AmpX (v. 2.0) (Got Me On My Knees LARLA)

greyfield 3915

Okay, I was very wrong. Having played dozens and dozens of games with various versions of this deck, I can officially say LARLA is really good in this deck. For that reason, I'm declaring this the real version 2 of the deck - a fact I feel is also marked by how the deck is now all 3s and 1s. No fat here.

What LARLA offers you is the ability to play flexibly - you can be variously a controlling deck, building up big Vamps hitting over and over, or you can be a pure combo deck building up a fast credit advantage and Amped Uping into the Keyhole repeatedly before your opponent can get their FA going; you can even do aggressive things like Singularity into servers much more effectively when you have a safety net. It's just generally more effective across the board. And compared with other MaxX decks, which often are gasping for air when they hit the LARLA and have to take a couple of turns to rebuild before resuming the assault (in part because their economy is build on cards like Liberated Accounts), this deck often wants to LARLA the same turn it Vamps, so it gets a brand new hand with a massive credit lead and can immediately begin pounding R&D.

It's possible the deck wants a Corroder to deal with Wraparound. The deck plays Crypsis as a kind of poor man's Hades Shard, but Crypsis has the same weakness of not being a fracter. The cards that seem most cuttable, though, I'm rather loathe to lose - the third Amped Up, the single Wanton Destruction, or a Sure Gamble.

Believe me when I say this deck has a very high skill cap, especially compared to the very first versions of the deck (which were entirely linear, "draw your deck and hope you get there" strategies). You have to intuit when you can spend early money, when you should divert to attack remotes, when to launch your Vamp attack, how many cards to draw (and what to discard), what ice your opponents are likely playing, etc.

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