Mac the Knife 1.1

GreatDismal 7

After working on a stealth deck for several weeks worth of local FLGS league play using a different shaper ID each week, I've come to the conclusion that Kate is the most consistent of them all. My basic strategy with this deck is to mulligan for a Professional Contacts and draw very aggressively for pieces of the rig, while utilizing Kate's ID ability every turn to build up the cheap rig components without wasting any clicks for econ if possible. The win condition is essentially to make big runs on R&D with a stack of R&D Interfaces (funded by Modded) or piercing scoring servers once the unstoppable Corroder/Switchblade/Refractor suite is set up.

The deck contains a great deal of draw and tutoring, because you are utterly dead in the water for early aggression if you fail to pick up Self-modifying Code early on. It also includes a great deal of memory, because shapers can get it cheap, and the hand limit benefit from BOX-E synergizes well with the abundant card draw built into the deck to get you all your pieces. As of my first draft here, the deck does not run Plascrete Carapace, relying upon Public Sympathy and card draw to stave off meat/net damage. Clone Chips and a one-off Levy AR Lab Access can help you recover if you're forced to discard any essential programs or hardware. Also, the Clone Chips are very helpful for memory management, because the deck includes only enough hardware for 9 MU worth of programs, while including a full rig (if you count Parasite) that takes up 10 MU.

The addition of Parasite is an untested new wrinkle following a really rough loss in which Mother Goddess presented an unbreakable wall to my full rig, and it's a generally useful tool in any case. Datasucker tokens really help to manage limited stealth credits during big runs, but it's not mandatory in most cases and isn't a high install priority. It should be noted that the Parasite is included at the expense of a third Silencer, which will reduce the performance of the deck in some matchups. It's a tough call, because getting two Silencers up means that suddenly you have a recurring "free" solution to Archer and pretty much every other sentry.

I'd love to get feedback on the deck.

10/19 edit: Taking some feedback into account and rethinking my influence allotment, I feel that the third silencer provides more value and reliability than a parasite splash, and that my intended use for Parasite can be realized in-faction with Atman in a reasonably efficient way. I also removed Test Run as too expensive, and added a third Diesel. Leprechaun has been added as a trick to accommodate Magnum Opus plus any late-game Self-modifying Code shenanigans that might need to take place. I've added 2x Replicator in order to facilitate rapidly building up the hardware rig, and I've therefore removed Quality Time as too expensive for the deck and redundant with all the other draw mechanics.

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