House of Thorns

I like the concept, and congratulations on your many flatlines! I always look at Negotiator with issue, as there are too many work-arounds for a card that has its Rez Cost and Strength the wrong-way 'round.

Is that one Data Raven doing anything for you? It would make sense to have two at least, otherwise, is he taxing enough on his own? Argus is always a kill deck, like Personal Evolution its ID is built to be damage all the way, so there are two pieces of ICE I think can compliment this.

Checkpoint - Don't fear the Bad Pub, in this kind of deck it's a scary beast. People worry about Bad Pub because of Blackmail, but if they're playing against Valencia they're going to give you that anyway. A 7 Strength ICE that has a 3 meat damage potential in Argus would terrify me.

Lockdown - Remove the Tollbooth or Data Raven and add in two of these. 0 rez cost, 5 strength, and if they cannot break it they will likely be forced to run that server on their last click from now on. Tempo disruption is important, and I find the best ETR Ice are the ones where the Runner jacks out themselves, simply because they can't afford the risk. Never underestimate under-confidence in a Runner, especially when they know you're packing Snare!

As a few other suggestions, I say have at least 2 Taurus' as they are good Sentries, and replace the 3 Priority Requisition agendas for 3 The Cleaners, simply because it fits this deck better and makes them far less inclined to take Meat Damage through agenda steals.

@Mechanoise Thanks for the feedback! As for Negotiator, I was planning on replacing it with either a second Errand Boy or another Nebula. While most every runner I played against let the money subroutine fire, it didn't really set anyone back either. Most Runners let the Errand Boy fire (a very big mistake), and I like that Nebula is out of NRE Mimic range. As for Checkpoint, it's certainly an option and one I may definitely consider for revisions in the very near future. I'm not a fan of giving myself bad publicity though (if I was, I'd most certainly be running Geothermal Fracking and Hostile Takeover over Oaktown and Underway). However, with the mind games I'm trying to use against the Runner with brazenly using the public agendas, it could certainly be a deterrent against running on the scoring server.

As for Data Raven, it's absolutely great. The Runner usually has to save clicks and credits when I play it because they need to get into R&D, steal an agenda and then clear the tags afterwards. It gets super taxing. Influence is really tight though. If I had to, I'd probably cut the Tollbooth for a second Raven, as I don't want to necessarily toss the Snares just yet, even though they haven't done much for me yet. I'm not really convinced Lockdown is what this deck needs but I will give it a shot for a couple games. Alternatively if I'm adding in Checkpoint, Bandwidth could be a great addition as a one of for the scoring server or I'm front of a Data Raven on R&D.

I don't think I need 2 of Taurus in here. 1 has been plenty, and if the Runner isn't packing a lot of hardware it's a dead card regardless. It's a nice silver bullet for Plascrete, and that's about it. As for the agendas, I can see why The Cleaners is an obvious choice but I also like money, and High Risk Investment gives me that money and then some. However I could definitely replace the PriReq with a Cleaners or maybe go 2x for High Risk and Cleaners. I'll try it out for next time.

@WardOfTheWoods Anytime bud. I'm more of an Industrial Genomics: Growing Solutions player, but our concepts are essentially the same, if you want in, it's got to hurt. Obviously our experiences are all meta dependent as well, so it's really what you're expecting to come up against.

Data Raven is always good, don't get me wrong; my issue was with running only 1 copy of it. If you rely on the Raven, that should take priority for multiple copies.

Lockdown is one of my personal favourites in a kill deck as a sensible runner 'must' break it to stay alive, and by God does it tax, let's do the numbers on Decoders to break Lockdown:

The hard counter to Lockdown is running it on the last click and letting it fire as the Runner won't be drawing cards for the remainder for the turn, but if you rely on I've Had Worse that now won't fire do you 'really' want to take that 2 meat damage if you hit an agenda? Or are you that confident to take a tag because he might not have the Scorch. It's worth a play, but you need to run two to better its potential.

Agendas wise, I did suggest to remove the Priority Requisitions for The Cleaners :P. High-Risk Investment is a good shout for money, Pri Req just isn't viable for ICE that's easy to Rez - it's not like you're running Curtain Wall or Wotan.

I think Underway Renovation is a perfect choice, as the Runner needs to deal with it before they begin Hemorrhaging their stack. That's a perfect opportunity for you to set up nasty ICE.

@WardOfTheWoods Apologies, I just realised you're only running 1 copy of Priority Requisition. Maybe run 2 High-Risk Investment and 2 The Cleaners as you suggest.

Man, I just wrote out a whole thing and then lost it. I hate that. Anyway...

In my own Argus deck, which has also been flatlining left and right, I ended up taking out Snare!, not because it was bad, per se, but because I wanted all my traps to be advanceable. That way, I can set up multiple servers, slowly advance all of them, and wait for the Runner to make mistakes. Remember that when the Runner sees Argus, they're likely to retreat into caution quite a bit. With this deck, you can have a Project Junebug, a Cerebral Overwriter and a Priority Requisition all triple-advanced and on-board, meaning that when the Runner finally runs at it, even your worst-case-scenario (stealing the Priority Req) is more likely "lose the game" for them.

That's a best-case scenario, of course, but in my experience it's also how Argus plays. That's my deck and not yours, however. Grains of salt and all that.

My big advice here, and it's probably going to be very unpopular, is to get rid of at least one, probably two of your copies of Jackson Howard. I know he's an auto-include in every corp deck by conventional wisdom, but he goes against what this deck wants to do. Argus WANTS the Runner to hit agendas, because that's its best way of forcing a flatline.

More to the point, you're only running 2x Punitive Counterstrike, when in my opinion that's an absolute three-of for this. Taking out one Jackson means putting in a third Punitive, which is the card you always want to have at least one of, hopefully multiples of, sitting in your hand. Taking out a second Jackson means freeing up the slot and influence for a second Data Raven. And you leave in the third one just in case.

This deck looks great, I'm glad someone else is having success with Argus, and congratulations!

@Navelgazer Thanks for the feedback! I already took out the 3rd JHow and replaced it with a Junebug because I was hitting them too often and I'd WANT them to run archives in most cases. If I have to, I'll cut another ICE to make room for a third Punitive but as it is right now I've been fine with just the two.

As for influence, I'm probably going to take out the Tollbooth and put in another Raven for right now, and replace the Negotiator with a Checkpoint. Maybe another ICE for a second Checkpoint too if it works out well. I haven't had much success with the Snares so I'll probably throw in another trap asset of some kind and drop The Root so I have 2 slots left for ICE so I can try out both Lockdown and Bandwidth as 2x to see how they each work out.

I just tried a couple of games with this and it was a blast! I haven't messed with the formula too much yet, as overall it tends to work well. I don't really see what Excalibur brings here, unless they are security testing or similar behavior off of archives. How have you been able to bring it to bear?

Random though I am going to test. I like the idea of the re-occurring credits from The Root, but I never have a place to rez and use it in my meta. So I have replaced it with Simone Diego. Slightly more limited, but she will help keep the bank up while renovating.

It was that or another Contracts.

@DarkTsunder Thanks for giving the deck a try! I initially had Excalibur in there as a way of discouraging multiple R&D digs with RDI/Medium, but my ICE is somewhat porous and I found that it wasn't fitting the deck very well so I dropped it for a Checkpoint. The Checkpoint now goes in the scoring server with a Lockdown and Data Raven usually. I also got rid of The Root and replaced it with a third Private Contracts because this deck makes absurd amounts of money normally, and the third Contracts is more dependable than The Root. I usually don't want a lot of remote servers either when I play so Diego may be much more helpful to you than The Root.