[Startup] Restoring Humanity - Urtica>Snare (guide included)

Girometics 2808

Do you like Snares? Do you like building mean and taxing servers? Do you like advancing your agendas? Do you like SKILL EXPRESSION™? Well then this deck is not for you, because we ain't got none of that!

Our plan here is to use the ruler of Siberia to fast advance some of the meanest 4/2's the game has to offer. But why do we do this out of Restoring Humanity you ask? The answer: Jank. A lot of it.

The ideal remote server for us consists of one or more Anemones, one Urtica Cipher and one Vladisibirsk City Grid. This way, Urtica essentially emulates Obokata Protocol, as we can safely offshore advancement counters onto Vlad Grid while the runner would need to take 4+2xAnemones net damage to access them, since we can always move the counters from Vlad Grid onto Urtica in the last PAW before breaching.

This strategy allows us to focus our ice (which admittedly is not very good as we're still playing Jinteki) on centrals where we aim to tax the runner either out of money or clicks. For that to work, you really need to think about whether and how to use your Spin Doctors, and to relief them a little from their role as a recursion tool, we use Kakurenbo to recycle used Ciphers or trashed Grids. In a similar vein, managing to score a Longevity Serum can drastically increase your chances of winning, as it allows you to use your Doctors more freely.

Other than that, we have Trick of Light to fast advance one of our 3/2's off of the occasional counters on Urtica, and then simply as much clickless economy as we can, as we mostly want to be installing cards or advancing Vlad Grid, which is also why this is a 49-card list instead of 44.

This list feels fairly strong against the recent slew of combo shaper decks, since they're usually less willing to dump their hand to trash an Urtica Cipher, and sniping Deep Dive out of the grip with a well placed Anemone is just -chef's kiss-.

On the other hand, Light the Fire! does a good job at ruining our plans. Funnily enough, that card is most dangerous against this deck when it is used as a one-off, since our best strategy against it is to use Anemone to really make that self-inflicted brain damage hurt, which works better the more they try to "stimhack" their way in.

Lastly, the reason we're running Cyberdex Sandbox instead of Offworld Office is that both Imp and Clot are quite painful to deal with.

2 comments
4 Apr 2022 Oddball

Fun deck! Thanks for coming up with the idea.

I'm trying a Hyoubu Institute: Absolute Clarity variant (since this is already 49 cards).

Have you tried to squeeze in Crisium Grid?

4 Apr 2022 Girometics

Thank you!

I haven't tried to put in Crisium Grid as this deck is already very tight on influence, but if I were to squeeze it in would maybe go -1 Tollbooth, -1 Palisade, +1 Eli 1.0, +1 Enigma, though I'd be unhappy having to part with Tollbooth as it does a lot of work.