Girl who Decodes

I gave up CT / Overmind for stalling out after the midgame. It never built to anything, so once the corp could get ice in place it became too expensive to run. Since I still want quirky Shaper fun, I switched to Kit Peddler, in the Yogasaurus flavor.

This deck has a bit of an arc in that it can Parasite away ice it doesn’t like (with Datasucker to help that along, and to take on ice over 5) and also includes R&D Interface to make later digs more interesting.

I ended up taking out Magnum Opus, and not using Professional Contacts, in favor of Armitage Codebusting, a bit of Kati Jones, and some events. My thought was that the deck actually needs very little money once it gets going, but Dinosaurus and Yog.0 are big up-front investments and I can’t be spending 5 credits on econ, even if it doesn’t run out.

Tonight I played against core Jinteki, both decks using a lot of small agendas to deal a lot of net damage. In one game I was able to do lots of tricks with Deus X to run on things fairly safely, but that didn’t include hitting an early Cerebral Overwriter that left me 2 cards stupider for almost all of the game. I believe that one I lost to Philotic Entanglement at the very end.

I also played twice against a violent NBN deck, and we split the games. He was doing the tag and fast advance bits, but also bringing in Private Security Force to punch me some. I ended up making a dumb play where I cleared tags but had no cards in hand, forgetting about the Restructured Datapool he could use to give me a tag and then punch me to death.

I have a few takeaways from the evening’s games:

• I need a little more econ in my deck. I tweaked things a bit to put in Dirty Laundry since I can do guaranteed-successful runs quite often against rezzed ice. I was doing a lot of clicking for credits.
• My hand sometimes ends up fairly static, which means I don’t end up digging for more econ cards when I’m scraping by. I need to get a better sense of when I need to stop spending all 4 clicks to maintain a lock and dig for cards that can do it better.
• I shouldn’t run early remotes. I can get great locks on centrals, I should keep to that. I YOLO’d in to some traps which lost me games: the Cerebral Overwriter and a Ghost Branch that started the tag chain that ended in Private Security Force.
• Sometimes ice isn’t rezzed for a reason. It’s easy to get cocky once you make a lot of free Yog.0 runs, but beyond the first ice that safety net is gone. The Jinteki player surprised me with a 2nd-row Komainu that wiped out my hand and set up a kill. I should be more aggressive Parasiting the front ice if there’s stuff I can’t see.