[Standard] Money is No Object 1.0 (Suggestions Wanted!)

Navelgazer 324

This is an experimental deck I'm trying to crack, and I'm eager for thoughts and suggestions so that we as a community might make this work. Nothing currently included here is sacred (except for maybe the ID).

Every time I look at "The Outfit" I wonder how to build something actually workable around it. 3 credits for taking a bad pub looks like way too much fun to not play around with, but every bad pub means a free credit for the runner during every run they make after that point. That's an investment that can swing in the Runner's favor literally in a single gusty turn. And they stack.

So our goal here is to make credits as irrelevant as we can. First, by using the ID and Weyland's tools to ensure that we always have more credits than we need. Secondly, by using un-iced asset spam to limit the usefulness of Bad Pub for the Runner. Third, by targeting the Runner's rig, such that they have trouble holding onto the Breakers they need.

The assets are a combination of drip econ, ambushes, and of course Spin Doctor. The only upgrade is Malapert Data Vault. While the draw/tutoring/fishing agendas out of archives aspects of Malapert and Spin Doctor are important, those tools are mostly here to give us ways to shuffle R&D pretty regularly during an age in which Conduit is the Runner's best win-con. Of the Ambushes, I wanted a variety that operate differently, with Clearinghouse (which any experienced Runner should expect) being one they have to deal with, Urtica being one that hurts them to run, and False Flag being both.

False Flag is in here for the same reason that Funhouse is: Tags! Funhouse will, of course, be extremely porous in a match where Money is No Object, but they'll still have to take the tag to get through to R&D/HQ. And False Flag operates as either a tag-tool or as a 7/3 agenda that the Runner can't steal, depending on their reaction to it. Reality Threedee might be the dumbest current include here, but it's decent drip econ that gives you three credits for rezzing it, and for the turn when it's unrezzed, it's one more piece of the shell game to make them waste clicks running remotes that (usually) won't have what they're looking for in them. Commercial Banker's Group is roughly the same thing. For all installed assets, the trash costs should basically read "0," since the runner WILL have use-it-or-lose-it credits to spend on nothing but trashes during those runs. We must simply accept that.

There is ICE, of course. Not a ton of it, but the main issue with this ID is that it makes a ton of money while giving the Runner (effectively) much more money. So we can't just try to minimize what the Bad Pub can do for the Runner - we need to have something to spend our buckets of ducats on! And in Weyland, that's mostly big expensive ICE. Big expensive ICE that the runner will have lots of Bad Pub credits to slice through. It is, indeed, a quandary.

So then, the ICE: The Bulwarks, Checkpoints and Trebuchets are there first and foremost to trigger The Outfit's ability. The Funhouses are there because of the classic Data Raven on-encounter ability. Bulwark is the only hard ETR ICE, and currently we're only packing two of them. There's no reason to Ice up anything other than HQ, R&D and a single Scoring remote with Malapert in it. The ICE won't keep them out, and if the Subroutines fire, they'll have free money for traces. We will try to have more.

There are three Retributions in here. They are there to snipe Conduits, Fracters, and whatever the central piece of the runner's engine is (be that their console, prognostic Q-Loop, what have you.) I believe these will be worth pulling back with Spin Doctor. It's entirely possible, especially in the early game, that one could pull off a nasty face-check or two with this ICE. It's equally possible that such a face-check would be suboptimal, so consider carefully before rezzing. Keep the Funhouses behind another ICE if at all possible to keep Inside Job from robbing you of your precious tags. The ICE here will be, for the most part, an annoyance at best. Place it carefully so that it's the most effective annoyance that it can be.

Agendas! Because the Runner is going to be hitting you constantly, the agendas are mostly low-value. City Works Project is the only one that can really hurt if it gets stolen from a central, and if you can score out a Divested Trust early (hardly a guarantee) then that matters a lot less. Hostile Takeover is a no-brainer here, but if you can IAA-score one in your Malapert server it'll be a very productive turn for you. And Broad Daylight is there to help gain you more Bad Pub bursts as well as slow down the Runner's tempo. Which you'll need to do because there are no Cyberdex Sandboxes here, and you'll probably need to do some virus-purging the hard way. Truth be told, I forgot that CVS is still Standard Legal, so that might need to go in here, but I don't yet know what to cut for it. Even with CVS, Aumakua will run wild all over this deck, as will Conduit, so unless you can kill 'em real fast (definitely a possibility) you'll spend a turn or two purging.

Obviously "BOOM!" is the big and obvious Win-Con here, and there aren't a hell of a lot of ways to work around it once you've got them set up for it, as far as I can tell. If you've got your Funhouses in place and/or are playing your ambush shell-game with any luck, they'll have some tags (one nice touch about this deck's "more money than it could possibly need" approach is that they can put a tranquilizer down on your funhouse and you can just keep rezzing it as needed. Chisel+Devil Charm is a different matter, of course.) Anyone running Carnivore can trash your BOOM!s out of HQ or R&D, and you won't have a lot that can keep them out (and Loup will draw up one after doing so) but your Broad Daylights counters can still keep them honest there, and trashed runner cards still mean tempo hits, and when the Runner is focused on your flatline win-con, they're not focused as much as they should be on your shell-game.

In theory, at least. Glorious, ever-hopeful theory. I haven't tried this deck yet, don't think it's in workable shape yet, and I'm not even sure that this concept has any value. But it's fascinating to me and I'd really like your thoughts on how to make this potentially degenerate dream a reality.

2 comments
31 Jul 2021 Navelgazer

Of course, I didn't even touch on Apocalypse, probably because I'm getting back into things and rarely ran into it back in the day when I was playing a lot. Apocalypse absolutely loves this deck. This is straight-up taking candy from a baby for Apocalypse. Crisium Grids are the only real tech I can think of to hinder that plan, and I'm not sure what I'd cut for them. Hmmm.

31 Jul 2021 Navelgazer

I also failed to mention "Stargate" a.k.a. Orange Conduit. Maybe the biggest of many issues with this current rough-draft version is that the Urtica/Clearinghouse/False Flag triumverate all require advancement, and so there's nothing in here as yet that hurts the runner hitting it on a central server. I want my Run Me/Trash Me deck though! Probably gonna obsess all day about how to make this functional.