A Spoonful of Rielle

The deck I played at last Store Championship : it was utterly NOT tested before the tournament, and yet did OK (going 4/1 overall). No pressure at this tournament since I already had won a Store Championship and Byes don't stack anymore, so I went for something completely different (no, not the man with 2 noses) and probably less competetive than what I'm used to : Rielle.

Your goal is to siege the R&D, spooning away any ICE you may face and making the R&D runs cheapers as it gets. The beauty of this is that the corp has to keep reinforcing the R&D, preventing him from building a good scoring remote server . Build early pressure on the R&D with a Cyber-Cypher, and follow-up as soon as you can with Spooned / Test Run+Scavenge on a Femme Fatale. Professional Contacts is the card you want to play early in game as you need to draw a lot and it really helps keeping high in credit. Before or after you drop a Cyber Cypher on R&D is probably the most important question you may have to ask yourself. Fortunately, you will usually have only one of those two cards in hand early, which answers the question for you.

This deck needs to draw a lot, as I said, and mid-game is usually all about clicking Pro-Con like a mad cow and if you can afford it running R&D. Pro-tip of the day : a Rielle with no breaker on table but 5 cards and 15 credits in store is a lot more menacing than a Rielle with a full suite of breakers but no credit. Keep that in mind when you're digging for the key cards you're lacking in mid-game.

Late game is yours if you manage to reach it : destroying 5 R&D Ice and running for 3 cards each time mean there is no way the corp will get its agenda except by using Fast Track / Jackson. As the corp has usually a hard time building a scoring server while the R&D defenses fall down quickly, Agendas tend to clog in hand and HQ is a good place to run once in a while. HQ is also often lightly defended since most ICE will go on R&D and you have a hard time running HQ early (with CyberCypher going in priority to R&D then remote, you need a late game Torch or a 3rd copy of CyberCypher to run the hand).

After testing the deck (yeah, I build decks 1 hour before tournaments and test them during them) it has shown two weaknesses,

• as it is is probably a little bit too much focused on the R&D, and would probably benefit from HQ access (HQ Interface or Legwork). With only 10 influence, this means dropping a copy of Spooned, which removes some early pressure but can be worth it on the long run.

• Money is an issue, but I don't know how to solve it. Pro Contacts is a beast as you need to draw a lot to get your Spooned and Same Old Things, but it gives one free turn to the corp the turn you drop it. ProCon and only 10 influence more or less dictacte the rest of the credit package (you need cards with a good credit/click ratio like Daily Casts / Modded to make up for the time you spend using ProCon)

I'm not convinced, despite the apparently good result at last tournament, that this Rielle build is more than a solid Tier2, but it's fun to play and quite different from what Shapers do at the moment. If you have any feedback / advice / possible changes, feel free to share!