Skorpios Shut em' Down

SubTric 432

This is a twist on the rather popular 'Axeidents Happen' deck that was posted some time ago pre-rotation. The core of the decks tech remains the same, but I have tweaked a few bits. I've had some great success with this deck online and against some local players, but had a bit of a rough ride at a GNK this week, facing some bad draws and playing against some players who were frankly much better at the game than me.... despite that, I still love this deck.

The core concept of the deck is to remove your opponents Fracters and/or AI-breakers from the game, which we do in a few ways and then run barriers only to lock them out of everything. All but 1 piece of Ice is cheap to rez and so we can save our money for the good stuff.

Agendas: Oaktown Renovation is a solid agenda that scores you cash. As we run Hunter Seeker to take out the opposing Fracter, this is a good one to enable it as you'll earn a few crds in the process. Graft and Hades Fragment are both great for setting up faster and keeping things moving. Ideally you want these later in the game when your opponent is scratching his head about how to get into a server. The star of the show however is Underway Renovation - Pull one of these in the 2nd turn behind an ice wall and more often than not you can mill the runners deck down by half a dozen or more cards over the next 2 turns. In a few games I've just kept on doing it, accepting that I can remove a card from the game each turn. My record is milling 15 cards before they found and installed a Paperclip, stole the agenda, then I Hunter Seeker'd the Paperclip. Ouch. More often than not, if you can get this going then you can hit the Fracter before they even begin.

Upgrades: 1 copy of Bryan Stinson because he rocks and even just occasionally getting his income is awesome.

Ice: All barriers. 13 of them. We had 14 originally, but I dropped one for a 2nd copy of Ark Lockdown. Full sets of Bailiff, Ice Wall and Wraparound, the latter being particular awesome in decks where they pull a good AI breaker. I was running 3 Vanilla, but dropped one to add another strength 1 ice to keep early Aumakua runs out ,so I popped an Himitsu-Bako in which has proven to be very useful for moving about late in the game. Also 1 copy of Tithonium for the surprise element when they come to expect they'll just bounce off whenever they face check - I've even sacrificed a 3 point agenda to rez this as they were confident it was a 3rd Vanilla and completely wrecked their deck for it. All but Tithonium is no more than 2 to rez which keeps us money in the bank for traces and even Tithonium can be rezzed by sacrificing an Underway Renovation.

Operations: This is where we get spicy... and consistent (we run full sets of most cards). Hedge Fund and IPO for the crds. Ark Lockdown (2 copies) to deal with Paperclips that are discarded rather than trashed, plus occasional problem events if the runner is using recursion cards like Same Old Thing. Housekeeping is BRUTAL, especially if you drop it turn one. The runner will be churning out cards and you'll be removing them from the game. Such a good card here. Hunter Seeker does lots of work. If they have a Fracter in play, feed them an agenda, then destroy it. If they are running SacCon, then we deal with it slightly differently - with the big combo: Hatchet Job and Salem's Hospitality. It's a combo I'm sure you've seen before, but you Hatchet a card back into the runners hand, then play Salem's, name that card, it trashes it, you remove it from the game with your ID ability. Gets around SacCon easy peasy. As well as breakers, it also deals with Film Critic, which otherwise takes your Hunter Seekers offline. I was running MCA informant as well for that, but there were too many moving parts and I decided that consistency was key.

Thats the bulk. Once you kill any Fracter's or AI breakers its pretty much game over. To be sure make sure your scoring server (all servers ideally) is 2 ice deep to avoid Inside Job and similar run effects as well as DDoS.

So there you have it - want you friends to hate you? Shut em' down!

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