TWIY Shock Advance — 3rd place SC deck

I played this deck a couple weekends ago at a Store Championship in the PDX area right after Double Time came out, and really enjoyed it. RSVP has been amazing since day 1 with SanSan and MMC (and Pop-up and Paper Wall and...) and NAPD Contract is a fabulous card that sometimes works well with RSVP.

Another inspiration for this deck was playing against a friend who didn't make the requisite Jackson/Archives runs before attacking R&D — a play error, sure, but it got me thinking. Instead of putting in the usual 3x Caduceus that I love, why not three Shocks, and make sure to run 9x2 agendas so you always know the count? This can turn into a complex middle game where NAPDs are left in Archives where they often can't be afforded, or can be strategically given to the runner to open scoring windows. You can Jackson aggressively and let both agendas and Shocks flow into Archives, spending almost no marginal effort to add defense against the common Datasucker strategy (and who runs Record Reconstructor at a tournament?)

I don't have a lot of playtesting experience with Shocks, but I'm not sure if I need any special credentials to dump them into Archives and occasionally make the runner sad when they pull them off R&D. I even got a flatline off a runner error in the last round of Swiss, which put me into the top 4. (He ran, expecting a Jackson shuffle before beginning a Medium attack, but just died instead. He, an inveterate Jinteki player and local Net-pal, had also asked me if I was high when he first ran into a Shock on R&D. XD)

I keep thinking that there's some sort of version of this deck where Archives gets almost all the agendas and is locked down more than usual with a Tollbooth and/or RSVP, but I never really got to that state with this deck. Because of RSVP's eventual weakness against Yog.0 and Datasucker, adding a little to the Shock defense with a copy of Cyberdex doesn't seem like it'd be out of the question. I did do a virus clear or two to slow down Yog a couple times.

I'm not sure if the basic concept is really top-tier, but this turned out to be an excellent "noob killer" deck for the tournament. Runners can pursue a standard R&D lock strategy for an entire game and not be even remotely aware of how terrible their odds are to close out. (One game I lost the next day was off a 10% chance to score the only agenda in R&D, a gamble I'd happily repeat.) NAPD was hot off the presses at that moment, so some of this might be a function of poor adaptation to the new card, but it was really easy to count 9 agendas and play the odds — it's common to leak 6 points but retain excellent odds that the runner won't get the seventh.

...OK, it's really, really common to win 7-6 or 7-4 with this deck — 7-0 and 7-2 require your natural luck for drawing Moon Ads at the right moments. Anyway, people kept overextending themselves to score that Breaking News and close out, but they never found it! The agenda leak meant I had no prayer in single-elimination after a shutout as runner in the first game.

Shipment from Mirrormorph is a choice I expect a bit of grief for, if I get any comments at all, but it's handy if you happen to see it turn 1, it can help you do something after two clicks of Jackson or a click of that and Green Level, and it occasionally (rarely!) works as a poor man's Biotic Labor, allowing you to install SSCG and Moon Ads simultaneously on click 1 for that fresh moon counter feeling. I didn't use it that much during the tournament, but it did good work to set up servers in at least one early-game moment. shrug

There are other ways to spend the influence, of course, including more Rotos, Swordsmen if you're feeling extra sassy, or even saving up for a single Biotic Labor (I did the 3x BL "AstroBiotics" deck for a while but it was a little high-variance to be fun for long). I ran a variant at a SC the next day with some Hives, but didn't do as well, though Hive is pretty fabulous. I've even run a stupid Accelerated Shutdown version of this deck that seems pretty reliable at closing out the game from 4 points by scoring a 3-point Beale, requiring one moon counter at the ready. (Card changes for that one are left as an exercise for the reader.)

Light on sentries — Shock being the silent sentry here. Matrix Analyzer was the "last card" added to the deck for edge cases involving Account Siphon and rare agendas left overnight, but didn't do much work on this particular day. I enjoy sentry/tracer-heavy NBN:MN, but no Caduceus/Data Raven/etc. in this one.

OK, that was a novella. But I love this deck! Don't steal my tech! –B