Fugee 401k

Woof. Alright, some interesting choices, probably fueled by limited match-ups (a friend playing a trace heavy deck?), so I’ll try to help you plan where to take the deck from here without just rewriting the deck for you. You have a boat load of link strength, but no immediate benefit from it. Sure, if the opponent is running nothing but tracer ICE, this makes sense, but a) not every opponent will, and b) it’s not doing you anything the moment it’s played. These types of plays are generally called “tempo loss”, and you want to look for ways to not slow down unless you have to (the obvious exception being plascrete carapace, but you do your best not to play those until you see a card that will deal meat damage, or a deck that commonly runs it). So you have potentially 7 cards that are entirely dead pulls, where even if there might be trace later, playing these cards before you’ve seen it will be a tempo loss. The most common fix for a deck like this is to play underworld contacts, which gives you some drip economy out of your link strength—In Kate, you only need 1 link before you’re getting this money. On top of that, Link 2 is way stronger than you might think, Having more than that is likely overkill. In Kate, most people tend to just run rabbit holes and either an access to globalsec, borrowed satellite, or helpful AI (in most cases, access because it is cheapest, but cases could be made for either of the others). This will come with practice; I’ve found 4 link cards, when trying to get to 2 link, especially if 3 are rabbit hole, to be sufficient.

High level deck construction, you’re using zero influence and 50 cards. There is no reason to use none of your influence, (the beautiful balance of this game is that there are cards that are “better” than other cards, offset by their influence cost and the inherent weaknesses of their faction). And the decks that do run very little influence tend to just grab a couple copies of the powerhouse cards like Account Siphon or Desperado. The general reason to be running at 45 cards is to have the best possible chances of seeing the best cards for your deck. And perhaps more than that, consistency in play style. A deck at 50 cards and mostly 2 copies will play wildly different from game to game, generally for the worse (you have a harder time getting those cards you NEED, and you will have less useful practice with your deck). So advice here is to play 15 influence and 45 cards (if you have been playesting a deck for months, there might be good reason to play at 46 cards, or 14 influence, but these scenarios will only arise in a well tuned deck—don’t leave money on the table until you have to).

Motivation is a cool card that I would like to see more people playing, but here is where I see it not pulling any weight for you (its 1 card and a 0 cost, so it’s not really tempo loss, but it’s certainly wasted space from a construction standpoint), you have no search, which means you’re just going to be drawing for cards, making motivation perhaps a bit helpful for deciding when to draw, but not really changing the fact that you WILL draw that card. Similarly, shuffle effects would let you get a chance at a different card draw, but nothing in your deck shuffles (search effects will shuffle) so its just kind of squandered synergy that you could easily take advantage of.

Cheers