Caldera

The Plan

With all of her time spent jacking into the London Library, Hayley had learned a lot. More than most who accessed those servers.

And she’d shared that knowledge. There were a few corporations who were more than upset after their secrets had been published in LL periodicals.

Today though, Hayley had a new plan. She was going to take down the Jinteki infrastructure in Breaker Bay once and for all, and the division known as Replicating Perfection would crumble from within.

The BS Reigns

Caldera is pretty cool. It’s better than Net Shield, at least. And in a London Library deck, one of the worst things to happen is to have your hand knocked out and lose all of your Chameleons and big breakers.

The other terrible thing that can happen is that you smash into a Snare while all of your breakers are on the board and your hand is empty.

That’s basically the best thought I had for Caldera. Otherwise it’s just a support card that can go anywhere—I mean, it’s only one influence. Expensive in the credit department, but pretty good as a non-meat damage mitigator.

Nothing super surprising or special about this deck. Chameleons and LLDS work together great. Mass-Driver and Na’Not’K and Cerberus for the occasionally annoying piece of ICE that Chameleons have trouble with. Brahman to return non-Chameleon programs without LL trashing them, and Ubax to get your Brahman/Test Run programs back into hand clicklessly.

Lots of economy in Opus, Temujin, and Tech Writer. Enough that I felt comfortable not putting Hedge Fund in. Once you see a Dhegdheer, you probably want to get the Opus out. Unless you see a Temujin first. That’ll keep you comfortable while you build up.

Might need some more card draw, but we’ve got the Artist Colony/Fan Site combo to find any missing piece quickly as well. Oh! And you can Scavenge something off of London Library if you’re looking for a cheap way to get something out for two clicks and you’re low on the credits. Which also pumps the Tech Writers. Lots of combinations in this one. Very Shaper BS.

Safe Keeping Hayley (Caldera)

Hayley Kaplan: Universal Scholar

 

Event (6)

3x Scavenge

3x Test Run

 

Hardware (8)

3x Clone Chip ★★★

3x LLDS Processor

2x Ubax

 

Resource (19)

3x Artist Colony

1x Beth Kilrain-Chang

2x Caldera  ●●

3x Fan Site

1x Film Critic

3x London Library

3x Technical Writer

3x Temüjin Contract ★★★ ●●●●● ●

 

Icebreaker (7)

1x Brahman

1x Cerberus “Lady” H1 ★

3x Chameleon

1x Mass-Driver

1x Na’Not’K

 

Program (8)

3x Dhegdheer

1x Equivocation

1x Magnum Opus

3x Self-modifying Code

 

15 influence spent (max 15, available 0)

48 cards (min 45)

Cards up to Terminal Directive

 

Deck built on https://netrunnerdb.com.

Flashbang

Not Meant to Know

Hayley had never been to London, and she still hadn’t.

Luckily for her, the Library’s information was all online. With some creative connecting, Hayley had secured full access—even to the restricted areas.

And she’d found something interesting.

“Flashbang,” Hayley mused. “Let’s take it for a test run.”

Purring Engine

Flashbang is a weird card. Is it cheaper than Golden? Probably on the reinstall tax, but I haven’t done the math.

You DO have to equal strength to derezz the ICE, so that’s why we’ve got Datasuckers and LLDS processors. That strength 0 is a problem.

So, London Library. With Lady, Mass-Driver, and Brahman to support. Chameleon fills out our breaker suite when things get awkward. It’s in Hayley because we can compound our program install clicks, and I’m using Autoscripter to double down on that. Tech Writers are a must with all the installs we’re doing, and we’ll be relying on Brahman/Ubax to bring things back to hand if we don’t have the clicks to pull them back from the Library.

Clone Chip and Test Run help with that as well. But dear god, don’t wait that long against a Skorpios deck! In fact, don’t use this at all against a Skorpios deck. Or maybe drop the Clone Chips for Employee Strikes.

Equivocation—my favourite—ends the game for us.

Of the last few decks, this is probably the most exciting to me. But mostly because of the Brahman/Library/LLDS/Ubax chain. Not really because of Flashbang. Also Mass Driver would be cool here.

Cram Session Hayley (Flashbang)

Hayley Kaplan: Universal Scholar

 

Event (8)

2x Levy AR Lab Access

3x Sure Gamble

3x Test Run

 

Hardware (10)

2x Autoscripter  ●●●●● ●

3x Clone Chip ★★★

3x LLDS Processor

2x Ubax

 

Resource (13)

2x Beth Kilrain-Chang

3x Daily Casts

2x Film Critic

3x London Library

3x Technical Writer

 

Icebreaker (7)

1x Brahman

1x Cerberus “Lady” H1 ★

3x Chameleon

1x Flashbang  ●●●

1x Mass-Driver

 

Program (9)

2x Datasucker  ●●

2x Dhegdheer

2x Equivocation

3x Self-modifying Code

 

15 influence spent (max 15, available 0)

47 cards (min 45)

Cards up to Terminal Directive

 

Deck built on https://netrunnerdb.com.

Week 14 – Follow Up

Some housekeeping first.

The blog has been sporadic (having missed a whole week! Plus having missed a bunch of RPG posts even when I am posting!) because I am now in the process of selling my house.

It’s been very busy.

I’m on parental leave now with my six-month-old daughter, and I thought I’d have tons of extra time to write and post and play games, but instead, any time that I’m not feeding or playing with the baby, I’m cleaning the house for showings.

It should all settle down in the next few weeks once we’ve gotten a sale, but until then… things might still be sporadic. The fiction will likely be shorter than previous posts. I’ll do my best.

Additionally, my local store the Two-Headed Giant will be hosting a tournament on Monday the 19th. I’ll be running it, and so I won’t be testing my week 15 decks. I might take AgInfusion as my corp, but I’ll likely take Geist or Reina as my runner because I’m still tweaking those.

Actually, I’m thinking hard about taking my AgInfusion deck. It’s pretty cool, and you’ll get to see it later this week.

But on to the decks I actually played yesterday!

Berserker

Honestly… this card. I still don’t get it.

So, I didn’t get to play this deck. But a newer player who didn’t have his own cards wanted to play, and he thought he’d give the Quetzal deck a go. I cautioned him that it was a sub-optimal deck and was probably extremely weak. Nevertheless, he wanted to play it.

Unfortunately for him, it took half the game to find a Paintbrush and he never found Berserker. Anarch problems!

As Quetzal, he was still able to get through my Eli’s for a not-terrible trade, which he used to great effect on R&D. In a separate game he kept Keyholing through an Architect. It was… amazing for ETF with three Turtlebacks in play.

Again. Berserker. In any deck using SMC, Corroder is better. In any other deck (particularly in Anarch), Paperclip is better. So… not sure why you’d ever use this over something else. Maybe I could see it if it was break one sub for one credit. But the two credits for up to two subs makes it extra expensive.

NEXT Opal

This didn’t fire once. The deck was okay, but I also didn’t see any Ronald Five’s all game, so it just played like a super weak Moon deck. Seidr’s ability never fired because my opponent was Kit and just broke my Eli a few times with Inversificator.

Again, I don’t think Opal is amazing. It’s probably pretty taxing if you have all of your Silvers and Bronzes up, but it’s also a strength three Code Gate, so it’s not taxing at all if your opponent is using a Yog.0.

Not super impressed with this one either. I wish it was three to rez. Then at least it could be an okay trade against something like a Gordian.

Persephone

This deck fell flat on its face. I was up against a combo Weyland (which I will be featuring on the blog in a few weeks), and I just couldn’t get set up quickly enough. I didn’t see my breakers (the problem of not including any searches), and I just played NetInstaller.

I got a ton of Chips and BMIs out, but I found that the draw wasn’t strong enough to get through my deck to the cards. Not the way I expected it would be at least. I was also really low on money because I had no drip. If I was clicking Opus to get money for installs, I wasn’t drawing to find my breakers.

Once I got one Inside Man out, things got a lot easier, but then he won. How to speed this up? Maybe in Kate. Maybe with Test Runs.

Bioroid Work Crew

This. Deck. Had. Legs.

I played this deck maybe four times last night. It was gorgeous.

Though playing against non-Whizzard, non-Slums runners is sort of cheating. You know?

I scored a GFI from hand in two different games. Once with the Work Crew, and once with triple Biotic. I had an ungodly amount of money. Estelle was an easy game closer. If I had two agendas scored, I could just get Estelle up to eight or ten counters and brute-force draw into the game-winning combo in hand.

One thing I was very susceptible to was HQ multi-access. Gauntlet and Legwork were pretty nasty while I was setting up. This made NAPD Contract a must-include. I’d probably drop a Hopper for another NAPD.

Marilyn Campaigns. I love them.

Oh, and Advanced Assembly Lines. So beautiful to drop Bioroid Work Crews that are stuck in your hand when you want to combo turn.

This deck was magnificent. 9/10. Would play again.

Persephone

She can solve it

Hayley jacked out of her terminal and took a long swig from her water bottle. This run had been another close one, and she’d been forced to leave the Haas-Bioroid servers relatively unexplored.

“The destroyer types still prove challenging,” she muttered to herself taking notes as she spoke. “Maybe I need more constructs to hold the load?”

The back corner of the library where Hayley had set up her experimental rig was devoted to ancient Greek mythology. It seemed fitting, as she was testing out a new program for one of her contacts.

The Persephone killer was a puzzle. It seemed to have potential on par with access granters like Keyhole or certain run of the mill viruses, but it fed off of actively firing subroutines—the nastier the subroutine, the greater the payoff.

Whoever had designed this was probably some sort of Anarchist masochist.

Still, it was a puzzle. And Hayley would solve it. She just needed to put together the right mitigation rig. HB’s servers were pretty spiky these days. Maybe she’d try a Weyland server next. Jinteki might work too, but she’d have to offload a lot of the attacks to her interconnected BMI’s, and Hayley preferred to use that only in emergencies.

“If I looped my identity through some Rabbit Holes though…” Hayley mused, “I could probably run some tracer servers and have them spinning their subroutines in place while they try to find me.”

Might be a long week of testing.

Sub-optimal but also what we’ll have

Okay, so Keyhole and DLR are rotating out. That’s awesome. That’ll put the game back into the remote. Well, it would if Medium wasn’t a thing. I guess that means Cyberdex Virus Suite becomes a must-have in decks? Or else ambushes like Snare, News Team, and the rumoured Shock 2.0.

Either way, there will be fewer ways to mill the corp and land massive accesses all at once.

Enter Persephone. Something that feels like Keyhole but is slightly more flexible… with a much more biting downside.

On building this deck, I went through every piece of Sentry ICE to see what we could deal with. It’s not news to anyone of course, but Sentries usually break down into AP (Net and Brain damage), Destroyer (trash programs), and Tracer. So, we have to mitigate those subroutines.

Ramujan-reliant is a pretty cool way to have an answer to net and brain damage on a sliding scale. It also doesn’t cost us money like Net Shield or Feedback Filter.

To deal with Destroyers, we go for the good old stand-by of Sacrificial Construct, and Tracers get Rabbit Holes.

With so many types of Hardware, I decided to put it in a modified SpyCam Hayley build. Obviously not as good as that deck. But potentially more interesting once you get the puzzle together.

Hayley/Replicator/Bazaar gets your Ramujans and NetChips out super fast. Then your deck is crazy thin for you to find your programs quickly. Make money, make runs, and break subroutines when you want to, let the Sentry ones fire when you want to. With three Levys, you’ll be able to recur cards that get trashed from Ramujan and Persephone, and then hopefully you get some great Archives accesses!

Greek Studies Hayley (Persephone)

Hayley Kaplan: Universal Scholar

 

Event (9)

3x Diesel

3x Levy AR Lab Access

3x Quality Time

 

Hardware (20)

6x NetChip

2x Prepaid VoicePAD

3x Rabbit Hole

6x Ramujan-reliant 550 BMI  ●●●●● ●

3x Replicator

 

Resource (14)

3x Bazaar

3x Inside Man

2x Laguna Velasco District

3x Sacrificial Construct

3x Technical Writer

 

Icebreaker (4)

1x Gordian Blade

1x MKUltra  ●●

1x Paperclip  ●●●

1x Persephone  ●●●

 

Program (1)

1x Magnum Opus

 

14 influence spent (max 15, available 1)

48 cards (min 45)

Cards up to Terminal Directive

 

Deck built on https://netrunnerdb.com.