SG+SU21 duel – Episode 2: Zahya Sadeghi (vs NEH)

Episode 2 of the duel series features economic warfare between a big tech monopoly and a profiteering cybercriminal. They may differ in means, but both are motivated by greed! These decks are designed to play well against each other, but are also strong in their own right within the System Gateway + System Update 21 card pool. See the corp deck here: SG+SU21 duel – Episode 2: Near-Earth Hub (vs Zahya)

With this deck, your goal is to keep the corp's board under control by running often to gain credits and trash assets. Daily Business Show, License Acquisition and SanSan City Grid are priority targets, while R&D and the scoring remote are your agenda hunting grounds. Stay aggressive – keeping the corp on the back foot is the key to success!

Pennyshaver and Zahya's ID are your primary money makers, augmented by multi-access tools (Docklands Pass, Jailbreak and The Maker’s Eye). Security Testing provides extra credits—even better with Dirty Laundry—since NEH typically plays horizontally and leaves some servers unprotected, while Scrubber defrays trash costs.

Career Fair provides a 3 rebate towards Resources, making it easier to install Earthrise Hotel (for clickless card draw) and Liberated Account (large store of credits).

With two of each icebreaker type, 2x Mutual Favor, and Earthrise in play, you should be able to get a full suite of breakers up and running pretty quickly. Before then, use Inside Job to gain early access to servers; ideally, save it for running a remote that you suspect houses an agenda.

Leech rewards you with pseudo-credits as a natural byproduct of Zahya running centrals often. Accumulating enough Leech tokens makes the corp think twice about installing and rezzing big ICE (particularly Tollbooth), or waste a turn purging them.

Sneakdoor Beta is not strictly necessary, but is a nice-to-have as another attack vector. However, since the corp can filter card draws with DBS, finding agendas in HQ is less likely. T400 Memory Diamond is included purely to support the memory-hungry Sneakdoor, but a low priority install otherwise.

In building this deck, we found lukevanryn’s 🥈🙌 Silver hands (2/23 Melbourne Startup CO) to be a helpful starting point. We narrowed the card pool from Liberation-cycle Startup to SG+SU21, then tweaked it over multiple duels with the NEH deck.

This matchup starts off pretty even, but tends to accelerate towards the finish depending on whether the runner is able to hold down the corp’s board, or it spirals out of control. Always an interesting duel!

SG+SU21 duel episodes (with more on the way)

Episode 1: 🟢 Tāo Salonga -vs- 🟪 Precision Design

Episode 2: 🔵 Zahya Sadeghi -vs- 🟨 Near-Earth Hub

Episode 3: 🔵 Steve Cambridge -vs- 🟥 Personal Evolution