Burner MaxX (Prepaid Anarch Goodstuff)

Are you tired of
nope, nope this has been done to death. And then the parodies were done to death, too. I refuse. Fuck that.

Why should you play this deck? Because it's not Whizzard, because it's a serious skill-tester, because it does all the good Anarch stuff, and because it's rich. And maybe, just maybe, to stick it in Damon's face for listing Prepaid VoicePAD.

Are you a Kate player who misses making it rain credits? Raise your phone in the air, make the sign of the devil horns, and step right this way.

How to Rock

Early Game: Get your economy rolling. Don't be afraid to play your money cards without Prepaid, but obviously you want to move Prepaids onto the board as soon as possible - your goal is to get at least 2 down without suffering too much expense. Playing Deja Vu for one is perfectly acceptable, especially if you already have a second to get that sweet discount. Once you have your phones, it becomes much easier to make absurd amounts of money the normal ways: namely gambling, extortion, selling fake stuff on Ebay, and even doing your job.

Your goal is to make as much money and build as much infrastructure as your opponent will let you do without letting your opponent just have free reign on the board. If you see them start building an economy, push aggressively to take it out before it can get out of hand. Faust and Imp are excellent at grinding through early-game walls. Start amassing silverware, and get your Same Old Things ready.

While the deck is built to be 47 cards so it's divisible by 3 after your 5-card starting hand, there's no shame in drawing extra cards to fuel Faust. But try to get it back to a multiple of 3 in a later turn, to avoid any unnecessary waste when you deck.

Also, keep an eye out for any unusual tech cards that can wreck you, as best as you can stop them. Biotic Labor in HB:ETF may signal a Chronos Project which needs to be taken out, and don't let their remote server grow out of control if you suspect a Blacklist might land there.

Midgame: By now, you're probably halfway through your deck. Continue to use Faust and D4v1d, now in conjunction with heavy discounts on the silverware and any spare Same Old Things/Deja Vus you have lying around (not held in reserve to Levy) to keep your opponent constantly on the back foot. If you can't stop a score, make sure it hurts them badly to score - tear down their ice on R&D and threaten to start a big Medium push, for instance, or ready yourself for a crippling Vamp. Concentrate on ice you can't break with Mimic and Yog.0 and ice that you can break quickly (e.g. Knifed on Eli 1.0) over "just any old ice", though against some decks even breaking a regular old Wall of Static can be fine. And remember, there's always the equal-opportunity trasher in Parasite.

Your other goal, besides scoring free points (I like to have at least 4 points before I Levy if I can, since Levy is also your lifespan) and keeping your opponent destabilized, is to start moving from the Faust suite into a regular core set suite. If you've got free breakers lying around and the money to play them, it's better to get them out now than find them stuck at the bottom of your deck after LARLA. Knowing when to throw away your Faust to develop your late-game breakers is one of the big skill testers in the deck.

Another is knowing exactly when to Levy. Try not to get stuck in a position where you have to spend your entire turn (even with Pads) to do it. Better to leave cards unspent in your hand than lose more tempo than you gained by having to click back up to 5 credits. And as with Day Job, fire it when you know your opponent has left you a turn to set yourself up for the next devastating series of punches.

Endgame: This is after the Levy. By now, you should have at least 2 and hopefully 3 Pads, and have started building your end-game breaker suite - the classic Core Set trio, enabled by Datasucker + D4v1d and a new gigantic trove of cash. It's much harder for your opponent to keep you out, between the breakers, your ice destruction, and Vamp the great equalizer, so press your advantage hard, and maximize the value you get from the recurring credits and consistent drip of economy events. Identify the ways your opponent can still win, and close those escape routes off one by one - lock down R&D and the scoring remote, take away their money, and stab their remotes until they break.

And always remember: playing MaxX means running against the clock. While the Core Set + Datasucker breaker suite can theoretically run forever where Faust gets burned out, you definitely are much weaker once your tricks dry up. It's better to take risks to get the win while you still can recover than find yourself having to take risks after your security blanket is gone because you played too cautiously when it counted.

Card Selections

3 Prepaid VoicePAD, 3 Day Job, 3 Lucky Find, 3 Sure Gamble, 3 Dirty Laundry: The core of the deck. Day Job is naturally the riskiest of these cards - you have to use it carefully, since you're ceding tempo to your opponent in the short term in the belief you'll get it back in the long-term with the cash in hand, so picking your moment to go to work is critical.

3 Deja Vu, 3 Same Old Thing, 2 Retrieval Run, 1 Levy AR Lab Access: It's not a MaxX deck without plenty of rebuys. These cards turn MaxX's negative into a positive by letting you get the choicest cuts from the lost cards. Prepaid VoicePAD makes Deja Vu far less painful than it often can be for MaxX decks; it becomes much easier to justify buying back cards like another PAD or a piece of silverware. And don't forget that you can occasionally Deja Vu for two viruses just to give Faust an extra splash of fuel.

3 I've Had Worse, 1 Plascrete Carapace: How to Not Die, a comedy in three acts.

2 Vamp, 1 Knifed, 1 Spooned, 1 Forked, 2 Imp, 1 Parasite: Your disruption. Vamp is your cornerstone and the way you ultimately can overcome the true bullshit that is a Foodcoats scoring server - because no matter how much money they've accrued, provided you've disrupted them effectively by smashing ice and attacking Campaigns, odds are good you'll have more just through the sheer size of your economic engine.

On that note, unlike Dumbleforks, where silverware is the way you stretch past Faust's inherent weaknesses (i.e. a server that costs more than 7 cards), here it's just more targeted disruption. Trashing a piece of ice your opponent strained to afford is mean when it costs you 2 to play your Forked or Spooned - but when that Forked or Spooned cost you 0, and you're about to lay siege with a big stack of credits on that now-disheveled server? That's just cruel.

Imp is a great tool against horizontal decks and kill decks alike, and is rarely unprofitable, while Parasite is a fine ice-destruction tool which exists primarily for dealing with one truly frustrating piece of ice in particular: Tour Guide.

2 Turntable: Because when NBN looks up into the night sky at their lunar advertisements, I want them to see links to my D&B band's Soundcloud page and drawings of dicks.

2 Faust, 1 Mimic, 1 Corroder, 1 Yog.0, 2 D4v1d, 1 Datasucker: Your two-headed dog of a breaker suite. Early game, lay the beatdown with Faust, while servers are cheap. When they start getting not-cheap, break out silverware and D4v1d and get to smashing. But your end-game goal is to transition back into the core set suite and party like it's 2012, with Datasucker stretching out the raw power of Mimic and Yog.0. Often I'll find myself trashing Faust well before I've run out of deck once I manage to assemble this suite, simply because you'd rather have that space for Medium, Imp, D4v1d, or another more versatile late-game tool.

1 Medium: Because multiaccess is a good thing, I've heard. I only go with 1 copy partly because the deck is packed as it is, but also because this deck is much more about patience than the typical Anarch deck, and I feel that the "shove Medium, run three times, and keep pushing" plan often runs counter to your set-up-PADs-and-disrupt plan. Instead, Medium is your end-game, the way you slam the door shut after a crippling Vamp, or the way you respond to your opponent going all-in on an IAA.

Other Options

HQ Multi-Access or CBI Raid: Adding Parasite required cutting a Legwork/CBI Raid flex-slot. The former is great against glacier decks, since you can often lock them up with Vamp pressure, while the latter is great against combo decks (meat damage and Cerebral Imaging). It would be nice to fit it back in, but that would likely require cutting Yog, which seems much more punishing.

Femme Fatale: I'm not a big Femme fan in this deck, since your payoffs are less gigantic - if you have Vamp money, you probably also have enough resources to go over the top on your opponent anyway. If you really want that, maybe you'd be happier playing Apocalypse MaxX. But if you really want it, Femme synergizes very well with your Retrieval Runs, and there is a free influence in this list... at least, until the MWL list changes again.

Councilman or Political Operative: This is actually one deck that I think doesn't want either of these marvelous tools, because much of the job they do is done just as well by Vamp and Imp. But if you're really really really scared of Caprice, then maybe?

Trope: Hahaha, I crack myself up. Trope. Good joke. Next he'll be telling us to play Run Amok.

Employee Strike: If your metagame is really heavy on Industrial Graveyard, Cerebral Imaging, or Blue Sun, then this could be a nice one-of. But in the current metagame, which seems to be shaping up to be ETF + NEH + some kind of Jinteki (RP or Palana, pick your poison), I'd leave it in the binder.

In short, I left my conclusion at home. And that's what I did for my summer vacation.