I Get By with A Little Stealth from My Friends

INTRO: This is my first deck—I built it mostly for fun, but did take it to the NYC local meetups and 2025 Districts, and it’s generally been solid for my first try at deck building. It’s gone through a lot of small variations, but this is the version I brought to Districts. Some notes on possible substitutions near the end!

OVERVIEW: I just love stealth breakers so much, and I couldn’t find a solid list that runs both in Crim, so I decided to brew one myself. This decklist isn’t very good—but it IS fun as hell. It’s a bit shaper-y because of all the setup you’ll likely be doing, but you also have tools for quick accesses, and by mid or late game you’ll be making stealthy runs where you crack a 6-strength Gatekeeper for pennies and bypass that 10-strength Surveyor laughing all the way.

SETTING UP: You’re gonna need card draw cuz you’re Crim. You’re gonna need stealth credits cuz you’re a Sneaky Crim™. Get those down in the form of The Class Act/[Earthrise Hotel and Penumbral Toolkit/Trickster Taka/Mantle respectively. 2x Bahia Bands will smooth the hand and speed you up a bit if you’re stuck without any other good draw, but generally you’ll want to mulligan for good draw and some fast money to put it down turn 1. If you have to pay the cost to install Penumbral Toolkit cuz HQ is locked down, do it. The value of stealth credits are much higher than normie credits, and they’re not vulnerable to Afshar/Valentão/Mestnichestvo hijinks.

We love to see an early killer for nasty face-checks. Favor a Revolver if you need to go fast, but if it’s looking like a slower game, grab Afterimage and watch the corp sweat. Archer ain’t shit.

Need early pressure? 1x Inside Job and 1x Boomerang give you some flexibility (albeit you have to get lucky enough to draw them early). But! Consider keeping Boomerang as a tech piece to shuffle your deck if you’re ever forced to make a hard choice on Class Act to bottom a card you actually need. Some games are won on seemingly small interactions like this. 2x Mutual Favor can do the same here and are very good for both grabbing breakers when you need em and improving overall deck access.

How about those friends I mentioned? Paladin Poemu is so generically good you should just install it the instant you see it. We put a lot of cards on the table generally, so the earlier the better. Trickster Taka is excellent for generating stealth credits that can also be used for normal breakers if you just need to get it below the 3 credit threshold. If you can get The Twinning down with Mantle, Mantle can charge it on your opponent’s turn if you didn’t spend the recurring credit and have a breaker to boost strength (thanks, @Radiant, for this knowledge which I am definitely using for evil and not good).

Also, you’re Ken. Try getting a run event out each turn if you know you can do so successfully. Run archives for the easy Dirty Laundry money. Your early runs are generally not going to feel very impactful unless you’re Doofing the poor corpos. Also with Ken, Carpe Diem is just Sure Gamble but better.

MID-GAME: Time to start turning up the heat on the corp. We’re looking for our runs/run events to count a bit more here. This is where cards like Penrose start to shine. They see your lonely Afterimage on the table and think they have a scoring window, so they jam an agenda behind barriers and/or code gates. BAM, Penrose hits the table and you crack the server with your stealth credits barely breaking a sweat, maybe even making some money on the job because of a well-timed Bravado.

Not a whole lot more to say here, you just want to balance setting up your board state with making impactful runs and pressuring the corp to make tough calls. Between Cupellation, Pinhole Threading, Hermes, and 2x Diversion of Funds, you have a few ways to disrupt/dismantle the corp’s game plan.

FIN: If all has gone well, you have a few more surprises in store for the corp: if you were able to save your ’Rang/Inside Job up til this point, use it for those runs where you absolutely have to get in for cheap. Or, if you’re healthy on stealth credits, time for Rejig to ruin the corp’s day. Flicker the Penrose and you’re getting into basically any server you want.

No fracter, but need to break some barriers with Penrose? Rejig. Stranded Boomerang after they trashed the ice it was attached to? Rejig. Revolver’s all outta bullets? Say it with me: Rejig.

I also went with Ken here for the extra influence, which makes just enough space for an Ashen Epilogue. It’s a real edge-case where this gets played, but you’re gonna be happy it’s in your deck if you’re up against Jinteki: Personal Evolution crap, or you lost a key card to random damage here or there.

MISCELLENEA: Generally, you want to keep stealth credits in reserve for breakers that require them. But occasionally, being able to spend a Taka credit to power Curupira or a Penumbral credit on trash costs can give you a bit of flexibility. Don’t be too precious with Taka credits, you really don’t want to have to trash the pup/have the pup tag you.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS: An earlier version of this deck ran other econ options like Career Fair and Daily Casts. I eventually made the call to cut them for more run events, but maybe that’s risky. Such is the Crim life. Anyway, Casts is banned now lol.

I could absolutely see Mystic Maemi working like a charm here too, we’re playing so many events. Same goes for PADs and Debbie.

I briefly thought about Leech or Ice Carver as an option for dealing with ice that is just above a break point for our friendly stealth breakers (2/4/6 for Afterimage, 2/5/8 for Penrose). I don’t know. Influence is hard. Plus Leech could create MU issues. Maybe drop 1x Bahia Bands for 1x Leech? Could be solid.

Flip Switch and No Free Lunch are cool cards that I could see being nice tech options too.

Originally this list was on 2x Hermes, but it felt like a necessary evil to go to 46 cards and run one more copy for the sake of seeing it early—it’s just so damn good at creating some real windows to disrupt the corp.

This deck absolutely sucks against AgInfusion: New Miracles for a New World/Anansi. But soon they will be gone forever :)

You also hate to see a Border Control or Bio Vault killing your key runs (i.e. the turn Penrose hits the table or a particularly disruptive Doof). Soon, both of these cards will be gone forever too :) (so will Doof T_T)

It’s also not great into asset spam-y decks since there’s no Miss Bones. That’d be another substitute to consider if you’re up against a lot of trashables in your meta. Bahia does some work here, but likely not enough if we’re up against something like Near-Earth Hub: Broadcast Center.

Last minute I also added a Mad Dash to the list in case we’re up against 3-pointers only (see AgInf above, or hyperglacier BTL). It didn’t end up mattering immensely because of my matchups, but it did hit every single time I played it, and it’s just a good feeling when it does. Could be an easy cut depending on your meta. I’ve also been toying with swapping it out for 1x Reprise and I kind of love it for how much you can snowball after a steal.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This is my first ever deck. I’m pretty proud of it, and it would be considerably worse without all the people who helped me test it, wittingly or not. Thanks to everyone at the local meetup in NYC and NYC Districts, it’s been so much fun testing this thing IRL and it’s only gotten better because of it <3 Shout out to my NY crew (@cado, @Wynaut, @arandall, @Exojay, @rohit, @Kysra, @wyld, @laura_42, et al), and respect to everyone I sat across the table from at my first tourney (@Wynaut on Lat, @Wikignometry on Sports, @Exojay on PD, @analyzechris on Hosh, @cado on Epiphany, @Wenjong on Ken [a win for Ken anywhere is a win for Crims everywhere!], and @kevinth on Ari!)

Much love, y’all. I’m very happy to be part of this rad community <3