Whizzard Oracle "string theory" deck

I will give it a try! tbh I have my doubts, particularly about the trace side of it; there are a lot of times when I want to simply blow by trace subs for free, and being able to force a brain damage with a variety of trace events/effects worries me in any faction. But! recurring creds are what whizzard (and all right-thinking runners) love best!

Spinal modem only triggers during a run:

How do you beat the scorch play, especially with Blue Sun around? Just fight for money advantage? Also, with only 1 Levy and no SOT, isnā€™t PE a pain?

With two Singularities and a Levy, itā€™s probably the single most PE teched Anarch build Iā€™ve ever seen.

Against PE, you cherish your deja vus like your first born.

Have you considered running AIs instead of typed breakers? It seems like you need very specific cards to get into a server and that something like Wraparound + Quandary will stall you out for a long time.

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From my couple of games, once you get your Duggers, the breakers soon follow. The issue is getting to that point. It can take 4-5 turns of just drawing and injecting to get there. In general I have a problem face checking ice early game with any deck so I tend to have this problem no matter what. I gotta man up and hit some Komainus first click. With this deck, Iā€™ll be discarding most of them anyway so who cares? And the Corp losing 5c is more critical in that case. Also you gotta make sure you are running potential Jacksonā€™s to slow down the draw and make the nerve agents more potent later. It is a free trash with Whizzard so just do it.

Still, I worry about the early game. I am afraid NEH or Tennin could have an insurmountable lead by the time you are set up, but I might be wrong because I havenā€™t tried against them yet.

EDIT:
Regarding AI breakers, none seem like they would work. Clicking Crypsis negates the medium/nerve agent dig multi-run part. Overmind would have at most a 4 tokens on it with Deep Red, and there is no good way of recurring it. The corp has a two to three turn scoring window after purging from Darwin. Plus, instead of digging for one of each breaker, you are digging for an AI whose future copies are failed Oracles and will always be failed Oracles unless you want to install three Crypsises for some reason. The breaker suite is okay as it is. It is just that Anarchs need more tutoring.

ah! this makes it a lot more playable. I will definitely test.

Iā€™ve actually been surprised with how hard this deck is to scorch: use demo run + multi-access to attack the combo pieces where they live, in the hand and the deck.

PE is one of the easiest matchups, Iā€™ve found: deja vus make your LARLA (or anything else, for that matter) very resilient, Singularity crushes Mushin strategies pretty hard, and your draw tools give you plenty of ā€œhitpointsā€ to work with. Just play careful when multi-accessing and these decks tend to collapse easily.

Itā€™s true that this deck is vulnerable to bad variance. if all your breakers and draw mechanics are near the bottom, itā€™s possible to just get locked out everywhere. This is part of the reason I included the blackmail/frame jobs, though as weā€™ve discussed above they are a very imperfect solution.

AI breakers are a bad idea; first off, which would you use? this deck canā€™t easily reload the limited-use breakers, and the inefficient ones, are well, just that. My recommendation is to facecheck fast and loose until youā€™re holding you last deja vu/LARLA. even with just one breaker, you might be surprised how hard it is for corps to get the ICE they need to lock you out of every server.

No doubt this decksā€™ main weakness is a bad draw; that variance is the main reason I say that this deck is ultimately weaker than the CT version. that said, in my games so far against NEH itā€™s been pretty 50/50 between having an uphill battle and just wiping them out early with multi access demo runs before they got enough ETR ice out.

I think I would agree that the variance is a definite negative of this deck. However, it appears the negatives of CT and this are opposite of one another.

CT can get her rig up quickly and ping centrals like no oneā€™s business, but when it makes a big Indexing or Legwork run, it can flop spectacularly. If the game runs long, it is stuck making random accesses until luck of the draw gives you a legwork or indexing. In other words, bad draws at the end of the game can kill it.

This deck takes longer to get the rig out and is susceptible to bad draws at the end of the game, but once it is out, it is full force ahead consistently. Post-levy, your cards are mostly for making money, blowing stuff up, and for taking damage. You donā€™t care quite so much what you draw late game because your multiacces is always there.

As you can tell, I like it. It is thematic and works reasonably well. I look forward to what OaC does to it.

Too bad Day Job is not going to be a double. It should be a double double.

Another tip for anyone playing this deck: do NOT throw away your breakers and keep a retrieval run hoping archives, that has been unguarded this whole game, will stay unguarded. The corp will notice your breaker in there and close that baby up. Take the hit on econ and just install it from hand.

Also, your deja vus are your lifeblood. Do not toss them into the garbage under any circumstances, even if you have your full rig out. All it takes is a miscalculation into a bad destroyer to sour your day.

Learn from my lunchtime game mistakes.

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good advice, generally. Sometimes I will risk it; if they drop the ball,itā€™s a huge cred swing. if they ice up (and it actually holds- Iā€™ll still try the retrieval usually, and a lot of corps will try to get away with pup or taurus or other ā€œthrowawayā€ ice to discourage the RR) then I can deja vu and install it the hard way, but theyā€™re stuck having spent ICE on archives.

another thing that matters is your local culture around runner trashes. around here few people ask to be read what each trash is; so you can ā€œhideā€ your throwaway in a duggars turn or something. Not the most honest move, but I donā€™t think itā€™s against the rules per se as that info is still there for them if they ask. I definitely donā€™t recommend this in a tournament setting or against easily outraged players :stuck_out_tongue:

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush! After my last game, retrieval run is not seen as income as much as it is ā€˜Oracle Insuranceā€™. That being said, it is actually pretty cool that even a ā€˜failedā€™ Oracle trashing a Torch creates a 6c profit for the runner.

Do you find that you are hurting badly if you donā€™t draw into Oracle May early? With the Hostage you are basically running 2 copies which isnā€™t a lot.

In my few games, an early Oracle can be more of a liability, though it is more useful to have her early than not. One time I archives was blocked, I didnā€™t have any breakers out so literally anything would stop a retrieval run. I got Oracle in my opening hand so I thought I was golden, but having to rely on only the 3x DejaVus for retrieval when there are six or seven things that can be dumped in the garbage is brutal. An early ETR ice on archives kills retrieval run dead and really slows this deck down. Unfortunately, you cannot treat the retrieval runs the same way you would treat the Test Runs/Eureka/Scavenges in the CT version.

Even if you just stuck to just three breakers, Duggers and two viruses (though I still wholeheartedly recommend Spinal Modem), I would rather have a couple of the non-events installed before I started using Oracle May every turn. Spending 11c and two clicks to pull out and install a breaker with Deja Vu is just too rough to risk the early Oracle misses.

One day, I hope Anarch will have a version of Hostage for Locations, as Duggers is truly the thing you want early. A Duggers turn is almost guaranteed to find something to install, and generate perhaps 6-10c worth of future Power Nap income when you discard all of the Doubles.

it would be rough if oracle, hostage, and duggars were all on the bottom of the deck. hasnā€™t happened to me yet, though; when you throw in inject, and the fact that an event deck has no problem overdrawing, itā€™s usually pretty easy to churn through cards and find that oracle.

This whole deck is very much a ā€œlean into the varianceā€ kind of deck. It all comes down to drawing a lot, and getting the most out of whatever weird set of tools the deck gives you.

3-1 with this so far, testing as written and with Spinal Modem. Only loss has been getting Scorched by Blue Sun. Spinal Modem does put in work. That said, how about Djinn as an alternative? Doesnā€™t provide the econ, but does both host and tutor for Medium and Nerve Agent.

Any additional program or non event adds to the wiff and recovery from a missed oracle.

As a replacement for Spinal modem, I wouldnā€™t recommend Djinn. I feel like it would make this more fragile. There is more program destruction than hardware destruction and two mills would make it a solid power shutdown target costing you three programs. Plus you keep your Spinal modem during an inject but would lose Djinn.

As anarchā€™s only tutor, it would be nice though. If you try it out, let me know how it goes.

Been testing spinal modem myself, and my my, does it ever put in work! thanks to @RustyKettle for the suggestion!

I tried pulling the blackmails, and then the very next two games was sorry I did. Itā€™s niche, but god is it powerful when it works! That said, I traded the third frame job for a third singularity: Ash insurance is nice with spinal modem out.

Infiltration was solid, but with the memory to run both multi-access, Iā€™ve slotted in two copies of surge and Iā€™m not going back. it makes huge demo runs so much easier to land.

current list is -1 Frame Job, -2 vamp, -1 quest completed, +1 singularity, +1 spinal modem, +2 surge.