Hostile But Not ICEy (3.0.2 Tournament Legal)

joechip90 99

Warning: this is a totally janky deck.

I've been trying it out in Jinteki.net and it has a win rate of around 80% so far. It is pretty easy to play around if you are expecting an ICEless Jinteki but it has hit enough people by surprise to get quite a few wins. I'm certainly not claiming that it is unbeatable but it has manged to win even with pretty tough match-ups.

The key to the deck is to get the Hostile Infrastructures out and rezzed as early as possible. You can do this through the judicious use of Tech Startup and Executive Bootcamp card to tutor for these. Every turn you want to install at least two remote servers and just go heavy on the asset spam. They will trash things, but you needn't get too upset: Museum of History and Jackson Howard will keep your recursion going. The times when they take two or three net damage to trash one of your Sundews, just for you to shuffle it back into the decks is very mean. The assets used here don't have particularly high trash costs but you're mainly using the net damage as the trash tax anyway so that isn't such a big deal.

This deck can score out for the win using simple never-advance with Early Premiere strategies but, more often than not, it'll get a flatline victory: an unexpected Shock! or Snare! can the leave the runner with too few cards to survive the flip damage of the Brewery. Often I'll leave the Philotic Entanglement on the board unadvanced with an extra surprise win. Psychic Fields are there to dissuade the runner from checking every remote and, if they hit it on click 3 or 4, it is likely to be a game winner.

FAQ

How do you protect central servers (particularly R&D)?: once the Hostile Infrastructures are up then I'll place Hokusai Grids on the centrals. This will slow the runner down to, at best, two R&D runs per turn. It really sucks as the runner to have to pay two-three net damage from the Hostile Infrastructures plus another net damage from the successful run plus 4 credits just to get rid of it. Once Tori Hanzo is installed then you just pay to convert the net damage each turn into brain damage instead. That plus the risk of Shocks! and Snares! makes R&D pretty inhospitable. HQ is always going to be a nightmare for the runner: it will be full of Shocks! and Snares! the runner can't even trash because of the Hostile Infrastructures.

What about Account Siphon? I played with the idea of putting Sealed Vault in the deck but I tended to find that, once I had a Turtlebacks or two rezzed then I bounced back from account siphon pretty easily anyway. Server Diagnostics and Sundews are going to drip in and you can still use the Mumbad Temple credits to rez cards so Account Siphon is, at best, an inconvenient speed bump. Often I would rez a Hostile Infrastructure rather than give the money to runner.

Why not Industrial Genomics? I find the threat of an extra two net damage to be absolutely vital with this build. It makes the runner much more nervous about just trashing everything and absorbing the Hostile Infrastructure damage. It needs a bit more setup than the typical IG deck but once it is there I think it is more robust.

2 comments
3 Mar 2016 joechip90

I've now made a few minor tweaks to the deck by throwing in yet another agenda (Corporate War) plus 3 Cyberdex Virus Suites and another Tori Hanzo. I was finding that I was getting the occasional loss with people doing medium deep-digs. Sticking CVS on the root of R&D stops that nonsense.

27 May 2016 mpeachey

I'm missing something. It seems that the Tori Hanzō is only useful with House of Knives and the Hokusai Grid. With the rest of the damage dealing cards, since you've got rez her on their way in, so no ambush, and the runner would know to trash her first.