Arctic Red Carpet

Under Threat

It's a nice sunny day, in the middle of spring. But you're not outside. You hop on your PAD and check the scroll. Good news! It turns out Jinteki's recent advancements at the Heinlein branch continue to perfect The Essence of You and have found a way to extend life itself!

But you don't care. You deign to complain about how such gifts are bestowed - you squeal about how we use our own property in New Angeles, about the security and investigators we employ to reacquire stolen property, about the supposedly monstrous influence our wealth affords us. Despite our failed attempts to remind you how we better your life, you decide to break into our servers and serve your 'justice'.

You are not the first, and we've learned since then.

Maybe you'll be ensnared in a spider's web or take a venomous bite or sting. In your surprise and confusion you will stumble away from our defenses, fleeing from the bloodthirsty predators and leaving a blood trail in net-space.

You'll be so pleased to leave alive with our secrets. You'll take a moment to tend to your wounds and relocate before our agents track you down. You'll rush to the airport, confident we lost our only window.

But we will simply watch and wait. Your plane will get diverted, and you'll let it go because we taught you to. And the first thing you see as you leave the plane is the arctic snow, and the blood red carpet leading out onto the ice. A man with a gun will be standing at the end of it, and the only thing left will be to give in to the end.

Concept

The goal of this deck was to make a PE deck that properly forks the runner without advanceable traps or mass agendas. This deck instead applies pressure.

The key interaction is See How They Run. Scoring it does two damage regardless of the psi game - one from the agenda and one from our ID. But you always want to score this with at least one spare click so you can threaten End of the Line. If you have a second spare click, you can tutor for the end of the line with Pivot, or if you already have it you can play Mindscaping for an extra damage. If a Runner isn't ready for this threat, they lose on the spot. If they are, they are forced into using saved up instant speed tag removal or draws before you End of the Line them - even if you don't have it!

For this you'll want lots of money. Charlotte + La Costa are a key part of how we'll do this as it also lets us dig for our combo pieces while simultaneously baiting runs in the remote. Hedge and Hansei are good burst eco, and the one of Celebrity Gift is a good way to recover from low credit totals to turn back on your threats.

Ice is pretty standard - probably the least optimized portion of the deck. I did most of my testing with 2 Anansi 0 Cloud Eater (but I think Anansi does less for this deck than the subs on Cloud Eater even if it does cost two more) as well as 1 Tributary 0 Enigma (but that got banned), so I think there's room to improve here.

Play Patterns

You have two goals early game - one: get money, two: find your combo. The best way to do this is to get a Charlotte ticking or score an Offworld Office behind a cheap end the run ASAP. The former helps find combo pieces, while the latter basically converts the Pivot into a third copy of End of the Line.

Once you've done that, fill the remote with upgrades and slowly build up your ice. If the Runner slows down, threaten your combo. If the Runner is aware of the decklist, I find they often take almost any bait you put in the remote. If the Runner speeds up, you can typically find a kill with Public Trail or any lingering tags - most Runners can't clear tags and stay above eight credits and 4 cards while repeatedly hitting your remote.

Phoneutria is a critical ice, and you almost always want at least one on the remote. It makes it hard for the Runner to respect both the access threat and the tag threat, especially if you can get them to run your remote repeatedly.

Match Ups

Against Shaper, you won't score out. Instead, you'll need to win on tempo. Pivot is your friend here - you can feed agendas and then use Pivot to either find Public Trail or End of the Line, then play the other from hand. Worst case you're up against Aniccam, in which case you're forced into scoring out.

Against Anarch, you're typically fine especially with the death of infinite imp - low credit Bankhar is often too dangerous to live long, and slower decks like Seb tend to die to the combo rush. The worst case here tends to be Arruaceiras Crew and other ice destruction decks - your best hope here is that they spend their destruction on the cheap ice.

Crim has a better matchup now that Tributary is gone, but very often you can kill both ways - tempo threats or combo kill.