Khus Dive

-------Intro-------

This will be my first published decklist. I wasn't sure if it would be of any use but it might be a good way to get my recent lessons learned and thoughts down for future me. At the start of playing this game about 5 months ago, I really liked shaper. I loved their programs, managing MU, and building this super awesome rig that will slice through firewalls.

I came to realize the biggest issue with this... speed. All of my attempts at shaper just could not keep up. Oh, I built my rig alright... as I watched the corp score out from under me uncontested. At the time I was playing Kit; almost religiously. For the longest time I scoffed at Lat and thought it was just another hoop to jump through for a single card draw. I was sort of correct. It is a hoop to jump through but I totally undervalued planning out your clicks and Lat forced that approach to the game onto me. Anyways, at this point I switched to Lat and I saw a little bit more speed in my games. I then just decided to lean into it. Watching Hoshiko decks get set up at just an absolute incredible rate gave me the goal: Do that but with the power of shaper programs.

-----Key Deck Concepts-----

1) Speed. I kept getting left behind in majority of my games. So I focused on weaving in speed with the power of shaper programs. Joy ride, Aniccam, and planning your turns for your benefit that also feed into Lat can really lead to a quickly set up doom rig.

2) Econ. There are a few types of econ that work into different phases of the game. Immediate boost econ like Creative Commission and sure gamble, mid range sustainment with Daily Casts and Telework, and bulk econ with Fermenter. For the rush decks you need the fast boost econ. Fermenters are there for the large bulk econ to battle the late game glacier decks. The mid range sustainment drip resources bridge the gap from boost to late game bulk econ. That's the idea behind it anyways. Draw order does get a say in that.

3) Alternate access options. A lot of cases stonewall ice can keep you out. Whether that's for econ reasons or for a lack of an icebreaker. I chose to incorporate Boomerangs into my deck. The boomerangs offer early game accesses while having the ability to fill in the gaps of your rig until the full suite is there. I think these alternate access cards are critical to runner decks; Bankhar, Sneakdoor Beta, Boomerang, etc... Now, I grab at least 1 or 2 of these options in all runner decks.

4) Shaper programs. K2CP. I don't leave home without it. It has saved so much money over the course of a game. A full rig with K2 breaks ice for pennies which was my end goal; a powerful set up programs written by a shaper to slice through defenses. Echelon is... mid. However, it fills the role well in the strategy of rig "building". For those one-off Hydras and Stavkas, having a strong econ backbone will see you through it. Unity is my favorite decoder now. 1 credit for 3 strength boost feels amazing and slides in easily to the full rig. Lastly, Cleaver. It is just extremely efficient, especially with a baseline strength of 5 when coupled with K2. The entire rig, once set up, is an absolute machine and is representative of a set of programs that is greater together than the sum of their pieces.

5) Multi-access. Leading up to this deck I tried to get conduit to work. However, the shaper U made it economically infeasible to repeatedly rely on conduit hammers. So I looked elsewhere. I switched to deep dives after realizing that I was rarely scoring multiple agendas on conduit runs anyways, deep dive didn't require multiple 8 credit runs, and the even wasn't susceptible to mavirus. Another card randomly crept into my deck, one that I had never really heard of. That card was Khusyuk. There are quite a few targets for Khusyuk actually. All 3 breakers, Aniccam, and the Daily Casts for the 3 costers. Fermenters, Teleworks, and Simulchips for 1 costers. I have found that I can, fairly often, get 6 card accesses with Khusyuk, usually 5 cards, and guaranteed 4 with the rig up and running. So now we put it altogether.... run HQ, Khyusuk R&D for 5 cards, run archives, deep dive for a fresh set of 8 cards. Normally Khusyuk breaking R&D lock is a bad thing however, in this case we want to see a fresh set of cards with deep dive. Lastly, all of this gets rounded off nicely with a pichacao on a piece of ice on HQ or R&D to get 2 accesses on the deep dive which can lead to stealing 3 agendas in a single turn.

-----Conclusion----- Is it a Hoshiko with gachapon, the price, steel skins, and Bankhar? Nah... but it's green and green is the one true way to run and I think it can run with the best of them if user error doesn't get in the way.