Meta Theory v1.1

Pikeman 289

So I was playing the previous version of this deck a lot, and I was never quite happy with it. Too many duplicate breakers leading to dead draws, and most of the time I just wanted to get through the whole deck ASAP.

So I kind of took that to the extreme, made a lot of changes, and this is what I came up with. To play this well requires a good read on your opponent, as it's a bit of a Swiss Army knife, and you won't need everything. Often you'll fall behind, sometimes even by 5 or 6 points, but if you can get into the situation where the corp can never leave an agenda on the table, and they have no options for FA, you might as well have already won. Speaking of FA, this doesn't do well against it; it can limp by, but has a low success rate as it's awkward to play against without the tools for it. Look at Criminal or at least some deck with Clot for better options to deal with FA.

Anyway, a few tips on piloting:

Your goal at the start should be to haul ass through your entire stack. To that end, you have 3x Diesel, 1x IHW, 2x QT, and 1x Astrolabe which can be useful against NEH, GDS, or any asset spam deck. You will be poor, as your only income at the start to mid-game will likely be from Daily Casts, but as long as you know what not to play, you should be able to squeak by. Only ever play a single Personal Workshop, and dump everything possible onto it. The other ones can be fodder for Stimhacks to finally install what you need during a run.

Fan Sites should also be out ASAP, as once you've got your workshop fully loaded, you're going to need a lot of credits. Make that a heck of a lot. Pawn off the Fan Sites to the Data Dealer, and you'll probably get 18-27 credits for your first big push, which should be with a Stimhack. Don't worry if Levy is in your hand when you stim, as that's what SOT is for--just make sure SOT isn't in your hand! Crush them with repeated runs with Atmans, and the few others to clean up the ice that the Atmans can't chew through.

When you're flush on credits, use Trade-In to trash Astrolabe (assuming you played it--only play it if you think it will be useful and you get it early enough) so you can install The Toolbox to fully pimp out your rig. You also will want both Film Critics on the board if holding on to NACH is important, as the multi-access can cause you to access two agendas in a single turn. Fall Guy can save it once, but not a second time (unless you played and used it pre-Levy and played it again post-Levy).

Lastly, let me talk about Magnum Opus. If you don't get it in the first turn, don't worry about installing it until very late, and only if the game looks like it will get to that late-game stage. It can sit on the Personal Workshop for a long time, it's basically just there to avoid those situations where the sheer macro of the corp late-game can cause you trouble if you don't have it handy.

Is this jank? I don't even know. But it's fun as hell to play, and it's one of my more well rounded decks, if you can believe that.

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