Laramy Fisk, v. 1

The initial version of my Laramy Fisk deck got off to a great start: the first time I played it I was swimming with money and my opponent was really off-balance, and I won easily. And having the opponent be off balance wasn’t uncommon in subsequent games; that game was by far my most profitable game, however. I usually had enough money, but I didn’t generally have much of a surplus, and in particular I didn’t have enough money to make big runs most of the time.

Also, I don’t have the icebreakers to reliably make big runs, or sometimes even runs at all, on remotes. My icebreaker mix is central-heavy; I do have Faust, but while Fisk Investment and Symmetrical Visage give me decent card draw, I don’t have good enough card draw to make regular Faust runs.

So my first tweaks were around money and card draw. I decided to add a third Security Testing, a third Dirty laundry, and an Earthrise Hotel; I got rid of Eden Shard, and after dithering a bit about the other two cards to get rid of, I decided to get rid of Forged Activation Orders.

Here’s the result:

Laramy Fisk

Laramy Fisk: Savvy Investor

Event (19)

• 3x Account Siphon
• 3x Dirty Laundry
• 3x Fisk Investment Seminar
• 2x Inside Job
• 2x Legwork
• 3x Special Order
• 3x Sure Gamble

Hardware (2)

• 2x Box-E

Resource (14)

• 2x Daily Casts
• 1x Earthrise Hotel
• 2x Film Critic • •
• 1x Hades Shard •
• 2x Kati Jones
• 3x Security Testing
• 2x Symmetrical Visage
• 1x Utopia Shard •

Icebreaker (8)

• 1x Alias
• 1x Breach
• 1x Cerberus “Rex” H2
• 1x Corroder ••
• 1x Faerie
• 1x Faust ••
• 1x Femme Fatale
• 1x Passport

Program (2)

• 2x Keyhole ••• •••

14 influence spent (max 15)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Universe of Tomorrow

It’s still got a lot of problems. The icebreaker suite is bad: having only one Corroder really hurts me sometimes (especially if it gets sniped and means I can’t hit remotes without Faust, but also Breach is expensive even for centrals), and I still don’t have enough card draw to feed Faust. So I either need to commit to Faust and add two more copies of Earthrise Hotels or get rid of it; I’ll probably do the latter, which will also free up the influence to get a second Corroder. (Though that won’t solve the whole problem, I’ll still have issues with code gates.)

I am getting super lucky with being able to draw Hades Shard, though; it’s definitely the MVP of the deck. Keyhole is useful, albeit not quite in the way I’d been hoping: I’d been thinking I could use it for constant pressure, but in practice people manage to defend R&D enough to make that expensive, so it often turns up as a surprise at the end: I’ll pick a turn when I’m going to pop Hades Shard, and I’ll get a couple extra Keyhole runs that turn.

I’m somewhat on the fence with Eden Shard, but ultimately it’s useful in that last turn (I’ll pop Eden Shard before Hades Shard), and also Eden Shard plus Legwork make a nice combo to see the opponent’s entire hand. (Or all but one card in their hand, if I force them to draw.)

I’m vulnerable against double Scorched (because Box-E only brings me up to 7 cards); that hasn’t been a problem in the local meta, but it might be a problem in tournaments. But you can’t protect against everything; these days, Film Critics are filling my deck slot of corp shenanigans defense, and it’s been useful.

The one blowout loss I’ve had was against core HB: they just kept on installing cards, getting them money and keeping their hand size low enough that I didn’t want to use my identity power. On which note, I’m still not sure when to use the identity power: do I use it when they have 4 cards? What about 3? What if I’m running on their hand? In general, I lean towards using it, so I’ll probably use it even if I’m running on their hand and even if they have 4 cards, but I’m not sure yet. And I suspect it’s vulnerable against rush decks: it takes a while for enough excess cards to make it to Archives, and I’m not great on remotes (and my identity power assumes I’m regularly running against centrals), so if an opponent realizes that, they have a decent chance of scoring agenda points before I create too much trouble.

I’m also seeing situations where one card in my hand sits in my hand (with multiples) for a while, then I find a way to use it repeatedly to suddenly apply focused pressure. That happened in that first glorious game: I spent a while in a board state where Account Siphon didn’t work, so they were just clogging my hand, until I got to a situation where I could make it into HQ and my opponent had six or seven credits: so then I ended up playing Account Siphon on three consecutive turns (clearing tags and letting them try to recover money each turn), at the end of which I had a lot of money and they had none. And in my most recent game against a core HB opponent, I was waiting to play Fisk Investments but their hand size was too low; once they hit a big enough hand size, though, I played it on three consecutive turns, and a lot of good stuff ended up in archives.

So there’s a lot to learn in how to play it. And, like I said, the deck composition isn’t right yet. But it’s fun, I’m definitely glad I built it, and I’m looking forward to trying it out at a tournament next week.