ONE WEIRD TRICK

easong 232

ONE WEIRD TRICK

Whizzard. Bagbiter. 3x Origami. Duggars. Activist support. New Angeles City Hall. Rachael Beckman. Mass install. Medium. Blackmail. By following these simple steps, you too could regularly access 20+ cards in a single turn.

Step 1: Hook up with Rachael and Kati

Get some money (liberated accounts or Kati Jones, ideally), then get some extra clicks on the field. Rachael Beckman, preferably.

Step 2: Lose all your money

Save money on liberated accounts/Kati Jones, then play Bagbiter. Get a bunch of money. If you have problems finding Bagbiter, you'll almost always have at least two origami.

Step 3: Party Party Party

Party at Duggars! You'll need to duggars twice on average, sometimes three times. Use your extra Beckman/Joshua clicks to play out your combo setup pieces/get extra money as needed/mass install origamis/possibly do runs (more on that below). You'll probably stop using Kati during this time.

What you're looking for: 3x Blackmail 3x Medium or 2x Medium and 1x Djinn 1x Grimoire 1x Mass install 1x New Angeles City Hall 1x Activist Support

Do not trash any of these cards!

Step 4: The steppening

The cards you need to have on the field at this point are grimoire and activist support (and a djinn if you only have 3 mediums) - everything else is secondary. That being said, you'll probably want to have New Angeles City Hall up and running to protect Backman/Joshua B, as well as an all nighter and one or two same old things.

You'll also want a minimum of ~15 credits.

If the corp is close to game point, The Source can delay it a turn.

If you've lost a combo piece to PE net damage or something, you can deja vu it back.

Step 5: Drill, baby, drill

On the corps turn, use New Angeles city hall to prevent the tag from Activist Support, and hope that they don't win!

At the beginning of your turn, use Joshua B, same old thing, and anything else you've got stored up.

If you don't have your third medium, get it with Djinn.

Mass Install three Mediums, all of which will start with an extra virus counter.

Then blackmail R&D three times in a row, then same old thing the blackmail once or twice. Trash cards starting on your second run. If you haven't won yet and have an extra click and an overmind out, run R&D again (but you've probably lost).

You'll access 4 cards, 7 cards, 10 cards, and 14 cards. This will win you the game in 90% of cases.

An Incomplete List of Weaknesses:

This is not a tier 1 deck. Most decks, piloted aggressively, can easily outrace you.

Thankfully, nobody I've ever played has expected the combo, so they probably won't intentionally counter your combo. But, here are a few things that can ruin your day:

  1. Oversight AI rezzed on R&D - I haven't actually seen this yet, but theoretically it would wreck your proverbial shit.
  2. Caprice on R&D - only seen it once, but you better hope you're good at the psi game
  3. A bunch of snares in R&D - not a problem unless they trash a blackmail - then it's a big problem
  4. Unrezzed Elizabeth Mills - I've seen Blue Sun with Geothermal Fracking rez and replay Elizabeth Mills a lot - try to trash her before the corp realizes your plan. Thankfully she'll probably be in a unprotected remote server.
  5. NBM Fast Advance :(
  6. PE randomly sniping three blackmails out of your 30 card hand. Fuck you too, Octogn net damage applier.

What if they've played it before?

Well, there are all of the above issues. But most commonly, I'll see people assume that you're going to build up the entire game and not run, so they can just score out agendas behind an ice wall or something. Interestingly, you actually can run somewhat aggressively!

Use your judgement, but running unrezzed (non-R&D) ice is often fairly safe and costs them a lot of them while costing you resources that are fairly plentiful for you (clicks). Things to watch out for are tags and net damage if you have critical pieces in hand.

Additionally, you'll notice the 2x overmind! Arguably, this should be a crypsis, but I prefer overmind. If they get arrogant and don't ice up a scoring server/R&D properly, this is enough to punish them and nab an agenda or two (at the cost of delaying your combo by a turn or two).

Results:

Octogn: Roughly 40-50%ish Octogn wins out of 20 or so games. Ideal opponents seem to be HB (without toybox), Replicating Perfection, and other glaciery type things - people will often freak out and ice things up 4 or 5 deep. Traditional Weyland kill decks are also great to play against, but it's important to get out City Hall early to avoid the potential Posted Bounty tag.

Casual play: 75%ish wins in casual play out of ten or so games (several of them repeat players) - possibly a result of the population on Octogn being more skilled than the median card-shop goer?

Tournament: 2 wins out of 5 games in a relatively competitive local tournament with ~25 people - in my defense, the first 2 games were against very good NEH Fast Advance players who went on to place highly, and the final loss was against a very good Weyland player who posted bounty on the third turn and killed Rachael and Bagbiter. (Hadn't drawn City Hall.)

The future:

The upcoming bad pub Anarch runner has the potential to improve this deck a lot and free up a lot of card space. If that happens, a potential improvement would be to run 3x demolition run and 3x Kraken. Play the blackmails as usual, then destroy the ice in front, and then do a demolition run or two to discard their entire deck!

Comments/Suggestions welcome - there's a lot to improve!

18 comments
26 Oct 2014 easong

I'm thinking of cutting something for a Levy AR access to recover from having things trashed - does anyone have any thoughts? I'm still iffy on including The Source.

26 Oct 2014 Softman25

My god.

I need to try this. This isn't even a want, it's a physical need.

26 Oct 2014 Zetan

Crisium Grid on R&D seems like it could be problematic for you. It'll definitely eat up a run on your combo turn. Still, awesome deck idea.

27 Oct 2014 moistloaf

Oh man, Demo Run on that last click.... too much. Great combo!

27 Oct 2014 trustworthym

Amazing deck, I love it. :D

27 Oct 2014 Dydra

seems waaaaaaaaay to piece-demanding in my opinion to fit into competitive play ... it's one thing for a deck to have 2-3 combo pieces, this one has 5+

27 Oct 2014 Softman25

@Dydra

You're attempting to insinuate this isn't just something to make your friends and rivals jaws drop collectively when you pull this off once and score about 23 points in one turn.

It also has insane surprise factor if they don't know it's coming.

(But yeah, I agree with you. Trying to play it out by myself, I haven't managed to get all the pieces once - even with Hostages)

27 Oct 2014 easong

@Dydra Side note, I read your RP guides/played with your RP 2.5 deck a few days ago against some friends, and it's awesome. One of them ended up taking it to the same tournament that this went to. Thanks for putting everything up, and I'm proud that you're even looking at my jank :)

But, yes. Ridiculously complex and seemingly insane is the idea. I don't expect to see this winning even the smallest tournament.

That being said, I think it's a useful exploration of the outermost limits of what can be done. The deck can get out this combo surprisingly quickly, given how many moving pieces there are - you'll almost always start with at least one of your critical connections in hand, and hostages are usually not too far away. You'll often be ready to start duggarsing before the corp has started to score their first agenda, and then you're just three turns away from winning. (Once Valencia comes out, it will be 2 for most decks. Stim dealer will also speed things up.)

I would be first to say that the idea is dumb and not competitive in the tournament winning sense, but playing something that breaks all of the competitive expectations in a competitive setting is a lot of fun and is perfectly capable of nabbing a few games.

27 Oct 2014 easong

@Softman25 What were you having trouble with getting out? Keep in mind that you really only need bagbiter and duggars - Rachael is really nice to have, but it's not the end of the world if you can't get her. Joshua B is really iffy and not necessary, and Kati another nice-to-have.

27 Oct 2014 easong

And, of course, I'm extremely open to any ideas about how to make it better/faster/stronger - in particular, a better icebreaker or maybe a non-duggars draw method (inject?) might be helpful.

27 Oct 2014 Fox Ex Machina

On your dig turn, you want a certain number of clicks:

That's a total of 8 clicks required. You get 4 in a turn, 1 for Rachel Beckman, 1 for Joshua B., 1 for All-nighter, but you're short one if you want to be able to get that second Same Old Thing off. And if you're missing two of those combo pieces, you can't even Same Old Thing once.

I'd suggest pulling The Source for another All-nighter to give a little more consistency to the combo. I'd have to test, but against a corp that realized you were comboing, I don't think The Source will have as much of an impact as you'd like for the 2 influence it costs.

27 Oct 2014 Syntax

Demorun the before last R&D run and drill x2 :)

27 Oct 2014 Syntax

This deck was working with Chaos theory, I played it before.

The plan was All Nigthers, Clone Chips, draw your deck and at 60ish cred do the following : Install Monolith Triple Medium and run calling back Atman through Clone Chips. Then Demorun the before-last clic.

I'd say it worked 1/3 games.

Medium serie is Install-1-4-7-10-Demorun 13-16. That means usually you see 30-40ish cards.

27 Oct 2014 Dydra

well, honestly I'm comming here on netrunnerdb to check for original decks and original ideas ... err... that work

I don't care how strong a deck is, if it's not original, it means nothing to me ... that's why I bash on every Ashe+ Caprice deck, that pretends is the next big thing and the authors act like they discovered fire or the wheel ... hell no, that setup was known in March even if not earlier

However, no matter how original a deck is, I can't co-op if I don't see any competitive potential in it .... because, for me, it becomes just some cards that work together - thrown in together ....

Maybe, now you understand why I'm not all into your deck :) I can't also give you feedback, because it's way-away from the type of runners (and decks) that I play. I can see this requiring 4-5 turns to setup and for me not running for 4 or 5 turns is not a real thing :)

The deck is original though, so I'd really love if you can shape into something like that "natman" deck that recently pop-ed up :)

Stay frosty!

28 Oct 2014 vegetable

I tried fiddling around with a version that used just the orgiami for handsize, ditching the need for bagbiter and killing your own economy. I use two crypsis and one femme as the breaker suite, and running 3 all nighters. The main thing that seems to make life good, is getting early rachel, so you can duggars -> install, discard redudant cards and keep going on the following turn. Will post more findings once i get to actually test it properly.

31 Oct 2014 Softman25

Actually managed to win with this deck, which was hilariously excellent, with the following mods:

Screwed up the combo (against Fast Advance NBN - I had to play Grimoire out on the combo turn) so I only got to Blackmail > False Echo things back to hand > Demo Run - but I still managed to take the game. Hilarious - and immediately dismantled because it's just so gimmick.

Would rate 10/10 again.

4 Nov 2014 whirrun

The blackmail false echo combo is insane! I've also got a similar deck using duggars, power nap and vamp. Probably not as good, but fast and arguably crazier. It's called 'Avada Kadavra', bad name I know, and it could definitely be modified, to sacrifice a little speed for a few less auto losses. Biggup Duggars combo decks!