Project CROW 4.1

This deck is part of the fourth iteration of the Project CROW mini-campaign for beginners familiar with System Gateway. It consists of three Runner and three Corp decks, that are upgraded up over three steps. They start with only cards from System Gateway, then visit the Startup format to end up with currently competitively viable decks in the Standard format that have placed well in tournaments. (See here for further information on the tournament formats Startup and Standard)

Other matchups will follow as the Standard meta develops and interesting decks appear!

Description

Here we are at the final station of the full Hivemind MaxX list, that we unleashed at one of the first big tournaments in the Gateway meta.

This list is very tricky to play, since it is quite fragile, but can be extremely powerful, when played correctly. The basic idea of the Hoshiko list is still there, but turned up to 11. MaxX allows you to very quickly see a lot of your cards, even though most of them will end up in the heap instead. Thankfully Simulchip will fetch them for you so the downside gets mitigated.

A new addition to the virus suite is Progenitor, which does two things for you: It eliminates the MU cost of your virusses and helps you be a bit more resilient against purges. This will prove very useful to host Hivemind. This card had a bad reputation for being a very janky card for a long while, but has found its home in this deck. It comes with one virus token (two with Cookbook) and tokens on this card are treated as if they were on all of your virusses, which amplifies their power significantly.

Together with Knobkierie to put tokens on your Hivemind, you will very quickly have an extremely powerful suite of virusses at your disposal. When using Fermenter, you only lose the tokens on the card, but count those on Hivemind as well, easily gaining you 10+ credits. Your Chisel becomes a nightmare for the Corp, chewing through ice even without the need for Devil Charm. Also Conduit now starts digging for a lot of cards from the get go!

If that's still not enough, take a look at Tranquilizer. With a Cookbook out, a single token on Hivemind is enough for this to come on the board with 3 tokens already. If you take a closer look at the timing chart, this allows for some very powerful shenanigans. Installing the Tranquilizer with Simulchip in the paid ability window during the ice encounter means the ice gets instantly derezzed. Since you're already past the point, where the Corp is allowed to rez ice, this means you have completely circumvented dealing with the ice entirely!

Your breakers have almost completely disappeared. MKUltra and Paperclip deal with some problematic ice the Corp could be throwing at you, but your most consistent breaker is Aumakua. With a Hivemind, this breaker easily reaches the necessary strength for almost any piece of ice in the Corp's arsenal.

And as if that's not enough, the deck unleashes its full potential, once it runs out of cards! Once you're down to 0 cards in stack, use Labor Rights to grab back the three most useful cards (typically including another copy of Labor Rights) and instantly draw one of them. If you then use Rebirth to switch away from MaxX (mostly to Omar Keung), you will have quick access to the most powerful tools in your list, that were previously milled by MaxX triggers.

This is a lot to take in and it will take time to get used to the variety of options presented to you, but once mastered, this list overcomes its fragility and becomes a very powerful setup!

Overview lists

These list show you what cards to put in and out for every game transition: Corp overview | Runner overview

Decklists

Seamless Rush vs Hivemind MaxX

Corp 1 | Runner 1

Corp 2 | Runner 2

Corp 3 | Runner 3