REMOVE HUMAN v.0.1

umbralAeronaut 811

About as straightforward an APEX build as I could make, using Intelligence Explosion as a starting point. The first several Exclusive Party get installed facedown and burned to APEX trash engines, turning later ones into money machines. Diesel (and outside of the NBN matchup, Hunting Grounds) are used to draw and establish breaker presence with a quick Endless Hunger/Heartbeat combo. e3 Feedback Implants spreads the threat range of Endless Hunger to cover the likes of Archer and Heimdall 2.0. It also gives some hope to the HB matchup against which APEX normally struggles. Gingerbread vitally handles Ichi 1.0 and 2.0, Vikram, Resistor, Archangel, Flare, News Hound, and a host of other current-meta problems. That leaves Architect, Crick, Turing, and a variety of positional ICE as this deck's principle unbreakable problems. The answer in these cases is Prey as needed to set-up your Apocalypse, as well as carefully charting the Apoc turn to hit Crick and Architect central servers last (nullifying the advantage of any installs the corporation makes from their subs). Architect will be a thorn in the deck's side all game but so long as the Corporation is detonated at regular intervals it can be managed.

Generally you only want to install Chop Bot 3000 immediately after your first Apocalypse in order to clean-up your board and accelerate your rebuild. Your set-up should be as slender as possible until your first Apocalypse. Levy AR Lab Access was dropped since my evaluation is that this deck will have won or lost fairly conclusively by the time it draws it's third Apocalypse anyway. APEX doesn't really demand much in the way of multi-access and the prevalence of asset-based kill decks makes deep dig risky anyway, so The Turning Wheel hits the sweet spot for our demented rampant AI.

Singletons of Kraken, Traffic Jam, and Utopia Shard exist to stretch your power plays just a little bit further.

Now all I need to do is somehow lose 5 cards...

15 comments
15 Jun 2016 tendermovement

Out of the Ashes could be pretty good for a 1 click Apocalypse. Have you considered that instead of some of the one-offs?

15 Jun 2016 umbralAeronaut

@tendermovement bonus clicks from Shaper are a luxury that APEX has to sacrifice some major fundamentals for due to how influence-hungry he is. Out of the Ashes is a whopping 6 influence for 3 copies. Any individual one copy of it COULD lead to an Apocalypse turn with a spare click left over though, which might be great or not depending on board state or matchup. It is also a lot easier to fit in rig-wise than Hyperdriver (as utilized by the other popular Apex build, the Hyperdriver 'King of Servers' deck). I think it's probably worth a try, but I decided to keep it simpler with this deck iteration and focus Influence on the stuff APEX needs.

15 Jun 2016 tendermovement

@umbralAeronaut Yes, I think it's not necessary to put in more than 3. That would net you a 1 click Apocalypse on the rare occasion but having 1 free run on the Apocalypse turn could - for example - save you from being scorched after as you could also install Heartbeat on the same turn. It seems like an interesting card for Apex. Haven't tried it myself yet though.

15 Jun 2016 esutter479

I'd say drop the Infiltrations, Kraken and 1 Apocalypse (if Apoc is out of the question, then Traffic Jam maybe) if you wanna get down to 45 cards. The rest of the build looks great, though, and I may be compelled to switch out my Faust for Gingerbread.

15 Jun 2016 Zenit

I think that Turing screw you big time. Perhaps a Panchatantra or ZU.13 Key Master or even a Inside Job

15 Jun 2016 wookiez

But Endless hunger isn't an AI, so why does it care about Turing?

15 Jun 2016 wookiez

Never mind, just looked up why. For future reference, turing doesn't say 'End the Run'.

15 Jun 2016 tendermovement

@wookiezIt can't break the damn thing because it's not pure "end the run" it's a "condition then end the run". The only way to go through is to have a dedicated breaker which is usually not run in Apex or click through.

15 Jun 2016 tendermovement

@wookiezComment sent before noticing the reply, apologies.

15 Jun 2016 umbralAeronaut

@esutter479 Yeah, I think you can go to 2x on Prey, and Wasteland (Wasteland doesn't want to get installed before you've gotten your first Apocalypse off, and with some discipline Prey can be reserved for the few examples of ICE that will disrupt your Apocs). You can probably drop all of the Infiltration if you like, I like having Expose but it's probably unnecessary. Thanks for the kind words!

@Zenit If Turing is installed on a remote, it just gets Apocalypsed. If Turing is installed on a central server, it's a full turn with #Prey and 2 facedown cards to get rid of. It's a tough pill but I firmly believe that's your tech right there, devoting too many other deck-space resources to a card that's typically just a 1-of in Corp decks is working a bit too hard.

15 Jun 2016 Zenit

@umbralAeronautI understand. I was thinking the same, but maybe the tempo loss Turing make you incurr it's too much.

18 Jun 2016 mawa

[accordions intensify]

20 Jun 2016 Shteevie

Haven't played Apex before, and with the claim that this is a straightforward build, I thought it might be a fun experiment for a meetup night. Played it against BABW kill and NEH asset spam with Sensie.

I see the trick with Exclusive Party, but without some kind of recursion, it feels like spending 6 influence and slots on an average of 2 cards and 5 credits. Is that accurate? I liked having a no-brainer card to play facedown at the start of the turn early game as I spent the first several turns drawing deep for EH, but that's not worth the cost, I would say.

And without EH, the deck is... static. Facechecking with no programs out is rough, and anything worth playing that is porous will hit you twice before Prey removes it from play. Vanilla and Wraparound really make this deck cry until EH drops.

I'm going to pull Exclusive Party for Special Orders and maybe Easy Mark. But I'd love to hear what you think I was doing wrong.

21 Jun 2016 umbralAeronaut

@Shteevie Oh this deck was principally a thought exercise when I made it, I will disclaim any statements of it being actually good/coherent until I can test it out more myself. Exclusive Party is really not a fantastic card, even less so when you're paying Influence for it. The most important part about EP for me is that it will never cost you a card (when played for it's ability it covers the click spent to draw it). The rationale is that APEX doesn't ever need a terrible lot of credits, but he wants at least a few and he also REALLY wants to see his mini-faction power cards, so an econ piece that doubles as a 6-card deck thinner and has upside when used as fodder for his ID ability is going to be more useful to him then, say, 3x Lucky Find (for equal influence).

If you don't see EH when you need it, you're going to have a bad time against gearcheck ETR which is a common ice suite strategy. Variance happens. So yeah if Special Order does it for you then go for it, let me know how it works.

25 Jul 2016 umbralAeronaut

Post 23 Seconds' release and after playing several more games with this guy I have refined it, ended up cutting Wasteland and adding the Out of the Ashes suggested as well as additional icebreaker options with Overmind, and it now lives on as the (regrettably less memey) but far more effective "Cult of Apex":

netrunnerdb.com