District 9 was a shit film

Is there anyone else here old enough to remember when Neill Blomkamp turned a legitimately excellent 6-minute short film into a truly mediocre 112(!)-minute action movie?

This deck attempts to capture that magic by being a slightly-too-large version of a pretty good basic idea that has some brilliant moments, but mostly fails to deliver. It combines a number of cards that you should already be playing in Anarch—Strike Fund, Steelskin, and Bankhar—and adds in cards that supercharge them and abuse the anarch card pool. Zer0, Buffer Drive, Lago, and District 99 are all cards that quite honestly kinda suck on their own, but actually start to feel powerful in combination with each other and with the good cards I already listed above. My deck leans into a combination of Boomerang, Botulus, and ice kill like Chisel/Charm and Crew/Leech to supplement Bankhar, but these combo pieces can just as easily be used with a more standard breaker suite (with the caveat that you need to install what you need before hitting Zer0 or ramming into ice with Bankhar).

District 99 is the real star of this deck, not because it’s the best card here, but because it’s actually a B+ card here, despite being dogshit in every other deck it could go into. A normal deck can’t reliably count on District filling up even once in a normal game. With this deck, however, you will consistently fill it with counters by doing what you already want to be doing. That means that every turn or two you can bring back a Steelskin right before hitting your Zer0, cycle your Time Bomb again after checking archives (and getting a counter for when it exploded), get back a Crew or Chisel to keep pressure up on the corp‘s board, or get back your finality for another deep dig into R&D.

Oh my god. people. I just went to rotten tomatoes to get the score for District 99 so I could humerously compare myself to what I was sure would be a 55/100. But no. In our worst of all possible timelines District 9 has a 90% from critics and an 82% from as many reviews as there are people who live in Madison, WI. If that many people like middling trash, maybe this deck has what it takes to take dotw. Sharing this deck with you all feels like I’m the poor schmuck whose job is to try and sell RC Cola to a restaurant that currently stocks Coke. Yes, I’m aware that I’m Temu Hoshiko.

With all those caveats aside, this deck is a ton of fun to play and I think provides a novel, mostly-functional shell out of anarch. Lago has already seen success in better decks than mine, but comes with the disadvantage of grinding your deck into dust during long games against glacier. Likewise Zer0 used to see play back in the day of Clan Vengeance decks, but is generally a poor-man‘s version of ProCo unless you can salvage some value from the net damage it gives. Paragon was mostly replaced by Pennyshaver by most criminals, but is well worth the 2 influence here, with both abilities actually giving you value by helping you move resources off the top of the deck to increase your Lago value or by filtering the top card to better give you what you need in the moment. You will often run out of meaningful things to install with Paladin by late game, but even if all you do with it is install Boomerangs and Botulus it’s the best money card for the slot.

For those of you who want to tune this deck or salvage the core of it for your own better version, there are tons of directions to take it. The only influence that’s absolutely here necessary is the Buffer Drives. Labor Rights plays equally well with District 99 as any of the other combo pieces and is a valid target for district‘s ability as well. When more of my games were going to long games against BtL glacier on jnet I would use Labor Rights on an empty stack to turn my deck into 3x Strike Fund. If you’re going for a faster setup (especially if playing a suite with breakers), Moshing also works very well in this deck. I cut mine for slots, but ymmv. I was being too much of a dirty hipster to slot turtle in here, but it’s probably significantly better than my suite.

I would make a final plug, however, for Freedom over Hoshiko in this meta. With corps as strong as they are, Freedom‘s ability to meaningfully and repeatedly threaten assets without the need for Bones or Imp is amazing. Even a single leech makes HQ runs absolutely menacing, especially versus combo or kill decks. Hoshiko is so overtuned that you have to devote 30 deck slots to match her native ID ability, but if you’re looking for something fun to play in these waning months before all of our janky FFG cards go away, you should sleeve this up. Special thanks to Virulenz and DoomRat for helping turn this from pure jank into a mostly-functional deck. Criticism and mockery is welcome.