[startup] Blooper Reel

Card draw simulator
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Satoshi 450

This has been my jam on jnet recently, with pretty decent W/L, after a lot of iterating.

Turns out, the shell has a lot of overlap with Veronica's Get #Blooped -- I'll try to explain the main ideas first and then the differences.

The main idea is to

We aren't always fast advancing agendas, just when we can. We generally never-advance agendas, except Offworld Office.

This deck has a decent matchup vs. Criminals, and can usually hold its own vs. Captain Padma boat decks. Against Esa it is very dependent on what actually gets sabotaged, but even if all the Spin Doctor's get trashed you can maybe get things back with Simulation Reset reset. You have one Subliminal Messaging to try to help sustain against the sabotage. (At times that has been a 2x.)

Economy:

The economy package I find quite sufficient given the amount of ice you want to rez. Keep in mind that rezzing Bloop de-rezes something else, so we have more costs than it may appear.

Other decks are using Nico Campaign which is objectively better if it survives. However I like the staying power of the Marilyn Campaign. You could cut Regolith Mining License for Nico Campaign. I slightly favor Regolith because it has a little better rhythm if you put it in the scoring remote, only blocking the remote for 2 turns.

Ice and ice placement:

Harmonic ice is very delicate, you really want to get ice down in the right order to get maximum effect. Wave is a critical ice -- if you don't draw it any point in the game, you are likely to lose. The reason I say this is, we only have 12 ice, but Wave lets you summon more ice, so you find those twelve ice's faster. Once you have Bloop, you can de-rez Wave in order to re-rez it later and find more ice.

  • The ideal starting hand includes Echo or Wave. You want to get your Echos rezzed first if you can.
  • Usually, I put Wave over HQ. (It helps to protect any agendas in your hand by adding an ice when they run. HQ is also the lowest priority server here.) If I have a Bloop I usually put it on R&D, because we won't be able to rez it early, but if the game goes well, it will come down to the runner trying to get R&D lock so you can't score out with Ontological Dependence. Sometimes I just leave R&D open and wait to see if the runner actually wants to run it. (Against Esa, Bloop goes over HQ before R&D, to defend against Chastushka, which is usually more devastating than Finality). If I have two echos, usually one is the scoring remote and one is R&D.
  • When you rez Wave, you want to either call for Echo or Bloop usually. If you don't have any Echo, you should probably get an Echo. If you do have an Echo, you should fetch Bloop. The main idea is that Bloop always wants to de-rez Wave, and ideally even be over the same remote as a Wave. This will mean that when the runner runs, wave is de-rezed, and then Rezzed again, adding two power counters to all rezzed Echos. These Echos can quickly become very hard to deal with-- and even if the runner has an answer, we have a chance to trash that answer later. The upshot is, you want to have an early Echo on the board, somewhere where it will get rezzed, and then after that get the "Bloop-derezzes Wave, Wave fetches another Bloop" engine going.

Over the scoring remote, you want some combination of the following ice:

In the scoring remote you want to have

If they don't run this on their first click, they don't have enough clicks to get through Manegarm, and steal the agenda, and deal with Mr. Hendrik, without taking brain damage. If you also rez Pulse during the run, then they don't have enough clicks at all.

Some runners are playing with Basilar Synthgland 2KVJ to get an extra click, but if they do this, it's basically suicide vs. Thule Subsea: Safety Below, since you can fast advance Ontological Dependence once they install this.

If Funhouse is in the mix, then they also need a click to clear the tag. If they can't do this, we have 2x Retribution to try to blast their rig. Good targets include:

Now that Simulchip has rotated, Retribution is much more likely to pose a problem for the runner than before, and open up a scoring window.

The result is that if they clear out the scoring remote, you can usually make them pay for it.

Eventually, the game ends with the runner trying to contest R&D constantly, perhaps with WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ. But again you can make this very taxing:

This creates a pretty taxing server, and ends with them either taking a brain damage or floating a tag.

Usually your targets to recur include Manegarm Skunkworks and Mr. Hendrik.

Notable omissions:

  • No Distributed Tracing. This is just a very expensive card for what it does. 3 credits and two clicks is a big tempo hit for you, and it just rots in your hand unless the runner is stealing agendas. If you don't have the follow-up punishment then its a dead card usually. I prefer the Funhouse & Mr. Hendrik combo.
  • No Hypoxia.

May seem weird, but consider our options when the runner is tagged:

Usually the way I'm thinking about it is, I want the tag punishment to open a scoring window so that next turn I can do a brain damage with Djupstad Grid. You might try playing around with Hypoxia anyways, since it takes a way a click and so contributes to your scoring window at least a bit.

Life in the bubbles has a different take, they have 2 End of the Line for tag punishment. But this isn't a guaranteed kill, the deck only plans to play that card once. So that seems like a fragile win condition to my sensibilities. (I might be wrong, you might have more success swapping out simulation reset and a retribution for an end of the line.)

  • No Nightmare Archive. This card gets rave reviews right now, and it seems very strong -- you can poison archives and force Esa and others to encounter it. However, it didn't make the cut here. The reason is, we have mostly 2 point agendas. If the runner steals 4x 2 pointers, then the -1 from Nightmare archives didn't matter at all. So they would need to hit 2x Nightmare archives for it to start mattering that way. That means we need to run 3 of them probably. For this you will have to cut pretty deeply in the rest of the deck idea. (It has some synergy with Simulation Reset though, since you can use that to put Nightmare Archive in the bin.)

True, we do actually have Élivágar Bifurcation. So you could run one Nightmare Archive and think of it as a negative Élivágar Bifurcation. You only have to score one Élivágar Bifurcation, and as long as you feed them the Nightmare Archive, then even if they steal it, it can't cause you to lose. So you could even discard it.

However, that's not usually what I do with Élivágar Bifurcation, usually if I have it, I try to score it over Djupstad Grid to get another core damage, even if I already scored the first and it won't help me win the game.

So that's my analysis -- as Runner I always take the -1 point vs. Thule Subsea: Safety Below, because it often won't prevent me from winning the game, and I'm more worried about them fast-advancing Ontological Dependence. Most Thule Subsea: Safety Below don't have 3 pointers. As corp, I have a hard time justifying cutting any of the other cards in the deck for the Nightmare Archives, when it's only going to matter in the fraction of games where the runner steals exactly one Élivágar Bifurcation. In the end, I think Djupstad Grid is the real nightmare.

Thanks for reading to the end, hope you enjoyed that. Remember, mega style points if you manage to score by points and by flatlining the runner with Djupstad grid simultaneously. Djupstad grid is for real.

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