Why would you need Top Hat for that? If you just wait for an agenda to come on top, you don’t need Top Hat. The only way I see those two cards work together is running R&D no matter what, look at the top card with Find The Truth and then, based on that information, decide if you want to access the top card or another (unknown) one.
What actually is an okay strategy right now, I think. I’m a bit scared of multi-access right now, because I might find two agendas. What means I might actually need to steal one and lose NACH - which leaves me vulnerable to combo BOOM. Although I prefer Indexing over Find The Truth/Top Hat. Multiple R&D runs a turn even with (mainly) Stealth breakers are possible in a Mirror/Net Mercur build.
3 Cloak
3 Sure Gamble
1 Clot
3 Temüjin Contract
2 Net Mercur
1 Corroder
2 Modded
2 Film Critic
1 Houdini
1 Switchblade
2 Astrolabe
1 Employee Strike
3 Dirty Laundry
3 Self-modifying Code
3 Diesel
2 Clone Chip
3 R&D Interface
2 New Angeles City Hall
2 Daily Casts
Obviously tuned for CMT and Sync, with potential for improvement when misdirection will be relasead. One thing I am not sure about is whether I should have corroder as my main fracter. The alternative could be inti and/or blackstone, which frees up 2 inf that can be spent on the secon e-strike and the third clone chip ( or hunting grounds) but that will leave me with 42-43 cards which is a bit too much. Any suggestions?
I don’t see cold read as the Shaper version of Stimhack, at least in Smoke, when you can get into any server with little to no problem.
I think cold read is a better version of dirty laundry, since it sinergizes well with net mercur and possibly temujin. You got 4 stealth credits up-front and, for me, its most obvious use is to kill naked assets. Seems especially useful vs ctm when you can use stealth credits to trash sensie and spend the remaining 2c (3 if you have net mercur installed) to fight the trace. Since CTM is by far smoke’s weakes matchup that means a lot.
Now that Martial Law has been released, I was thinking that something like the following list may work on a wide range of matchups:
2 Cloak
3 Sure Gamble
1 Misdirection
1 Clot
3 Temüjin Contract
1 Dagger
3 Net Mercur
2 Film Critic
1 Houdini
1 Paperclip
2 Astrolabe
2 Employee Strike
3 Self-modifying Code
3 Diesel
2 Clone Chip
3 Cold Read
2 R&D Interface
2 New Angeles City Hall
3 Daily Casts
I’d like to see what are @CodeMarvelous 'thoughts on that.
The list is clearly tuned to try to beat CTM and SYNC - with a great deal of tag avoidance and removal (misdirection+NACH) and a modicum of asset hate (cold read mainly, was thinking to find a slot for paricia, too).
E strike helps also vs CTM and vs PU, which has been a surprisingly problematic matchup so far.
Besides that the deck seemed to perform very well in competitive jnet.
How do we feel about Cold Read as a stimshop-enabler? 4 (or 5) burst credits from 0 seems pretty good. In addition to the use with personal workshop or fan site/artist colony, you can (as you note) use it to offset some of the tempo hit from trashing naked assets in the early game, contesting CTM traces, etc.
I guess it’s a better Dirty Laundry so long as you don’t have to use programs, and that’s a good card. Stealth decks are already tight on slots thought, and it’s a little low impact for stimshop. Cold Read + Patron + Temujin is pretty good value as long as there’s an open server and a way to use the credits.
The idea is interesting but as @hbarsquared noted, deckslots are tight. I really don’t know what to cut to fit in 2 personal workshops. But the interaction between cold read and smc is really nice, it works as a pseudo stimhack for installing programs. Maybe street peddler and cold read can work well together, too
So just to clarify…If you use Cold Read to run a naked server and put the 4 credits into SMC, and then don’t use any other abilities on programs, does that mean that you don’t need to trash anything?
My first thought upon reading Cold Read was that it would work best in Smoke decks that run Paperclip, or perhaps the case where you have Clone Chip and a cheap program like Refractor. But if you can also put it into SMC, that just gives more options, which sounds great.
cold read is such a hard card to put a nail on. i kinda like the 1x as a ‘oh shit, they are jamming cuz i didnt get my stealth set up fast enough and i need to slow this shit down’
either that or a PW list. since with net mercur if you just use the whole thing on PW its 4 creds of value plus build 1 mercur
–
kinda neat with cycy to trash it so you can reset its server with a clone chip. or in a list with paperclip (or a diff anarch recursion breaker) and sahasrara or macrodrive
but now your bordering into shit i would play, not reasonable people
On an unrelated note, I have really been digging a Smoke breaker suite of Blackstone, Refractor, and Dagger if you run Net-Ready Eyes.
Blackstone’s base strength of 3 means that with NRE, you can break Eli for only 2 credits, and it retains its strength for the rest of the run, compared to Corroder at 4 credits and Paperclip at 3 credits (or 2 credits with Paperclip + NRE). It also works well against Data Ward with NRE, requiring a reasonable 1 stealth credit and 6 regular credits, compared to 10 credits for Corroder, or 7 credits with Paperclip.
Against Bulwark, Blackstone + NRE costs 1 stealth credit and 5 regular credits to break; Corroder needs 9 credits, and Paperclip again needs 7 credits.
I think that on its own without NRE, Blackstone is subpar, and I would probably go for Paperclip. But if you’re trying to save influence, and especially if you run Dagger (great for Sherlock or Gutenberg with NRE) or Refractor (great for Archangel with NRE), I think Blackstone is quite solid. If you pack Escher in your deck, or against glacier decks that want to run multiple barriers on a server, the strength retention is just icing on the cake.
Yeah, I’m wondering whether there’s any benefit to running it in a stimshop deck that is less-stealth-focused-- say, using Switchblade, Gordian, and Paperclip, but not going whole-hog on stealth. 3 stimhack, 3 Cold Read, a couple of Magnum Opus, and Security Nexus/Rabbit Holes or something like that. Installing 2 of your 3 rabbit holes for free with Cold Read credits, or taking a big bite out of SN’s install cost seems all right. Just putting in a 1x Cloak so that you have a way to charge up stealth credits with Net Mercur could be all right, and if the corp is really focused on taxing out your stealth pool, well, Cold Reading has a nice surprise factor for must-succeed runs.
In your proposed build, do you really even need switchblade? It seems kind of superfluous if you can just run a trace through a taxing sentry.
Gordian also seems bad if you have the options of Refractor, Cyber-Cypher and Houdini all in faction and supported with your ID. You could even pack Zu as a back up breaker if you really, really wanted to as you would have the link to support it. Cold Read even kind of plays nice with Cyber-Cypher/Lady allowing you to use it and run a reset with Clone Chip.
Your breakers are all really efficient already and if you are packing Refractor/Dagger + Fracter of choice you can get through some of the smaller stuff at an affordable rate, while saving your nexus hit for whatever is your biggest/most frustrating ice.
My final question is, how does this look compared to Nexus Kate?
It seems with Opus, Nexus and your ID ability out of Smoke you can reliably get through just about anything for next to nothing. The decreased deck size is an improvement over Kate, and I wonder if going down a link will have much effect on the build at all?
All good questions/comments! I feel like maybe you put more thought into your response than I did in my post
re: breaker suite- my point was mainly that since stimshop takes up a bunch of slots and stealth takes up a bunch of slots, maybe 1 stealth breaker and the rest standard would be reasonable-- then you rely on smoke, Net Mercur, and maybe a cloak to fill in on stealth credits (and Cold Reading in a pinch). The traditional stimshop builds use hw/programs with high install costs which you cheat out with stimhack credits, which is why I went towards gordian.
re: comparison to Nexus Kate, I’m not really sure. On the one hand, bad pub is awesome for stimshop, and Net Mercur can be thought of as a pseudo bad-pub. On the other hand, if you were to replace Cold Reading with Modded you can get bigger install discounts with Kate (plus that 5th link that makes nexus so tasty), and maybe not have to monkey around with the whole workshop thing.
I could see smoke + NM + PW being potentially a 1 credit-per-click discount on hw/programs vs. Kate’s 1 credit-per-turn discount, but it’s not super cut-and-dry.
My thought process was “Smoke + Net Mercur ~= bad pub. Bad pub is good with PW. Credits that must be spent during a run are good with PW. Cold Reading is credits that must be spent during a run. PW likes expensive hardware. Security Nexus is expensive.”
Whether that actually adds up to a coherent deck is not at all obvious to me, but it seems neat.
