Valencia Estevez: Angel of the Apocalypse

I've been toying with an idea for a pure control deck out of Valencia since she was released, but never really got around to playing with it much as I was so immediately drawn to MaxX. I've been playing this build recently and absolutely love it. It has so many win conditions, is loaded with money and draw power and has the Blackmail threat to keep the remote locked down until you build inevitability. I think Valencia is a versatile ID that can support lots of different builds primarily because the economic boost from bad publicity is noticeable and Blackmail is such a great threat that many decks can't easily play around. This deck builds upon her bad publicity count to slowly grow her advantage, shrink the runner hand size and strike with one of your many win conditions when you feel you can't be stopped or the Corp makes a move. I hope you enjoy the build and please let me know if you have any question or comments.

Win Conditions:

The primary draw to this deck is the win conditions. You get a bunch of Anarch good stuff and throw in everyone's favorite board wipe: Apocalypse. Blackmail, as I mentioned, is really your first line of defense. With 3 copies, 3 Deja Vus to get them back, Levy AR to cycle your deck and countless card draw, you should feel safe to spam these pretty liberally when the Corp throws something in an iced up remote. There are many times where I score free points with the 2nd Blackmail as the Corp tries to rush me and assumes I don't have 2 in hand. Make the Corp play scared and don't be afraid to jam your Blackmails - you want to Corp to get nervous to play out their cards as that gets you to the next phase.

Itinerant Protesters has been amazing in this deck. It rewards you for doing what you already want to do, which is stockpile more bad pub to make your runs practically free. Once you get to 3 bad pub, which is very easy to do, you start to disrupt many of the kill and fast advance combos as the Corp has to start choosing whether to discard combo cards or agendas they have been holding. It also helps you trigger Vigil every turn, which is huge value. I used to play 3 copies, but found that the first one stuck around on the board for a while and the others consistently clogged up my hand. With all the draw and recursion in this deck, you'll be able to consistently keep this in play. Even if you don't have time to build bad pub from recurring Investigative Journalism, putting the Corp at a max 4 card hand size is still good and will get you extra cards from Vigil.

Wanton Destruction is one of my favorite cards and is something I added to fight damage decks. With the reduced hand size from Itinerant Protesters, you can pretty much guarantee that if you time your Wanton right, you are going to dump a hand full of Scorches/Traffic Accidents into Archives. Even against non-combo decks, it is also usually guaranteed points during the mid game as the Corp is forced to hold agendas because of the Blackmail threat.

Apocalypse has been an awesome addition to the deck. Once you are rich and the Corp commits to building up big servers or building a remote with heavy upgrade protection, you can easily run all centrals and wipe the board with Eater and Blackmail runs. My only advice playing this deck is that you want to make sure you fire Apocalypse at a time where you have enough money and a Keyhole in hand to immediately follow up with it the next turn and start trying to finish the Corp off. While your rig is really light, you are likely killing your Wyldside/Adjusted Chronotype/Vigil setup and should only do so if you think you will quickly win the game. Many corps can't come back after you land this and a landed Apocalypse always hurts them worse than it hurts you..

If all else fails, you have Keyhole and tons of money/bad pub to make repeated Keyhole runs and starting destroying the Corps deck. As I said, there are so many ways to win and so much economy to fuel it that Corps have a tough time defending against every possible threat.

Economy and Support Cards:

This is pretty much a collection of every good economy card (and lots of them) that I could make room for. This deck gets rich very quickly and has so much card draw that I have found myself discarding Sure Gambles and Lucky Finds because my hand was so loaded. Once you get Wyldside/Adjusted Chronotype and Vigil going, you draw 3 cards for free at the beginning of your turn. If that isn't enough, you have playsets of I've Had Worse and Inject to dig for Blackmails, Vamps or other missing pieces. The card draw may seem like overkill, but it makes the deck very consistent and play much faster than opponents will expect.

The money cards are very click efficient, which is important because you want to spend your clicks either playing out your hand, using Investigative Journalism or making Keyhole runs in the late game. I tried a version of this with Magnum Opus, but this version has been much better and you get to play out your hand much more consistently. You are mainly using the pile of money you gain from this deck to do a few key things. First, you can Vamp the Corp down to 0 if they are threatening a fast advance or you need to challenge a remote where they either have a Caprice or you don't have a Blackmail. Second, if the Corp is building up up a lot of ice on their centrals, you can burn your money to set up an Apocalypse to wipe their board then lay down Keyhole and finish them off. Finally, if the Corp doesn't commit much ice to R&D, you can just get aggressive and go for the Eater/Keyhole plan.

In terms of programs, Eater/Keyhole is all your really need. Blackmail and Vamp gets you into remotes, so you really only need Eater to enable your central server runs to turn on Vamp, Wanton, Keyhole and Apocalypse. You could add a couple of Parasites if you were worried about Turing or Swordsman on a central, but I haven't really found it necessary.