Pizza Express: Keep the Change, You Filthy Animal

Cool deck. Only wish there was a way to give yourself a way to stretch out an Apocalypse (e.g. if it gets hit by stray damage and you have to SOT it, or if you need to Shutdown an Architect first). Weirdly, this may actually be a deck that could use a copy or two of Early Bird.

Apokenlypse is a really cute gimmick. The hard part is actually closing the game out once you blow everything up because you can't really rig back up here. The moment an ETR ice hits R&D again you're going to have a bad time. I feel like that's why you need Levy, Clone Chip, extra breakers, etc.

@greyfield I've considered Early Bird as a way of being able to still play Apocalypse on a non-ideal turn, but it often requires an undefended central to really be helpful, and that's not a sure thing. In my mind it's fighting for deck space with Feint, which is also fairly useless outside of setting up Apocalypse (or trashing a rezzed Crisium Grid). Early Bird also screams for all the other good-stuff crim cards (Desperado, John Masanori, Security Testing) which I can't really support. In a vanilla Ken deck though, it's lovely.

It does seem a shame to run Feint without Emergency Shutdown, but I tested and found the latter awkwardly clogging my hand and tempting me to invest time and money derezzing ice that I was about to trash in a few turns.

@Chuftbot You actually can rig back up after Apocalypse, since there's two breakers of each type, not counting Faeries. So ideally the first set is for "pre-Apocalypse", and the second set is for "post-Apocalypse". Now of course stuff happens - you facecheck into an Archer at the worst time or get sniped by a Power Shutdown. Running fast has its risks.

In addition to costing precious influence, recursion in general doesn't get along very well with Apocalypse outside of Apex: Invasive Predator, because my rig is turned facedown rather than trashed, and without an Aesop's Pawnshop or Chop Bot 3000 I literally cannot get those cards into my heap.

Ultimately though, because this deck has no rig to set up at all, you tend to have a very lucrative early game. I'd say 75% of the time that I play the Apocalypse, I'm at 4-6 points, and braced to win by touching an agenda anywhere. With most of their ice in the trash, and me with Inside Jobs, Same Old Things, and potentially more breakers, as well as leftover multiaccess, I've usually got a very fair shot at winning after the board gets wiped. Fast-advance, obviously, is the biggest issue there.

I was going to ask him about Comet or Doppelgänger, but... Where'd he go? He was JUST here a second ago.

@GrantZilla1979 ¯\(ツ)/¯

Comet is just too expensive in every way, but Doppelgänger is slightly more palatable (the is useless here), and would allow the Same Old Thing recovery for Apocalypse that @greyfield was mentioning. I'm now dreaming of a sillier deck that tries to cap the board wipe with Notorieties...

Yeah, I'm still living the dream of a viable only central breaker deck with Notoriety / Quest Completed / now with Apocalypse deck that works outside of Silhouette.

You just 100% fold to architect, right?

@mendax If by "100% fold" you mean spend 4 to break with Alias or 1 to Inside Job it, then yeah, I'm tits up.

Winning the game without any breakers post-Apocalypse is very often possible, but it's not like I don't still have cards left to play. Extra breakers and Special Orders are nearly always hanging out in my hand when the nuke finally hits.

Hows the ruling with Rolodex and muertos gang member when playing Apocalypse?

@fiveplus5is55 Oh wow, that's an interesting idea. Facedown cards are effectively blank, but I don't think they're uninstalled, so you could completely skip the bad effects of Rolodex and Muertos Gang Member (although I'm struggling to imagine a situation where the latter would help the corp in any case).