"Freedom Through Equality" (1st place, King of Servers)

LSK 4662

Took this deck to 1st place at the May 21 King of Servers at Pastimes, in a field of 18 players with some strong competition - at least five players who've won a regional, as well as the infamous Will Brown. I piloted this deck as part of a team with Alex Simon and Trevor Stack. It went 3-1 on the day, beating Palana, Fastro, and Jinteki Biotech and losing to Butcher Shop.

The Geist gameplan is pretty familiar by now. This deck, in particular, is built to set up very quickly and slow the corp down enough to fully set up. You win by sniping agendas and Spy Camera'ing the rest.

Card choices and notes:

"Freedom Through Equality": This deck has a lot of expose effects. In particular, this is really good with Raymond Flint and Spy Camera. You'd think it might not be very effective in a deck built around The Source, but you use it for the last point more often than not.

Account Siphon: Geist normally doesn't run this because your breakers aren't geared towards multiple HQ runs, but it's nice to have access to a single copy because sometimes the opportunity presents itself to use it. In addition, it means Decoy is never dead, which is good because you get loads of advantage out of every trash ability.

Inside Job: This is nice to have available; it's not the best card in the deck by a long shot but sometimes it's just an effect you need, and you dig fast enough that you'll have access to it most of the time.

Decoy: Between this and Forger, you can soak up an entire Breaking News, which is extremely useful.

Film Critic / The Source: I never want to play a deck that can't handle fast advance, and The Source is a very effective way to beat Fast Advance since it isn't affected by Clot hate. The Source and its support cards make up a large part of what makes this deck functional at all. As a huge plus, both of these are connections, so there's very little opportunity cost to installing them.

Raymond Flint: REALLY REALLY GOOD. Expose effects are good together with "Freedom", and this guy draws you two cards and gets you a credit along the way. The HQ accesses are irrelevant.

Street Peddler: This might be obvious, but you almost never install these post-Levy because you don't want to have to give up cards.

3/2/2 split of the cloud breakers: In testing I found that I wanted to break Archangel cheap more often than anything else, since losing the Off-Campus Apartment is a disaster, so I played 3 copies of Crowbar.

Peacock: It breaks Tollbooth at the same price as Gordian Blade and it breaks Turing elegantly. That's a good place for a breaker to be in the current metagame; it's a much better deal than ZU.13.

Props to Spags for running such a tight and fun tournament!

9 comments
22 May 2016 rubyvr00m

Well played, man. That one-of "Freedom Through Equality" is clutch.

22 May 2016 Katsushika

Played this deck a couple of time and it feels nuts! Film Critic + The Source is so nice too :)

22 May 2016 moistloaf

very interesting geist build. i can attest for how obnoxious it is to play against the source

23 May 2016 leburgan

The Raymond Flint making Aaron retire Biotech was pretty great.

25 May 2016 bigfleet

With only 2 Forger for link, has memory been an issue getting breakers to the right strength? Does it also then restrict Siphon a little if you plan to use the trash ability to avoid the tag? Maybe there's room for a Sports Hopper in here.

27 May 2016 SHIEL

Thank you so much for this! I adore Geist, he's a joy to pilot, and this is the first Geist build I've played that's actually won games for me in a reasonably competitive setting. I'm pondering whether the deck's already enormous draw power could suffer the loss of some number of Street Peddlers to make room for one or more Security Chips... They seem like they could be useful in a number of situations. Also, I've gone to 46 in order to add a Data Dealer - It's a Connection, so it can go onto the Apartment for a card at the very least, and it can be helpful in matchups with News Teams or Shi.Kyūs. In a more common situation, however, it occurs to me that it would be a delightful answer to 15 Minutes: That point was never gonna stay in your score area anyway, so why not turn it into delicious money instead of just letting them take it back?

29 May 2016 prozz

my favourite deck lately, thanks for sharing. my (i hope) improvements include:

any ideas how to fit 2 Scrubber or beat asset spams?

30 May 2016 SHIEL

I'm not sold on the Sports Hoppers here. I wouldn't mind dropping a run event for an extra PolOp, but I don't see a need for more than one Hopper. Geist has so much ability to draw cards at instant speed, I'm not sure that much extra is super necessary... And a 3-cost install is a bit painful until the deck gets going, even if you do get it back when you use it.

As for Scrubbers... If your local meta has that much asset spam, maybe drop one of the Sources? I'm not willing to do that personally, because in my area asset spam isn't common enough to be worth it, but that's up to you.
I'll playtest with some of these changes though, see how it goes for me!

5 Jul 2016 zaknafean

Just wanted to say how much fun this deck is to run. Geist has always been my man since his release, even before the real support cards for him came out. Took this undefeated in a couple local games, and won me some new promo cards. Not the craziest of competition but still great fun.

Flint is clutch. Wish I could fit 3. The Source package is great, I install it as soon as I find it, and it messes up click math fabulously. And Spy Camera... my MVP card. Precision runs in criminal is something I've wanted for awhile, and this deck just does it.

I do wish I had some HQ pressure. I don't run HQ much here, but when I do I want it to hurt. And second I keep eyeying New Angeles City Hall, and thinking it has a place here, completing the Source package. Not sure what I could cut to make this work though.