Ackbar called it

Diogene 3864

Iceless, one step further. What is that further step : recursion. 3 Preemptive Action and 3 Genotyping. You'll be able to bring back thoses Snare! and anything else again and again.

3 game plan :

  1. Kill the runner.
  2. Score through shell games.
  3. Make it impossible to steal an agenda.

How to kill the runner.

  1. Psychic Field + Neural EMP. Note that you can push the runner to trigger Psychic Field with Hangeki.
  2. Runner has less cards than you have Neural EMP, use them to flatline the runner.
  3. Fearless runner run Snare! (or use multiaccess to run more than one).
  4. Give negatives agendas points (Hangeki, Shi.Kyu, News Team) along with some stolen agendas from the runner. Then score Philotic Entanglement for 4+ net damages.
  5. Score an agenda (usually a Sting!) to kill the runner, if the runner has only one card.

Score through shell games : 12 assets = 12 ambushes. Make those traps come back with your recursion tools (6 of them : Genotyping and Preemptive Action).

Make it impossible for the runner to scor by bringing trap back, so that the runner will have no more card to pay the for stealing an agenda.

Everything in this deck hurt. You can make cards come back through 6 cards, make the deck virtual size of 58. This will maintain the dilution, making econ card and traps come back and protecting you from trashing ability. Also, with 9 negatives agendas possible, you can delay the runner a lot in their scoring plan. Allowing to get them with your traps.

To protect you from Stargate you have Warroid Tracker. Stargate is the bane of this deck. There is not much defenses possible against it in an iceless deck. Warroid was the best I could find. Trojan Horse seemed good, but the runner must access a card first. And Stargate does not access. So here is the advice : Always Put Warroid Tracker First On R&D.

The only tag punishment is Closed Accounts (and trashing the ressources). You'll never care about Bad Pub, because taxing the creds of the runner is not what you do here. Getting rid of all the runner creds is just so Warroid can be used.

Everything is a trap. Amiral Ackbar called it, and the emperor smiled.

2 comments
4 Oct 2020 rattkin

How do you test these decks? The way I see it, runner can just wait few turns and see what you'll do. There's no advanceable trap, so they will run anything you'll install. They just need to have 3 cards in hand and worst case scenario they lose their hand to Psychic Field (so they want to draw at least one card afterwards, ideally two). So if they see something advanced, they know it's agenda. Can you can score anything reliably here?

4 Oct 2020 Diogene

@rattkin Ah, thank you for the question. The key here is the card cost. Yes, the runner can just make run and lose cards, but to score, they need to keep 5 cards, at least, because of Obotoka (4 cards from Obo and 1 for Jinteki PE ID). Otherwise, the runner will end up getting grinded by the loss of cards.

Also, if the runner is not careful to keep their hand with at least 3 cards, they run the chance of being killed by 3 Neural EMP. This happen 1/8 time, but it is a win strategy.

Finally, losing cards all the time is click intensive, since the runner must spend click to draw often. Letting the corp setup shell games. 1/6 time, the runner become in a no win condition, because they cannot score anything from lack of cards in their deck.

You can reliably score 4 agendas (Sting! and Philotic), because of the shell game. With Prisec, you can pretty reliably score Obotoka. Fetal AI is the worse. It is hard to score and work better as a trap. One trick is to advance an Obotoka and a Sting. If the runner score the Sting, it won't allow the runner to steal the Obotoka in the same turn, because of card loss. If they score the Obotoka, especially on a last click of before last click, you can kill the runner just by scoring the Sting (2 to 3 net damage). If the runner find the Neural EMP in your hand, they should be wary of scoring the Obotoka, because they run the chance of getting killed when its your turn by the Neural EMP.

This is the reason why the bane of the deck is Stargate. Because it does not interact with cards. With Stargate, the runner can just trash the win conditions of the corp. Otherwise, it is up to luck. Either the runner can score fast enough, finding the agendas easily, they have some amazing recursion ability (Harmony AR Therapy or Trope) or they are built for decking the corp (Fear of Masses, Bhagat, Alice, Maw).

This mean Anarchs are tougher to beat and Shapers (long setup) easier. Experienced runner will recognize the iceless archetype and adjust (they stop installing cards) before mid game. But iceless is not used often in the current meta, leading to a nasty surprise for a lot of runners.