Improved Bioroids

Krams 949

Pretty standard glacier, with pretty non-standard card choices. Testplays on Jinteki.net went very well, the deck is both successful and fun to play. Any comments welcome :)


Strategy

The game plan is simple: Turtle up, create Melange remote, turtle up some more, maybe create a second remote for SanSan if you feel like, turtle up some more and roll out agendas. If you see a chance to score and can choose between several agendas in your HQ that you can try to score out, always try to score Improved Tracers. It makes the servers really really taxing. This agenda is vital for the deck. I'm currently testing, what I can put out to free up deck space to be able to Fast Track it.

The deck only has 5 bioroids, so the title seems to be a bit misleading. But the bioroids are my most expensive ICE and as such they are important to glacier up, so they do play a key role. But even if they are important and they deal brain damage, it's pretty much impossible to win by brain damage (so far I haven't met a runner that careless) and since there's no other damage there will be no flatlines. This deck is 100% focused on scoring. Of course, the runner can't know that for sure ;)
About 80% of the time, agendas are scored by traditional slow-advancing, but there's a CVS just in case you need to remove Clot and fast advance out the main defensive upgrade. I even like to slow-advance 15 Minutes with this deck! It's always good to put unadvanced cards into a defended remote and have them pay to check it. Beale or no Beale? ;)

Economy

The deck is usually very rich and can afford to stack many ICE, rez them all and still have money left to make traces scary. Typically, the runner will try to not let any trace fire. That's okay. If they never fire, that means that the runner has broken your ICE, which usually doesn't come cheap with this ICE suite!
One thing I noticed is that runners usually fear the third of Ichi 1.0 and 2.0 the most. Hitting them unprepared with only 1 left they rather break that one and have their programs trashed. Which is exactly what I want, because that slows them down and opens scoring windows and I couldn't really punish the tag anyways, except by destroying resources if they have some.

  • The All-Seeing I is mostly a counter against DLR decks. I can't use it to attack the runner's economy since I can't land a tag on my turn. Feel free to remove it if you test the deck.
  • Resistor can tax runners that float too many tags, which helps against Account Siphon spamming. The 0 rez cost means that you can even rez it directly after the Siphon landed and at least have any defense. Other than that, it's just a simple ETR ICE that forces the runner to have anything out that can break a barrier. Though, from time to time I like to install a Resistor as innermost ICE on R&D and stack 3 Turnpikes on top of it just to mess with the runner. It's still posssible to establish an R&D lock. At a fair price :D
  • Mother Goddess has won a lifetime deck slot in all of my Improved Tracers decks (I have three, they are all relatively good and they are surprisingly different from each other). Having a hard ETR can be important and it almost never fails to stay taxing.
6 comments
27 Nov 2015 Cliquil

I would think about Gutenburg over Turnpike. I also wonder whether there is room for Keegan Lane in this deck.

These are just ideas though - don't want to tell you your business! :D

27 Nov 2015 Krams

@Cliquil As I said, any comments welcome :)

I guess Gutenberg vs Turnpike is a matter of taste. Both 2 to rez, both 3 strength, both have a trace strength high enough that it's easier to clear tags later on or prevent/avoid/remove them with card effects. The thing I like more about Turnpike is the on encounter ability, which adds nicely to my goal of building up taxing servers.

The problem with Keegan Lane is that I'm not really tagging consistently, except with Turnpike. And he's kinda anti-synergetic with Dracō. Fitting him in would require a rework of the ICE suite towards more tags. The problem is that I don't want to drop the bioroids as heavy hitters, but also need the cheap ETRs to prevent access. The only ICE in this deck I can really switch out is Archangel, but I use him more as an ambush to punish central server accesses than as an ICE anyway.

I'll definitely try out Keegan one day. Maybe out of SYNC. Maybe in a deck with about 6-9 of Data Raven, Turnpike and Gutenberg :D

27 Nov 2015 Kikai

Strong looking deck. Love the idea of slow advancing a 15 Minutes behind an ice fortress :-) Have you thought about replacing The All-Seeing I with Freelancer? It's easier to land against Valencia Estevez: The Angel of Cayambe.

27 Nov 2015 Krams

@Kikai With the release of The All-Seeing I I have dismissed Freelancer as outdated, but you really have a point there!

29 Nov 2015 forktines

Why Resistor over TMI? There doesn't seem to be a lot off tagging in this deck, and if you're making a NBN: Making News glacier deck, TMI seems like a valid include.

29 Nov 2015 Krams

Resistor is free to rez, which can be good against Account Siphon attacks and has the tracer subtype, which can make it slightly more taxing with each Improved Tracers scored. And I wanted to keep the overall ICE rez cost deviation on the lower end. But I'm confident now that this deck can actually afford a little more expensive ICE.

And yes, TMI is a decent barrier in any NBN:MN glacier. Maybe I'll try -1 Resistor, -1 Archangel, +2 TMI just to have another hard ETR. The only problem I see with that is Atman, since I already have Viktor 2.0 and Ichi 2.0 in the str 5 spot.
On the other hand... I don't really need to be that afraid of Atman when I have an agenda that changes the strength of nearly every ICE in the deck. So yea, I'll try TMI.