"Mac" the Knife

Card draw simulator
Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Repartition by Cost
Repartition by Strength
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
Mac the Knife 1.1
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GreatDismal 7

After working on a stealth deck for several weeks worth of local FLGS league play using a different shaper ID each week, I've come to the conclusion that Kate is the most consistent of them all. My basic strategy with this deck is to mulligan for a Professional Contacts and draw very aggressively for pieces of the rig, while utilizing Kate's ID ability every turn to build up the cheap rig components without wasting any clicks for econ if possible. The win condition is essentially to make big runs on R&D with a stack of R&D Interfaces (funded by Modded) or piercing scoring servers once the unstoppable Corroder/Switchblade/Refractor suite is set up.

The deck contains a great deal of draw and tutoring, because you are utterly dead in the water for early aggression if you fail to pick up Self-modifying Code early on. It also includes a great deal of memory, because shapers can get it cheap, and the hand limit benefit from BOX-E synergizes well with the abundant card draw built into the deck to get you all your pieces. As of my first draft here, the deck does not run Plascrete Carapace, relying upon Public Sympathy and card draw to stave off meat/net damage. Clone Chips and a one-off Levy AR Lab Access can help you recover if you're forced to discard any essential programs or hardware. Also, the Clone Chips are very helpful for memory management, because the deck includes only enough hardware for 9 MU worth of programs, while including a full rig (if you count Parasite) that takes up 10 MU.

The addition of Parasite is an untested new wrinkle following a really rough loss in which Mother Goddess presented an unbreakable wall to my full rig, and it's a generally useful tool in any case. Datasucker tokens really help to manage limited stealth credits during big runs, but it's not mandatory in most cases and isn't a high install priority.

I'd love to get feedback on the deck.

5 comments
28 Oct 2014 ironblue

I really like Kate's take on the stealth rig, and mulling hard for an early Professional Contacts with her is the real hotness. While someone wiser than I might be able to take the deck apart over inefficiencies, there are only a few snags I see holding you up.

Modded works (optimally) with exactly 5 cards in your deck... If it could cheat out Proco we could all die happy men, but alas. With a rig as memory intensive yet cheap as yours is, I don't know if I like Mod and Mopus as economy pieces.

Likewise, Test Run is usually built with slightly different cards in mind... Yours are both cheaper than the cost of the event itself, and once they hit the board they want to stay there. As tutoring it's still very useful, but again you might be able to find better solutions.

If you haven't done so already, look at the Trade-In/Replicator combo. There's a lot to be said for spamming hardware pieces in a stealth rig, especially if you're doing things like relying on more than one AMC for memory and more than one Interface for multiaccess.

Anyway, I like it, and wish you luck running it.

28 Oct 2014 ThroneRunner

Was having no Sure Gamble intentional as well?

28 Oct 2014 GreatDismal

I'm excluding sure gamble for now because it rarely seems to matter unless I get it in my opening hand, and I'd much rather stay with proco. The deck relies strongly on recurring credits and Kate's install ability, with opus to power Corroder. Test run is a card I'm on the fence about. More tutoring is strong, but it's very expensive. I will look into the trade in/replicator option- it could work, though it would be better with 3xsilencers/lockpicks.

Anyone have an opinion on using datasucker and/or parasite vs a backup AI breaker for weird situations that can't otherwise be broken? Maybe Atman would be better.

28 Oct 2014 Pinkwarrior

@GreatDismal how r u finding Switchblade i've been quite wary of it, sure it can cut through sentry's like butter but it also requires 2 stealth creds per sentry so am interested to how ur finding funding it on a run.

28 Oct 2014 GreatDismal

@Pinkwarrior switchblade is incredible in this deck. Two recurring credits or ghost runner tokens beats Archer. I'm considering reading in datasucker and parasite for another lockpick because it's just that awesome.