Film Source - A Tier 2 Iain Stirling Deck

This deck is solidly Tier 2. I've taken it to two tournaments in London, most recently the 19th September BABW qualifier, and I think I have a good idea of the deck's strength. I decided to write it up because I think it's a different and interesting deck, despite being low power.

The core idea of the deck is to let the corp score an agenda then play The Source. You start getting Iain Stirling: Retired Spook credits. Your economy is enhanced by the Underworld Contact and Drug Dealer.

With the money rolling in, and The Source slowing the Corp down, you have time to play out your icebreakers. One of the most frequent questions I get when I show this deck to people is whether the deck can afford to play Garrote. The answer is emphatically yes. Easily.

Your Fall Guy keeps the The Source alive when agendas are scored, and you don't need to worry about the cost to steal agendas imposed by The Source because of Film Critic. However, if for any reason you access an agenda and don't wish to steal it you can simply decline to pay the additional cost for The Source. You can also leave agendas hosted on Film Critic if adding them to your score area would cost you Iain Stirling: Retired Spook credits. Having two copies of Film Critic really helps this.

Don't let the corp build up an asset economy. You have the money to trash their remotes, and Drive By loves unrezzed asset economy. In an ideal game, the corp will be unable to score and builds up agendas in hand. Then you Legwork in and take them. While not stealing agendas - or hosting them on Film Critic - you can keep the corp poor using Account Siphon and Emergency Shutdown. If you have an extra Forger in hand then instead of throwing it away remember to use your current Forger to clear tags. Finally, sometimes you need to just sit back and let your money build up rather than burning through servers for random accesses.

Corroder and Garrote are obvious choices for this deck. Picking fracters for criminal was a bit harder. Cerberus "Rex" H2 is actually quite good, but the power counter limit is a problem in a deck without recursion. There's also a Passport for if the Corp gets some code gates on the centrals that you need to attack in the early game. Unfortunately you don't have the memory to have all of your breakers installed at the same time.

Using Hostage is the big skill decision in this deck, and I've come to regret my choices more than once after loosing a game. I can't give too much advice, you have to work it out from the game state. Getting Underworld Contact up early is great, but The Source is a midgame priority. If you don't have much economy in the early game then Tri-maf Contact is in the deck as emergency relief.

Having two copies of each breaker - except the relatively unimportant #Passport - is vital in a deck that lacks recursion. Likewise, you will occasionally lose The Source, and you want to draw it, so two copies of that too. The extra Film Critic is good, because two film critics means another agenda in your control but not in your scoring area, and of course you want to draw them.

This deck's biggest problem is letting a fast advance deck get more than one agenda off before The Source goes down. RP is very annoying for this deck, with its reliance on Cerberus "Rex" H2, but if you can keep up with trashing those agendas you will be fine.

I don't see many places for this deck to go without big economic changes, but maybe someone else will spot a way to put things together. (Perhaps if criminal got a program recursion card). R&D multi access is horrible, but I can't justify dropping anything for a singleton Medium or R&D Interface. It's also possible that the D&D cards will give me new direction through low influence icebreaker alternatives, I honestly haven't been paying much attention to them.