Teched to the gills (3-0 in Vale's async)

nbkelly 953

Bowlsley is right. Unity sucks ass early, and Euler kicks ass early. Euler also kicks ass late though, if you can hold it for a combo turn. I absolutely love Deep Dive. It's Notoriety, but you're paying a 1 credit premium to probably get 2 points, and probably get 4-5 points too if you have a click to spare. I've already slotted it into my eternal lists.

cruising with euler

This list went undefeated in Vales' Async tourney, carrying me through the first three rounds against Pālanā Foods: Sustainable Growth, Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design, and NBN: Controlling the Message and allowing my to get king of swiss. Additionally, my standing in public games with this deck is 30/5. I think I could have won my fourth game (vs. aginfusion prison), but I chose a different meme runner deck so I could have choices for the cut.

This is a combo deck, but it's also (in my opinion) a heavily NPE deck. Boomerangs on cafe give you a very good way to contest remotes, and you lock the corporation out of the option to hold up unrezzed ICE and put your boomerangs in jail (they can still use Malia Z0L0K4 to incarcerate your gameplan). Despite being combo, I'm still running 46 cards. It's the most powerful shaper number.

PAD Tap is probably the main thing that lets you keep up with traditional decks. It's a 1 influence 0 investment siphon that usually gains you at least a credit, and sometimes it's even two rezekis for 2c cheaper.

Dummy Box lets you wage economic warfare on the corporation if they try to trash PAD Tap. It also protects Paule's Café against most threats - I found that without it, I would easily get blown out by Above the Law, or a nicely cooked Tomorrow's Headline.

Just like Bowlsely, I included Ankusa as theoretical tech against Kakugo. It also forces your opponent to instantly pop Border Control, and it's a bit less of an atrocity in these cases when you can discount it with cafe, or even better, force them to decide on popping Border Control before you're actually forced to install it. Just the threat of it sitting on Paule's Café is enough to change how some corps are allowed to play.

In contrast to the tao decklist of the week a few days ago, I don't think Rezeki is right for this type of deck - it's too slow, and if it's not in your opener it is likely to be negative equity.

Clot is a good card. It can stop you losing - but more importantly, it can steal you a score and a free turn as the corp purges. In testing, I found this took the winrate vs. Sokka's fast advance BtL from around 30% to around 95%. We're a combo deck, but that doesn't matter if your opponent wins first. Clot steals you the turns you need to win first. You don't need a suite of Simulchip to play clot. You probably don't even need one. Just stealing one score from your opponent is enough to swing most games.


Deep Dive decks are quite weak to two things in my opinion: 1) getting rushed out 2) random damage. I chose to run Guru Davinder over Caldera for a few reasons.

  • It costs 1c to install, instead of 3
  • It synergizes with Paule's Café.
  • It stops you losing to a random Azef Protocol score.
  • 4c to dodge Anemone is good value. 4c to dodge the Anansi ability is good value.
  • The last instance of damage negation is free - you let Guru get trashed on your third run, so you can steal Obokata Protocol if you have to.

If you're preventing damage from three copies of Kakugo then you're paying 1c to install + 8c = 9c. With caldera, it's 3c to install + 9c = 12c. It takes seven single pings to make Guru Davinder worse than Caldera.

Lat: Ethical Freelancer demands you play 5 more cards than Tāo Salonga: Telepresence Magician, but I think it's worth it. The extra draw you get, or alternatively, the ability to manipulate how many cards your opponent is willing to keep in HQ, is quite worth it in my opinion. Lots of horizontal players will (and should) rez Spin Doctor to deny you draw. That's fine, we already beat those decks.

Pelangi, Boomerang and Self-modifying Code give you opportunities to combo without needing to draw through your entire deck - this was one explicit weakness I found with the Tao list - it ran singleton breakers and no tutoring. When testing it, I found the strongest determination of if I could win or not was if paperclip was in the top half of the deck. With this list, you can reasonably go off with only half your deck drawn. My best trick is to do it on a scoring turn. The corporation is likely to go broke defending against Shapocalypse, and you can probably get into the remote for free afterwards.

The actual going off turn requires very little money - Cybertrooper Talut with Euler and Gauss lets you get through most ice with ease, Ika is a servicable breaker, and you have three copies of Boomerang you can install at instant speed during your runs to get through nasty ice, like Surveyor. Your primary uses for money are:

Where can this go wrong?

Thank you for reading my novel.

7 comments
27 Apr 2022 gilesdavis

TL:DR- it's an nbkelly list, you know it's gonna be good so just play it already ✌️

27 Apr 2022 bowlsley

Hooray! Can confirm that Clot is an excellent slot in the current meta, it's won me quite a few games almost single-handedly.

27 Apr 2022 Baa Ram Wu

Best use of Paules Cafe since Hayley got her groove on! Excellent work!

2 May 2022 whatever

Fun looking deck, will have to try it out. How does the Boomerang recursion work if you use multiple in a single run through Paule's triggers? Do you only add one back to the stack at the end of the run or does each trash trigger a separate effect to return it?

3 May 2022 bowlsley

@whatever each Boomerang creates a separate trigger to recur one from the heap. So yeah, using multiple in one run is fine.

3 May 2022 Shorty

Killer good deck! Some slots might be dabatable but I guess the performance stands for itself. =)

5 May 2022 nbkelly

@Shorty some slots are definitely debatable. I tuned this to try and cast as wide a net as I could, because I wanted to catch whatever jank I would face in the first couple of rounds.

You can't take it down to 45 cards though. That would be cursed.