One thing I found during my initial testing is that val got way more consistent with progenitor, no matter what her virus plan was; but then people started playing power shutdown a bit more and those decks were too easily defeated, imo.
I haven’t touched val in a while, but maybe its worth revisiting some of these ideas.
Power shutdown is a problem but it’s not seeing much play at all round these parts, certainly not out of faction, and if it’s coming from Weyland you can usually just sit back and rely on Blackmail. I know someone who is currently testing Grail NEH with power shutdowns, that’s a bit more of a worry but since it doesn’t have any influence left for Biotics it’s certainly beatable. HB rush with Power Shutdown is a threat that could be on the horizon, but if Clot takes care of the majority of FA decks there’s probably some retooling to be done in replacing Chakanas with something that adds more value elsewhere.
I really need to get my hands on the other Valencia list that did well at the Oxford SC, it was something totally different, seemed to mostly be using single incubator into Nerve Agent/Medium runs. Went through the swiss undefeated so must have been doing something right!
incubator -> medium is extremely powerful (having played that deck). If you take my list up a few posts and switch the progenetors with incubators you can see it work. It puts the corp in a place where they have to slow down and constantly purge to stop a turn of huge medium runs; but they can ruin it still with a well timed cbdx-suite.
Incubator -> Nerve Agent is even stronger early game, I’m really surprised how many Valencia lists seem to skip it. What was your thinking on leaving it out? I don’t see any HQ pressure at all in your lists, which makes it an obvious place to hide agendas…
Cyberdex is always gonna ruin one run, that’s one benefit of the VBG/Hivemind version, you’re only out one blackmail and back at full strength in a turn that way rather than having to burn an incubator and wait for another to charge. Also means you can have Darwin & D4v1d as your BP removal backup plan rather than Frame Job, so no Blue Sun infinite Lizzie worries (not that I’ve actually had the BP removed once yet, but maybe if more people pick up on Valencia’s potential!)
[quote=“Vapo, post:265, topic:2393, full:true”]no Blue Sun infinite Lizzie worries (not that I’ve actually had the BP removed once yet, but maybe if more people pick up on Valencia’s potential!)
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It’s funny you should mention that. First time I tried out your deck was against a Weyland Blue Sun deck that used Mills. I was trying to get the hang of how the deck works so I lost. Mostly, it had to do with having a couple of opening draws with no economy. While he opened with Hedge, Hedge, Restructure and was able to Bounce OAIed Orion twice. He was basically drowning in money.
I was able to blackmail into a remote before losing my BP to mills, but it was a marked account with two counter on it… He also runs a Valencia deck so he knew how to play against it.
Like I said, I only ran the deck once, I like the core of it but I’m trying different approaches for the economy. I went back to the noise deck you referenced in making this for some ideas.
Economy was the toughest part of the build to balance for sure. I’m pretty happy with where it ended up but it certainly is tough if think you might be facing Scorch or they can remove the BP and they open with that much money. Do report back if you find an alternative econ package that works 
The noise version is certainly better in that department with Cache/Aesops but I really don’t understand how you’re supposed to handle people rushing agendas without Blackmail, the breakers are awkward and slow to set up, and I believe the original Noise version didn’t even have D4v1d which seems like a very odd choice.
Advanceable traps are definitely a potential problem, it’d be really nice to fit some expose in there but deck slots are tight and not that many traps are around at the moment - I love Reversed Accounts (I assume that’s what you meant since Marked Accounts isn’t advaceable?) but it doesn’t seem anywhere near as popular as I think it should be (thankfully for Valencia!)
I was very focused on blackmail and r&d dig. Potentially to a fault. There was no nerve agent because oracle may had me cut down on non event cards. Everything was about money, blackmail access and plan b (which was easter key hole)
While I agree nerve agent makes a lot more sense in a virus build, I was going for an r&d lock which meant focusing on r&d accesses.
Reversed, exactly.
I’d love to be able to throw some Surges and/or Grimoires in this deck to speed up the virus counter generation.
There’s also Clot which is an Anarch take on Chakana (sp). Corp can’t score agendas the same turn they install them, but the program is trashed if Corp purges viruses. The program is more fragile, but requires less setup time/resources/influence for the same result.
The big difference between Valencia and Noise I’ve noticed is Valencia’s reliance on Events and Event recursion. Noise is all about leveraging his ID ability.
I tried Grimoire, but i never wanted to take the tempo hit from installing it before I was set up, and once you are set up you really don’t need the extra tokens. Surge is more interesting but I’m not sure it has enough extra value over virus breeding ground unless you’re going for a much more big dig version with multiple mediums.
Clot is definitely something to look at, it would be useful to decouple the ‘you can’t score’ and ‘i get massive accesses’ parts of the deck so you can focus on one or the other in different games but I do worry about the NBN and HB matchups - they can easily switch to never advance against Clot and you don’t have enough blackmails to run their remote every single turn.
Chakana is really good at identifying agendas in remotes, though - of all the things I would worry about with this deck, never-advance plans sure as hell aren’t one 
So, I guess what I’m saying is, it’s ok to not decouple your plans for certain matchups.
Yeah that comment was thinking about a version with Clot instead of Chakana. I don’t think both together is worth that many deck slots, you’d only want to drop the clots for early cover and that would slow down getting your proper combo up (and if you have to tutor the Clot up with Djinn it becomes 3c and 2 clicks, which isn’t a great trade for a purge). A version with Clot instead would definitely not be as strong a lock but it frees up influence for other goodies and allows you to set up for anti-FA much more easily, it’s something to test for sure.
Do you find that caprice/TFP are particularly problematic for your approach? I had a game the other day and just wasn’t able to set up fast enough or win the few psi games I got to play to prevent RP comprehensively defeating me.
TFP isn’t really much worse than for anyone else, at least since you’re usually multi-accessing you can prep for another run on R&D before it gets drawn or hit their whole HQ again to try to grab it, but yes Caprice is basically the single worst thing to see across the table and it’s a matchup that does need work - I don’t think you can sit back and let RP build up a big bank balance like you can with most other corps, you probably need to start doing non-blackmail runs early to force them to spend money and allow you to get better set up before they’re comfortable scoring. I’ve been toying with including Deus X as the best way to recklessly facecheck against them.
Drive-By could be a seriously great splash once it turns up and potentially totally flips that match.
Drive By is a clunky card. People will simply rez Caprice immediately.
That is still a big improvement on the current situation where unrezzed Caprices can sit on both R&D and the remote. If they put her in the remote and rez her at least you can definitely get into their other servers!
Then I’ll meta the metagame by playing S&W.
If only it was tutorable without spending more influence I would absolutely include one in Valencia. It would take RP from being your toughest match to probably your easiest. A couple of them might actually be the right replacement for Chakanas in my current build if FA does completely die to Clot and RP crops up a lot more.
I had to double check IT Department and for some reason they are not a sys op.
In the version you run now, how many Chakana’s do you generally get out? Do you go for two or try to get all three?
One think I really like about this deck (and Running in general) is the ability to not telegraph what I’m doing with my rig. Once I have Hivemind set up I can hit something fairly hard, but the Corp won’t know exactly what until I’ve done it.
Very much depends on circumstances. If you’re facing NEH and they haven’t used (or have recycled) any Biotics and have an Astrotoken available it can be worth getting all 3 but otherwise 2 is probably enough.
Yeah once you get the main framework set up you can apply pressure everywhere on very short notice thanks to Djinn. I’ve particularly enjoyed occasionally giving up on Blackmail voluntarily - sometimes corps give up on icing up a bit too quickly and if R&D is only lightly iced you can really punish them for it. A single Blackmail Medium run is nice, but a whole turn of Medium digging starting at 4+ accesses is crazy.