in between turn 3 and turn 15 or so, usually. All you have to do is race them. Stealth Andy and Shaper decks have a good deal of setup time and are easy as hell to beat. This is why I won the tournament. The worst matchups are by far Noise, (Clone Chip shuts of Diagnostics Combo, and this deck is basically all-in on it) AoA (Siphon spam is still good against CI), and Gabe, (deck is not built to defend 3 servers).
R&D lock is a joke. Most of the time, you’re not waiting on an agenda to win. Hard to lock you out of Shutdown or Diagnostics.
Card Pool: Up to The Source
Event: Store Championship
Players: 17 Players, 5 Rounds Swiss, Cut to top 8
Location/store: Curio Caverns
City: Springfield, VA
Country: USA
Date: 1/4/2015
Winner: Chris Briley (Feliks)
Standard Shaper Kit v2
Rielle “Kit” Peddler: Transhuman (Creation and Control)
Event (17)
2x Indexing (Future Proof)
2x Legwork (Honor and Profit) ••••
2x Modded (Core Set)
3x Quality Time (Humanity’s Shadow)
2x Scavenge (Creation and Control)
3x Sure Gamble (Core Set)
3x Test Run (Cyber Exodus)
Hardware (12)
2x Astrolabe (Up and Over)
2x Clone Chip (Creation and Control)
3x CyberSolutions Mem Chip (Fear and Loathing)
2x Plascrete Carapace (What Lies Ahead)
3x R&D Interface (Future Proof)
Resource (1)
1x Utopia Shard (All That Remains) •
Icebreaker (8)
1x Atman (Creation and Control)
1x Cerberus “Lady” H1 (All That Remains)
1x Deus X (A Study in Static)
1x Garrote (True Colors) •••
1x Inti (Creation and Control)
1x Sharpshooter (True Colors)
2x Torch (Mala Tempora)
Program (7)
2x Magnum Opus (Core Set)
1x Net Shield (Core Set)
1x Parasite (Core Set) ••
3x Self-modifying Code (Creation and Control)
10 influence spent (max 10)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to All That Remains
RP Is Horseshit
Jinteki: Replicating Perfection (Trace Amount)
Agenda (9)
3x NAPD Contract (Double Time)
3x Nisei MK II (Core Set)
3x The Future Perfect (Honor and Profit)
Asset (10)
1x Daily Business Show (All That Remains) •
3x Jackson Howard (Opening Moves) •••
3x Mental Health Clinic (Honor and Profit)
3x Sundew (Mala Tempora)
I’ve been tempted to try this type of deck but Hades is really popular here. I could totally see people just not running until Hades is in their hand if they saw CI across the table.
I beat a Leela. She prevents the 7 points in one turn thing, which I didn’t actually realize having not played the deck since she came out, but I formulated a pretty good plan B: draw to Biotic Labor, score a Vitruvius, then score 5 in one turn, which is super easy even with the one bounce they get, especially since you can Mirrormorph twice and they don’t know which agenda(s) are the ones you need to score last (the 5/3).
It became pretty complicated in practice, as the Biotic was in the last 3 cards, but I just counted my cards and Disagnostic’d without Jackson combo to Biotic out the 3/2 and then used Jackson the next turn to not die/set up the 5 point turn. This is one of the reasons I love this deck: as stupid/solitaire as it is, you often have to come up with creative ways to win.
I think you can actually score 7 in one turn against her, but you probably need to have a ridiculous hand. Don’t feel like calculating how to do it, but I’m pretty sure it’s doable by rezzing Jacksons, taking an extra Biotic click to reinstall, and shipping extra agendas into play.
Bwahahahaha! Don’t worry too much about it, no one wants to learn to play this crap.
The only way to beat Hades shard is to draw your whole deck, or at least draw enough of it that there aren’t enough agenda points for them to win when you shutdown. Chakana, and the Source generate similar problems, but all of these things are beatable if you draw enough of your deck. If you draw all 3 Diagnostics or Kaguyas, you can save yourself a diagnostic flip, which is equivilant to a click or two.
An additional way to conserve tempo during combo is to play Shipment from Mirrormorph twice. During combo, you need to put 3 agendas and 3 Jacksons into play. Normally, you just Mirror once, but if you have 5/6 of the installs in your hand, you can replace two uses of Interns with a second use of Mirrormorph. If you have 4/6 of the installs in your hand, you can Mirrormorph off the first Diagnostics if you haven’t drawn it naturally.
If you have Biotic in hand, you can Biotic twice, (once from hand, and once off a Diagnostic), and save a click in that way as well.
Noise with Clone Chip is the biggest issue. If he mills you after you Jackson, you will lose a key Combo piece and potentially fizzle. You need to set it up so that you can afford to miss a diagnostic flip and hope they hit one that you don’t need. If you have a good hand, you could set up a Diagnostic with redundancy and have a 2/3 chance of not being fizzled rather than 1/3, but I don’t see how you can do much better than that. Luckily, I was the only Noise player.
Leela doesn’t prevent all instances of 7 points in one turn - with a couple extra combo pieces in hand you can do EffCom, EffCom, 5/3 to win while never having more than one agenda installed at a time. Jacksons are invulnerable to Leela since you can just rez them early.
Example combo:
In hand: Power Shutdown, three AD, 2 Jacksons, Mirrormorph, 2 EffCom.
Shipment from Mirrormorph - Jackson, Jackson, EffCom
Power Shutdown
AD - SFSS, SFSS, Biotic. Score EffCom, use counters (8 actions total)
Install EffCom
AD - Interns Jackson, SFSS, SFSS. Score EffCom, use counters (11 actions total)
This has a spare action at the end so you have some flex to play Archived to find the 3rd AD, etc. With SFK in hand to finish the 5/3 you have another spare action on top of that.
This is why I love this deck. Every game is a complicated puzzle that your opponent has to sit and watch you think about before you eventually decide that they’re dead and you kill them.
I would just show my hand and tell people that they lost the game. They scoop, I take a picture of my board state, and I can figure out exactly how I beat them later without making them wait.
Maybe it was piloting, or just because it was solid. It didn’t do anything I haven’t seen in Nisei before, other than be a little more kill focused and Ice light. It felt like a PE shell with the Identity swapped out and a few other cards (Caprice, Snowflake, Cerebral Cast) thrown in. I wish I had the list to play with it - part of it was just the “I don’t know what this deck is going to do” feeling of sitting down against it, but even in the second game it was one of the tougher matches of the day.
Do you have “oh shit” moments where halfway through you realize you’re not going to make it? And then you score Hades Fragment and try to keep playing or something? Or do you just auto-lose when you whiff?
It looks close, but I don’t remember seeing House of Knives, though I don’t remember the full Agenda spread. He also definitely had Kitsune in the deck, so it’s not a 1-for-1 copy.
I actually started going off in one game and realized I hadn’t drawn diagnostics. The runner had a 3-counter Nerve Agent in play, so I actually think I ended up playing it right by trying to go off when I couldn’t. I had already scored an EC off a naked install with the implication of the threat of going off, so I just took some free clicks and used Jackson a bunch until I drew it.
