Crisium Couriers

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Do you want to surprise people with a rarely used ID? Play a deck that, while not Tier 1, can definitely hold its own against many popular decks? Then look no further.

The strategy of this deck is simple. Score a Hostile Takeover out of hand as quickly possible, then turtle up. Throw out all your ICE in front of your centrals, focusing a little more on HQ and putting the odd Ice in front of Archives to stop Temüjins, Datasuckers and the likes. Advance it all at least once for Mass Commercialization. Use Crisium Grid where necessary. And then, when you have all the pieces together slam them down. Put a Crisium Grid on HQ, one or two Off the Grids into a Remote, together with the Government Takeover, wait for the next turn, play Red Planet Couriers for the win.

This might sound simple (and quite frankly, it is), but it can be very effective against all Runners, that need to run to fuel their economy. Run-based Criminal, Siphon Whizz and similar Runners tend to despair against a deck that plays 16 ICE, needs those just for the centrals and has Friends in High Places to bring destroyed pieces back into the game. Also, triple Crisium makes life extra hard for them. Stealth can be a pain, just like Degenerate decks, against those you have to be fast.

Card Choices:

Agendas: The Agenda suite is very simple. You have the Takeovers you want to score, the rest of the Agendas are chosen for maximum defensive capabilities. The Government Takeover is a liability, of course, but the rest of the decks is just 7 Agendas, of which your opponent needs to steal four or five, which is really good.

Assets & Upgrades: Jackson is a staple, also Crisium Grid and Off the Grid are Three-Ofs, since the Crisium Grid can greatly slow Runners down and you need it for the Combo. Off the Grid is played three times, since double OTG makes the Remote that much safer, should your opponent play cards like Political Operative.

Operations: Here you have the heart of the deck: Red Planet Couriers. Although this card is extremely important, you only need one of them, so 2 is the right number. The Fast Track helps fetch the Government Takeover and Friends in High Places is just an all-around good card, helping against Ice destruction, allowing you to pitch combo-upgrades early on and, also very important, gives you two installs with one , which helps you set up the turn before you Courier out. The rest of the cards are economy. The Sweeps Week are almost entirely unnecessary and could as well be Beanstalk Royalties, but I just didn't see anything else, where I could spend influence on, so you might as well play Sweeps Week. Hedge Fundand IPO are just solid cards. And Mass Commercialization is absolutely insane. I played this deck a couple of weeks before its release. When I saw it, I was amazed by how good this card seemed to be. And it exceeded even my wildest expectations by far. This card in this deck is absolutely bonkers. Playing it turn three or four for 6 is easy and already very good, but using it later on gains up to 20, sometimes even more. All that for a 0 play cost. Unbelievable.

ICE: The ICE is all advanceable. I thought about using some non-advanceable ICE, but this suite worked out well. Okay, Hortum and Mausolus are often just advanced once for Mass Commercialization, but all the other ICE get significantly better when advanced, and the Hortum-Advancement can still be good against AI-users or reckless facecheckers.

When I first built the deck (inspired by Runlastclick's live stream), I thought it was utter jank. And then I played it and just won lots of games. And then Mass Commercialization came along and made it even better. I think the deck is actually alright and can be a good meta call if you suspect a lot of Runners, that are not prepared to fight a Glacier-like Corp. So go out there, advance some ICE and deliver those packages from Mars to help liberate the populace from tyranny before the tyranny takes root. Because that is essential.

7 comments
9 Jul 2017 MrHuds0n

You can quite clearly play Biotic instead of Sweeps for scoring Government Takeover out of hand with Red Planet Couriers.

9 Jul 2017 Netrunnerunner

@MrHuds0n That's true, but then you have to find ways for the deck to deal with Clot. I think that, in the current meta, Off the Grid + Crisium might be better; we're not seeing a lot of Political Operative, whereas Clot and Sacrificial Construct are fairly common.

I'm not sure if I'd take Asteroid Belt over Fire Wall; Fire Wall becomes more threatening with advancements, and doesn't suffer from near-useless counters if the runner's applying pressure and forces you to rez it early. I feel like you have to econ to support Fire Wall. The more benefit you get from the 9 counters needed for RPC, the better off you are.

9 Jul 2017 MrHuds0n

I'm not saying replace Crisium + OTG with Biotic, but a Biotic nonetheless would be handy.

9 Jul 2017 Klopstock

As @Netrunnerunner already said, the Off the Grid/Crisium Grid-plan is much better (in my opinion). It takes one more round, but it is harder to counter (a single Political Operative or Councilman is definitely doable, both at the same time are difficult, but which decks play both those cards at the moment? Much less than the decks that play Instant Speed Clot, for sure). And you need more cards, that's right, but those cards are helpful in other situations as well. Crisium Grids are always nice for defense and Off the Grid-scoring is the backup plan, should your opponent steal your Government Takeover.

But you are right, @MrHuds0n, it would be possible to include a single Biotic Labor. But maybe the text was a little misleading. While the Sweeps Weeks could be replaced with Beanstalk Royalties, Restructure and the third IPO, that change would make the deck considerably weaker, I think. The advantage would be, that you could finish the game faster, if you draw the Biotic before (or instead of) your combo and your opponent does not threaten Clot. But the problematic games normally are those, where you are under a lot of pressure early, because your opponent sets up a stealth rig quickly, you don't find enough ICE or something similar. In these cases, where it is difficult to set up your boardstate, Biotic Labor does not help. Also, I think you could only include one Biotic Labor in the deck, because influence and slots are tighter than they may seem (I am already troubled to cut a card for one Biotic, let alone two). With only one Biotic though, you need to draw the one Biotic, the one Government Takeover and one of the two Red Planet Couriers. I would not use Fast Track in that situation, because then your opponent would know, that the Government Takeover is sitting in your HQ and he has one round to throw everything he has at it. That seems too risky for my taste. And that's why the combo seems quite unreliable.

In the beginning I thought that because of these reasons, it would be better to exclude the Biotics. Nevertheless, the payoff seems good and your arguments convinced me to give it a shot, so I think I'll try it for some games and report back.

10 Jul 2017 APZachariah

Any room for Anson Rose?

10 Jul 2017 Klopstock

@APZachariah Well, you could make room for Anson Rose, but I don't think he would be good. The main strength of this deck is that you only need to protect your centrals and no Remote. Rose, on the other hand, needs to be protected to amass his counters. Sure, you could use Off the Grid for that. But that is a very steep price for relatively little payoff. Additionally, it would not even be very safe, since it is hard to secure an Off the Grid in the beginning. You need the OTG itself, multiple ICE in front of HQ and preferrably a Crisium Grid and also Anson Rose. And that is far too much for my taste, just to get some more counters. If that's what you want and need (and I didn't), Shipment from Kaguya would be a much better alternative, I think, since it is far less convoluted.

15 Jul 2017 5N00P1

You could include Caprice Nisei, that's what I did when playing OTG in Blue Sun: Powering the Future. It makes runs on HQ even harder or can protect R&D.