Niezwyciężony (1st Place @ Haunted Game Cafe Winter)

CrimsonWraith 3638

Invincible

My first place Corp deck at the 15-player HGC Winter Tournament in Fort Collins, CO. I went 3-1 on the Corp side, the sole loss was a timed loss after game one went 45+ minutes.

It is my latest version of the Untrashable archetype originally made popular by db0. The base concept is to make running your remote servers click and credit intensive for the Runner. This is accomplished by keeping taxing ice on the centrals that cannot be bounced off of and protecting your remote assets with Encryption Protocols and Hostile Infrastructures. If the Runner spends his clicks and credits (and cards) to continue trashing your assets, you use Jackson Howard and Interns to continually recur them. In my brief experience, I've found the Runner typically stalls out and stops trashing everything before you run out of ways to bring stuff back. If the Runner doesn't waste his time trashing your assets, you should have more than enough credits to just win the game.

You score agendas out by setting up a server with some combination of two-three ice, Caprice, and Ash. This is often a NAPD Contract or Fetal AI, requiring further taxes to steal if a Runner does manage to access the agenda. Of course, if you're familiar with Untrashable, you already know all of this, so let's talk about what's new.

My base set of agendas here is Fetal AI, NAPD Contract, and The Future Perfect. Each of those agendas protects itself to some small degree, an important element with a smaller number of ice in the deck. A scored Nisei is incredible in the archetype, but it is very, very painful to have them stolen, and I've moved to playing without them entirely. With the Philotic Entanglement, I've found in playing that the Runner often stops running every new remote you install. A 3/2 allows you to turn that into a method of sneaking two points out when the board state may not otherwise favor you. You're not going to flatline anyone with it, but hitting a card or two is still better than scoring a blank Braintrust.

I feel very comfortable with 3 x Sundews and 3 x PADs as the only economy in the deck. You could make an argument for Mental Health Clinics here instead of PADs as the 0 rez cost is huge, particularly with no other economy besides the Sundews. Somewhere between swapping economy assets out and ambush assets in the last update for the deck, I stuck with the PADs instead of MHC, I'm not sure that was the correct call in hindsight. For upgrades, I cut Hokusai Grid out completely to make room for the Hostile Infrastructure. I'm liking the change so far. Having both in the deck would be great, but I'm pretty happy with the balance of economy assets, ambush assets, upgrades, and ice where it's at, didn't want to mess with it too much trying to shoehorn extra cards in.

Nothing terribly interesting on the ice suite. The morning of the tournament I took out a Tollbooth and added an Architect. Tollbooth is fantastic because it serves as a taxing/painful central server ice as well as a hard ETR for the remotes. That said, Architect seems a natural inclusion given the nature of the deck. There's only influence for a one-of either one, so it did not have a significant impact in the tournament at all.

Thanks for reading, feel free to hound me with questions below. =)

14 comments
24 Nov 2014 PeekaySK

How'd you like them Chimeras?

(Also, what's up with the polish name?)

24 Nov 2014 jawohl

en.wikipedia.org this might be it @PeekaySK

24 Nov 2014 PeekaySK

@jawohl I'm familiar with the novel, just curious about the associative train of thought that led Matt to name the deck after it :)

24 Nov 2014 RustyKettle

As your only (timed) loss of the night, I can attest to this deck's nastiness. I meant to ask, what guarding the HI that night? I could have sworn it was a hoskai grid. I should have run it to find out, but you were keeping me on my toes and I really didn't want to take a damage just to find it would take me even more damage to dismantle it. Plus I wanted to hang onto my inside jobs.

Finally, did you ever fire off the Ronin?

24 Nov 2014 RustyKettle

One more question: Did you ever use the Closed Accounts? Your only method of tagging is 1x Snare, so are you hinging on people floating tags post-siphon?

24 Nov 2014 CrimsonWraith

@PeekaySK The best use for Chimera is to protect Sundew in the early game. Runners rarely care to trade two clicks on their turn (risking whatever central server nastiness you have set up) to force you to repeatedly rez it, and it will hose any Runner deck not running AI breakers in the early game.

Let's see, the deck title is derived from a few coincidentally related things because I didn't have any clever Song of Ice and Fire titles for this deck. I was looking to derive something from db0's Untrashable title and Invincible was one of the first words to come to mind when thinking of synonyms. Invincible itself made me think of the Polish novel, whom's storyline somewhat ties into the identity for this deck: Basically, it revolves around the crew of a space ship investigating a planet where they find mechanical animal life that is self-replicating that they can't fight due to its complete (some may say perfect) integration into the planet's ecosystem. Finally, there was a Polish metal band titled Division by Zero, so the Polish title ties back as another homage to the original creator of this deck archetype (though he himself is not from Poland).

24 Nov 2014 CrimsonWraith

@RustyKettle It was an Ash guarding the HI in that game. Figured if you were going to trash it, I could make it cost at least two net damage and a few extra credits to do so. Probably a smart move by you to avoid it with the Inside Jobs in hand, seeing as how you lost one to net damage later and snagged the win with the other one.

I have not yet fired off Ronin (ironically, I would have been able to kill you with it following your Fetal score to break the 2-2 tie if you had not bounced it with Leela), I'm considering dropping it for another piece of ice, another ambush asset, or to bring back Hokusai Grid.

Closed Accounts is there primarily to deal with folks that tag themselves. Since I rarely have any ETR ice on HQ, it's necessary for dealing with most Criminal decks. I never used it at the tournament (though I would have used it on you, had we not hit time the turn you Siphoned me, hah), but I won a game on OCTGN the day prior by nailing a Runner with it after he Siphoned me.

24 Nov 2014 RustyKettle

@CrimsonWraith I most likely would have been more careful with the siphon if it wasn't a hail mary turn due to the time. Running tagme with that Leela deck is asking for death. I was low on cards and a scorch would have meant game, but a scored agenda would have meant game as well so I might as well hedge my bets, make you poor while making myself rich, and run on whatever you had advanced.

I would replace the Ronin with another snare, and maybe even try to fit a third one in there. I really like that it recycles itself with HI on the board unless the runner wants to take a fourth damage. When experimenting with HI, you can make a runner go from hitting 1-2 snares per game to hitting 3-4 if they refuse to trash them.

28 Nov 2014 Alsciende

I'm so glad I was able to use a font with a very broad language support =)

I'm going to try that deck with -3 Shock!, +1 Hostile Infrastructure, +2 Snare!.

1 Dec 2014 CrimsonWraith

Let me know what you think with that adjustment. My latest version has swapped PADs for Mental Health Clinics, and dropped Ronin for a second Snare.

4 Dec 2014 frost-duty

Having played this a good few times now, I've dropped the closed accounts for a reversed accounts; it's more useful more frequently and synergises well with the deck concept.

I find the shocks aren't as useful as snares. The weak point of the deck is early, as this is when a lack of ICE tends to lead towards agenda loss. Having snares slow the runner down at this point is incredibly useful. I took out the ronin and a shock to add two more snares. I'm not sure how much I like losing the ronin though... I;m still tempted to take out the last shock and add the ronin back in instead.

4 Dec 2014 frost-duty

Having played this a good few times now, I've dropped the closed accounts for a reversed accounts; it's more useful more frequently and synergises well with the deck concept.

I find the shocks aren't as useful as snares. The weak point of the deck is early, as this is when a lack of ICE tends to lead towards agenda loss. Having snares slow the runner down at this point is incredibly useful. I took out the ronin and a shock to add two more snares. I'm not sure how much I like losing the ronin though... I;m still tempted to take out the last shock and add the ronin back in instead.

4 Dec 2014 PeekaySK

@frost-duty From my experience, the correct number of Shocks in a deck is always either three or zero. Anything in between just means they're not useful for the thing you need them for (like, Noise frequent Archives check protection) and they become too inconsistent to bother with.

4 Dec 2014 frost-duty

@peekaySK I agree, seems like a sensible philosophy.

Overall I feel like they aren't quite worth it in this particular deck setup, and that other cards (especially snares) are just going to prove more valuable.