[Startup] Ob Except It's Killing You

At long last, and after designing nearly a dozen different decks, I've finally done it - I've created a deck that I can win with more than 50% of the time! Jokes aside, I'm really proud of this deck. It uses some cards that don't see a lot of play in Startup and uses them in Ob to do some very interesting tricks.

The goal of this deck is to get enough damage on the table to kill the runner in a single turn. This is mainly done with four different cards: Punitive Counterstrike, Reaper Function, Clearinghouse, and Azef Protocol. Outside of that, you want to be getting economy and playing a shell game with your agendas. There's not a lot of ice here, so be bold and don't be afraid to leave key servers unsecured.

Punitive Counterstrike is surprisingly the easiest to use for me. If you have two of them in your hand and the runner has two or less points, you've basically won once they steal their next agenda. Even one of them can still lethal using a combination of the other cards. Reaper Function is the other star of this deck. It is easy to leave on the table and fire it when needed, and if you think it's at risk you can pop it early and get a Regolith out of the deal. Clearinghouse and Azef Protocol are slightly harder to use, given that you need to double-advance them, but since the punishments are different for each of them hopefully you can confuse the runner enough to get them to leave them on the table for just barely too long.

Defense in this deck is extremely slim. Since you're leaving so many remotes exposed, Hostile Architecture is going to be your main deterrent to forcing runners to not touch your cards. This works very nice with your economy: very few people are going to be taking 2 damage just to trash a Regolith, and you can get even more money out of the deal by using Extract and Yakov. Another tool is ZATO City Grid, which lets you get a few hits on the runner and makes servers look scarier than they are.

Speaking of ZATO, let's talk ice. At the time I'm making this deck, Startup is dominated by the Endurance, so I've decided to forgo everything except a few essentials. Tithe is a good 1-credit taxer and can be fetched by Regolith when needed. Swordsman is here only to deal with runners who run only the boat and dolls as their breakers and force them back a step. Finally, Stavka is just a good card to combo with Ob when needed. None of these ices will ever secure a server for you, but you typically don't need to worry about that. Just play shell games with everything, and set things up so that when they do steal an agenda it'll be the last thing they'll ever do.