DONUTS! 2nd Place Atlanta Regional Runner deck

kevingoes 517

Trust the Donut. Believe in the Donut. I began working on this deck almost immediately after Honor and Profit came out and I spent a lot of time playtesting it and tweaking it, so there were a lot of conscious decisions that went into it. I really wanted to pair Donut and Whizzard together and make an economic denial deck using Donut to hurt their operation economy and Whizzard to hurt asset economy. I wanted to make sure that I could get Donut out on my first turn pretty consistently. The early game tempo sacrifice is worth it in order to get the most out of Donut.

I initially I went with 3 Donuts and 1 Hostage, giving me a 62% chance of getting an opening hand where I could get Donut out (provided I'm taking a mulligan to see him). After some testing I decided to change that to 2 Hostages and 2 Donuts. I found that having the extra hostage was useful for fetching Kati. I could have included a third hostage at the cost of 2 influence and increased my probability of getting the desired start to about 70% but I wanted to spend my influence elsewhere.

Since I'm planning on starting with Donut in play, Hostage is the only operation I'm playing. All of my economy is resource economy and I put all the resource economy cards in the deck: Armitage, Liberated Account, Daily Casts, and Kati Jones. I'm only running two Kati's. I might swap out a Liberated Account for a third.

I decided to spend my last 7 influence on 3 Clone Chips and a Femme Fatale. The secondary goal of the deck is to keep the corp from building strong servers and to cost them money by either destroying their ice or making it ineffective. So I'm running 3 Parasite, the standard fixed breaker/Datasucker suite (with 2 of each breaker) and 3 Knights. I wanted the Clone Chips primarily to recur parasites. I think of Knight as another parasite. I usually try to use it for early game pressure and give the corp a choice between destroying a valuable piece of ice or letting him stay alive to cause trouble. I never let him sit on a cheap or unrezzed piece of ice for very long if possible.

Grimoire went in as my console as a 2 of.

I was running 3 Crypsis as well but ultimately Crypsis was just too expensive. I needed multi access so Nerve Agent and Medium went in to the deck.

My Scorched Earth solution was Public Sympathy. I choose not to run Plascrete because it is a little bit more expensive and because I'm going to be drawing a lot of cards to get to what I need and I like having the ability to hold on to key cards for longer. A lot of times I will draw through and discard Public Sympathy in match ups where Scorched Earth is not an issue or I'm playing against NBN (No. I'm not letting them get more money from Sweeps Week) but it is sometimes useful in non NBN match ups.

I think the final touch was two Ice Carvers. I kept running into Eli's and Vipers and I wanted an option for dealing with them.

I played and lost a lot of games on OCTGN learning how to pilot it. How you pilot the deck does matter. You need to know what type of opponent you're facing and how to deal with them. (This is why I don't put too much credence into OCTGN data analysis).

The primary thing is you to need to face check ice and make them pay to protect their centrals. Donut sets the threshold for their economy cards that much higher so it is super important to make them rez ice or rez and install more ice in the case of permeable ice like bioroids.

Against NBN Fast Advance you need to hit hard and fast and that means using Parasites to destroy ice on their centrals when you can't break in. Against Glacier decks you have time to dig out your breakers so you need to save your Parasites for the ice that's costly/difficult to run and force them to rez their expensive ice to protect their centrals as opposed to their scoring remotes.

The other thing is you need to be patient. Most of the games I've lost to Scorched Earth decks were because I ran when it wasn't strictly necessary and before I knew I was safe from being killed. I find lately that a lot of runner decks play better when they take some time to build.

27 comments
9 Jun 2014 Talism

Ive been messing around with some thing similar, as soon as i saw donut i was WIZARDS got a new friend. public simp is the one thing i dont like in your deck, i would rather spend the inf on 1 X donut, 1 X decoy, 3 X hostage, 2 clones and 1 fem.

that way, if you want scorched protection, you hostage the decoy, if you want cash, you grab kati, you want donut, (which you do), so possibly drop one clone for a donut, or one hostage for a donut.

joshua B is a good include to as a 1 of, you might not use him or you could use him when you are ready for a big dig and the corp is too poor to respond bar trash him

10 Jun 2014 skaterforsale

I got to play next to you on the top table this weekend for a round before being stomped back down a table and saw this deck in action. I can't tell you how many people would look at your table and say "Dude....is that Donut?" Love the abstract approach you have going on, almost as much as those shades you sported. ;]

10 Jun 2014 kevingoes

Talism: running Decoy is definitely something worth trying. I don't personally feel that Decoy is as strong a solution to tag and bag decks. I know from my experience playing Scorched Earth decks, if I see a runner playing Decoy I will use my SEA Sources to bait them into either spending a lot of money to avoid receiving a tag and opening up a scoring window or to blow their Decoy. Additionally Decoy does nothing to stop Punitive Counterstrikes.

15 Jun 2014 PeekaySK

We've been playing around with Donut and Whizzard for a while now (started right after Donut was spoiled, actually). The one piece of the puzzle I feel like you're missing is #Vamp. Donut's biggest strength is just how difficult he makes the post-Vamp recovery process.

15 Jun 2014 lqm

Wouldn't Wyldside work really well with Public Sympathy? If so what would one think of dropping here?

15 Jun 2014 Indraklyr

I saw this deck in play at the Atlanta Regionals, and I have to say it was awesome to see it at work! Congrats on an incredible deck!

16 Jun 2014 brightknight_216

Congrats on getting second place. I like how you show Donut can be played in your decklist but I feel a little bit "iffy" on the use of Public Sympathy when playing against Jinteki where it has Komainu. Getting a hand of more than 5 cards is not good when facing Komainu even when we have sentry breaker. Have to spend a lot to break the subroutine. Have you face problems with this card? How do you get around it?

16 Jun 2014 apocrita

@brightknight_216 Not to speak for kevingoes, but Komainu is a fantastic Parasite target.

16 Jun 2014 Lemmit

Like the deck but would like to see Djinn.... Thought about -1 Yog and -1 data sucker for +2 Djinn?

16 Jun 2014 kevingoes

brightknight_216: I don't really end up playing Public Sympathy all that often. It's Scorched Earth/Punitive Counterstrike protection. It also has the added benefit of undoing some brain damage if that should happen. Against Jinteki, I just don't play it because of Komainu. (I also kind of don't mind having cards in hand that I can afford to lose. Clone chip is also hugely helpful in that match up. That being said: Komainu gets hit with a parasite hard as soon as I see one. I also dig like a fiend for a Mimic when I'm up against Jinteki.

17 Jun 2014 Ariya92

I played you in round 5 ( I was running CT and HB big ICE). I really like this deck and my give it a go myself. Those shades you were sporting were pretty awesome too XD.

17 Jun 2014 Kroen

Are 3 Clone Chips really necesarry? Why not go -1 CC +1 Hostage or something?

17 Jun 2014 PeekaySK

Because a third chip is actually useful, whereas a third Hostage would be there only to marginally increase odds of drawing one into the opening hand. You literally have nothing to fetch with a third Hostage.

17 Jun 2014 Kroen

Well, seeing as there's Hostage anyway, why not add some more targets for it? like Raymond Flint (a tutorable expose is nice, and if the corp takes BP and you have Nerve Agent out so help him...) or leave it at 2 Hostages and replace 1 CC with The Source or Mr Lee (seeing as this deck has 0 draw) or Professional Contancts (same reason). Just throwing it out there.

17 Jun 2014 PeekaySK

Because that would be diluting the deck's core idea with clutter it doesn't need, which would have to go in at the expense of stuff that is actually beneficial to your primary plan.

17 Jun 2014 Kroen

Okay, fair enough. But it does seem like piloting this deck requires a lot of manual drawing. Why not -1 CC +2 Quality Time? or even +2 Express Delievery.

17 Jun 2014 Koala

Quality Time is an event;)

17 Jun 2014 Koala

I don't like Donut Taganes at all. First of all you can't play events yourself anymore. Secondly one credit loss per Operation ist something but not that big of a deal for the corp. How many Operations are played in an average game? Maybe 7 if the game takes long? Maybe less? So you spend one action one card and 3 credits plus the 4 influence to denie 7 credits over the course of the game. Donut can still be trashed;the corp can still click for money and just not use those eco-events. Why not playing account syphon instead? Its a MUCH better option in my opinion.

17 Jun 2014 Koala

That said your article becomes even more interesting and your success is quite impressive!

17 Jun 2014 Kroen

touche, crack. okay, but if the hostage has just two targets, why not -1 hostage, +1 donut, +1 kati -1 something else? hostage is a huge tempo hit

17 Jun 2014 Koala

yes hostage makes it even more expensive!

17 Jun 2014 kevingoes

Kroen: you should really read the write up I wrote. I talked about changing the Hostage/Donuts/Kati Jones distribution. The third clone chip could be swapped out for something else. I would probably replace it with a Special Order. Professional Contacts and Mr. Li are both possibilities I've considered. . Cracked: I could swap out the Donut package for two Account Siphons. In a vacuum, on paper, yes Account Siphon is better. However going to two Accounts Siphons decreases my chances of getting the card that I want in my opening hand from approximately 66% to 40% which is a huge difference in consistency.

Sure there are times where Donut doesn't pull his weight but that usually means that my opponent is relying on asset economy and I'm a pretty happy camper.

17 Jun 2014 pants on head

Yup, donut in whizzard is a tax if they're heavily operation economy, and whizzard himself taxes asset economy, so you're taxing the Corp either way

26 Jun 2014 BoardGame79

Cool deck idea. Did you try to put in some Imps to work with Medium?

1 Jul 2014 Labbes

I love this deck. All hail the donut.

4 Jul 2014 kevingoes

AwakeLand: Indeed I did! I love Imp. It has to be one of my favorite Anarach cards. In the end I had to take it out to include Knight. It wasn't an easy choice for me.

11 Jan 2015 Kroen

Any chance for an updated version including cards up to (and including) The Source?