Smoaked Herrings

Runners these days are crazy, with all their fancy tricks and money seemingly coming out of nowhere. It’s hard for a Corp to keep up and often you just feel like by the time your plan is coming to fruition, you’re looking across at the incarnation of death, destroyer of worlds. Your ICE is next to useless, your centrals are under fire and the runner has outs for every little bit of tech you packed. I am the sort of player who wants to find something tricksy and clever as a solution to this kind of problem, but with the kinds of deck that are seeing play at the moment (Geist, Whizzard and Haley), they just have too much in the tank and too much recovery even if you do land a hit.

This deck is the culmination of a different strategy- just be better at the basics. Score fast. Be consistent. Demand the runner make hard choices early, rather than letting them set up their powerful sets of tricks. Capitalise hard on any stumble. ETF has always been the go-to identity for economy and solid, no-frills play, but that has traditionally been leveraged to either build huge, credit dense defense glaciers or stockpile credits for fast advance strategies. This deck instead focuses on using it as the foundation for a heavily tempo-oriented, multi-pronged scoring strategy.

At the core of this deck is the use of low rez-cost upgrades that combine to demand the runner keep very far ahead of you on credits to threaten your scoring server, then press the tempo as hard as possible. Oaktown Grid, Red Herrings and Ash 2X3ZB9CY together are, for 4 credits, often enough for you to be able to score out in a naked remote against a runner who has unwisely not been banking credits. Any two of those are still quite capable of providing a window during the early game. Add in a decent piece of HB ICE and even a moderately set up runner will struggle. Even if the runner has the funds to get through it all, it’ll often be a 15-20 credit investment for a single agenda which, even with the absurd economy of the current crop of runners, can be game ending in itself by stalling their setup and forcing them into inefficient play while you smoothly recover and keep threatening.

Another key focus of this deck is setting up quickly and efficiently. Advanced Assembly Lines is an all-star. In a perfect situation it is a click-free Hedge Fund that allows you to counteract a runner’s gambit (if they install a Keyhole, DDos, Sneakdoor or Same Old Thing first click, you can pop it to install extra ICE, or if they look like they’re going to contest a scoring remote you can shore up your defenses with an upgrade or extra ICE.). Even outside of that it’s very solid economy. I can’t stress enough how much that ‘bonus click’ effect is important to making this card a critical part of the deck.

Launch Campaign allows you to begin making money immediately, can be rezzed reliably and disappears quickly enough to allow you to get scoring when you need to.

Product Recall works with both these cards and Oaktown Grid for added value, or lets you cash in excess assets and upgrades after being run low to recover quickly. I find myself clicking for credits quite rarely against decks which don’t have a heavy focus on economic warfare (Reina, shutdown focused criminals etc.)

The agenda suite is also focused on this. HB finally has some really solid economic agenda options in Advanced Concept Hopper and Corporate Sales Team, both of which are out of this world in this deck. I've won every game where I've scored out one of these two in an early window. Combined with the HB ability they just give you an unassailable credit advantage which makes your scoring server more or less uncontestable.

The deck also runs 4 3/2s in your choice of Accelerated Beta Test and Project Vitruvius, to give you options for a finishing Biotic Labor. Most of the time you’ll still be installing these and advancing once- The Vitruvius for the recursion and the Beta Test so you can fire it and install a Jackson Howard if necessary. These agendas allow you to leverage your early scores into an incredible amount of tempo.

Finally, the ICE. The goal for this ICE suite was to be affordable, solid and reasonably taxing. In particular I wanted to prioritize keeping the ICE outside of D4v1d range to focus my taxing on Faust. A hefty 5 influence is soaked up by 2 Architect and 3 Eli 1.0, which are just fantastic all-rounders. The cheaper NEXT Ice are in here too, as solid gear checkers that can also end up being very obnoxious to non-anarchs in the midgame. Viktor 1.0 fulfills the role of a taxing codegate, with Yog.0 out of favour and a deck that doesn’t really mind the runner getting in once or twice. Finally there's Pop-up Window which lets you bluff more solid ice than you actually have and punish or deter repeated runs on your centrals. I’ve been tossing up using Interrupt 0 instead, but with 6 bioroids I can’t quite justify it.

I’m also running a single Crisium Grid which has proved to be a solid piece of tech to disrupt HQ focused gameplans just enough to smoothly finish out in a few games. Most of those situations I would likely have won anyway, but Crisium just made it inevitable.

All of this comes together in a deck that progresses aggressively and consistently. I've played maybe thirty games with it, so far its worst matchups are Whizzard at about 50/50 and Leela at around the same. It deals with the the remaining cast of Anarchs and Criminals even better and I’ve rarely lost a game to a Shaper of any variety with it.