Nasir's bag of tricks

linduxed 9

This is my first attempt at a somewhat competitive deck.

I've only used cards which I physical copies of, which might explain some omissions: Order of Sol, for instance, would have been a card I would have liked to experiment with if I had it.

Deck composition

The deck relies on its tutors and card draw to get to the relevant programs.

Significant amounts of memory increasing cards are available, so you should rarely have a memory shortage. There's a breaker for every ICE, along with some utility programs for a variety of situations (Test Run and Self-modifying Code will help you find them).
One thing to note is that you've got Imp, Scrubber and Paricia as help for trashing, since you'll find yourself in situations where you get through the ICE into the server, but won't have credits left for trashing.

The pre-run economy consists of Magnum Opus, Professional Contacts and Sure Gamble, while Nasir's identity ability will give you what you need during the run (most often).
Interesting note is that the Professional Contacts cards were added after I noticed that Lucky Find costs influence, which I would have preferred for a more explosive pre-run economy, but I couldn't manage to cut 6 influence from the other out-of-faction cards.

To smooth out the runs somewhat and prevent embarrassing one-credit shortages, Rook, The Personal Touch and Parasite can help you out. Parasite is also good to use for the pesky 0-cost ICE like Pop-up Window.

Chakana is there as something of a safe-guard against fast advance decks. It's disruptive against other decks as well, but that's the main reason of its inclusion.

Strategy

Neither am I an experienced Runner, nor have I played with Nasir much, but here's what I've noticed about the deck so far:

You want the Personal Workshop fast, since it will be your primary way of ensuring that credits don't go to waste; keep the card in mind when you're deciding whether to mulligan.

On a related note, while you'll get some money to put into Self-modifying Code and Personal Workshop during the run, you really want to get the Magnum Opus out, or in some cases Professional Contacts. No, they won't help you during runs, but they're more reliable and you really need that pre-run economy to speed up the process of acquiring a big rig.

So far I've found that the hardest part of the deck is to know when to allow yourself to tutor for the various tools that are not breakers: Rook, Chakana, Parasite and Paricia. It is beneficial, however, to get these out, so keep them in mind when looking through your stack and heap. Rook in particular can give you some well needed credits during your runs.

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