Death By a Thousand Little Thoughts

StarlightCrusade 104

Death's Jewels and Blooms, sown

In the garden of my mind:

Ignore? If you can.

Let's do the maths. If you're playing against Jinteki, every advanced facedown card might be an agenda, and it might be a trap. A smart runner knows that, while he may be able to compute probability, part of risking one's life against Jinteki is merely guesswork. Obviously, we can't account for free will, or for human stupidity, but let's go with the hypothesis that there's a fifty percent chance that the runner will run on a facedown Jinteki card with an advancement token.

So the runner runs. 50/50.

Enter Matrix Analyzer. It's one thing if the advancement token goes on a piece of ice, or a facedown card in another server. It's another thing entirely if it goes on an unadvanced Card in the same server!. Suddenly, the runner has to make the choice: Trap or Agenda...AGAIN! 50% of 50% = 25%...the threat of a trap is now 2X as effective!

It gets better. What can one token do? Well, when Project Junebug is accompanied by Tori Hanzō, that one net damage becomes one brain damage! If you've scored an Ancestral Imager, you get the net damage even if they jack out. (Does Tori Hanzō proc with this? Does the run end when the runner jacks out, or after they jack out? I don't know...but that could make it even better!) And, if they decide to stay in and it is an agenda, you can always get your brain damage with House of Knives + Tori Hanzō. For added Tori Hanzō fun, you can put her on R+D with #Shiro, or on archives with Susanoo-no-Mikoto and Shock!, but that's not very original, or mathy. If you're really lucky, you can even force the kill with a Chairman Hiro, or a Valley Grid, but that's too hard to include more than one.

Jinteki Biotech: Life Imagined. I wonder what's this red button do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw

Perhaps I'm not enough of an elegance purist. Perhaps we should have cut out all the ice except the Matrix Analyzer, and all the assets except the traps, and gone with a 40-card Jinteki identity, but I don't have the guts for that.

3 comments
5 Oct 2016 FarCryFromHuman

Scoring an unadvanced Improved Protein Source by flipping the ID is the perfect tool to keep the runner running. I'd say keep this in Biotech.

5 Oct 2016 Windave

How do you get the money to do all that?

5 Oct 2016 StarlightCrusade

Funding the ice is a bit of a problem. Matrix Analyzer is cheap, and the traps are basically free, and if the runner doesn't bite you just Back Channels them.