After the prior version of my Laramy Fisk deck, I decided that I needed a better way to break into servers, and in particular to give up on the Faust idea. So I got rid of Faust and Passport, adding in a second Corroder and ZU.13. I’d been at 14 influence, and that added two, so I replaced one Film Critic with a Plascrete.

After that, I decided Breach wasn’t helping, and Earthrise Hotel wasn’t the best source of card draw for me, so I got rid of those plus my third Security Testing, replacing them with a Symmetrical Visage and experimentally re-adding two Forged Activation Orders.

Here’s the result:

Laramy Fisk, v. 2

Laramy Fisk: Savvy Investor

Event (21)

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

Hardware (3)

• 2x Box-E
• 1x Plascrete Carapace

Resource (12)

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

Icebreaker (7)

• 1x Alias
• 1x Cerberus “Rex” H2
• 2x Corroder •• ••
• 1x Faerie
• 1x Femme Fatale
• 1x ZU.13 Key Master ••

Program (2)

• 2x Keyhole ••• •••

It went 2-2 at the tournament; that would be fine, except both wins were on time (because my GRNDL deck is slow!), and one of them didn’t feel like it would have turned into a win. It was definitely a fun experiment, but I also don’t feel like I did as good a job with the experiment as I could have: e.g. this blog post talks about not running early without threat cards, but that’s exactly what I did. It wasn’t that rare for games to come together to where I could take apart my opponent at the end (basically, waiting until they got to a situation where they could win soon, and then doing a few last Keyhole runs and popping Hades Shard), but there were too many situations where that strategy got shut out.

So, again, evidence that I should probably netdeck for a bit, to get a better feel for what good decks feel like.

As noted in the prior version of my GRNDL deck, I thought I was playing it wrong, and I also needed to fix the ice. Amazon Industrial Zone wasn’t a good idea as Blackmail protection, so I got rid of it and added two copies of Elizabeth Mills. I got rid of PAD Campaign and Shell Corporation, and added in a Capital Investors. And, also I got rid of Corporate Town. And, ice-wise I got rid of Hadrian’s Wall, one Ice Wall, and Swarm, and added in a Builder, two Enigmas, and a Nebula.

Capital Investors was a bad idea, though: I wasn’t going to protect it, and it doesn’t make enough money in the short term, so I replaced it with a couple of copies of Melange. And I got rid of both copies of Builder and added in a Quicksand.

Here’s the result:

GRNDL, v. 2

GRNDL: Power Unleashed

Agenda (10)

• 2x Corporate War
• 1x Government Contracts
• 1x Hostile Takeover
• 3x Oaktown Renovation
• 3x Project Atlas

Asset (7)

• 2x Elizabeth Mills
• 2x Jackson Howard • •
• 2x Melange Mining Corp.
• 1x Shattered Remains

Operation (13)

• 2x Aggressive Negotiation
• 2x Hedge Fund
• 1x Midseason Replacements ••••
• 3x Restructure
• 3x Scorched Earth
• 2x SEA Source •• ••

Barrier (9)

• 2x Fire Wall
• 2x Ice Wall
• 2x Meru Mati
• 1x Quicksand
• 2x Spiderweb

Code Gate (4)

• 2x Enigma
• 2x Wormhole

Sentry (5)

• 2x Archer
• 2x Nebula
• 1x Taurus

Multi (1)

• 1x Orion

10 influence spent (max 10)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Underway

I brought it to a tournament; it went 1-3, and the one win was against a new player who mad some basic mistakes that let me flatline him quickly. It was too slow, and ultimately didn’t have a non-flatline winning condition; I did pretty well on money in several of the games, but my opponents reacted appropriately by getting even more money; that, combined with Film Critic, meant that I couldn’t either flatline them or keep them out.

I suspect that I’m not playing it optimally, but I also suspect that I’m building decks wrong: this one feels too conservative, too slow. I’m thinking that I should spend some time playing good net decks, to understand how a good deck plays (following this advice); hopefully that will give me a better idea of what a good deck feels like. (And it will improve my play at the board, too: if I’m losing, then it’ll be the fault of my play, not of my decks!)

For the September Minecraft session, I decided to start work on a room inside the cave I’d been obsessed with for the last several months: there was an area not too far in off of the water that looked like a reasonable beginning of a room so I decided to pretty it up.

Here’s what the front looked like initially

And here’s what the back looked like

Here’s the view up the waterfall from the front of the room

I started by putting in a floor; then an alcove in the back seemed like a natural storage area, and finally I added some furniture. It’s still pretty basic, especially the front of the room, but it’s a start.

Adding in a floor

Armor and bookshelves in the back alcove

A couch and a painting

A side table next to the couch and a work area on the other side of the room

Then I decided to build some stairs up the waterfall, to connect the room to the entrance:

That protuberance up there is a little ugly

Starting work on the stairs

While I was in the middle of this, Pat told me he’d finished the glass structure that he’d been building in the ocean last month, so I flew over to see that:

Looking up from the bottom

A glowing floor

The view from high above

A closer in top view

Looking down from the top; the line is Dan’s path

Then I flew back to continue my work; I ran into a neat looking round passage on the way.

Round passage

Inside the passage

Finally, I finished the stairs, and looked around to see what to do next.

The top of the stairs; I gave up on zigzags here

The finished stairs

The entrance looks cleaner now

Here’s what the path looks like near the room

This is on the other side of the water; I think I’ll build there next time

The initial version of my GRNDL deck has, honestly, not been doing as well as I expected. It sometimes manages the double-Scorched win, Midseasons is sometimes doing double duty by hobbling resource-dependent decks in non-kill situations, and in general all of the out-of-faction cards seem like they’re good choices; but I expected the deck to be able to win through agenda points more often, and I think it’s only done that once.

Part of that is that I have the wrong mix of cards, at multiple levels: the wrong agendas, the wrong ice, the wrong assets. In terms of agendas, the problem is Underway Renovation: as far as I can tell, it’s simply not a good card. If the runner’s deck is fairly full, then I’m doing nothing to change the odds that the next card that they draw will be useful, and while I might happen to hit a card that is painful for them to lose, runners frequently have better tools to get cards out of the heap than out of the stack, so I might actually be helping them by forcing them to trash a good card.

Underway Renovation still probably hurts the runner if I ride it for long enough, but that’s expensive and, if that really is hurting them, then they’ll eventually get in there to grab it; it’s also probably helpful if they’re playing a high-draw deck and I can cause them to run out earlier than I’d like, but that’s going to be a middle or end game situation, and if I can defend an agenda long enough to cause problems there, then I’ll be better off scoring a 2-point agenda instead.

The ice problems are a little more subtle. I love Archer, but I think three of them are a bit much (especially since I don’t like two of my 1-point agendas); and the experimental ice (Swarm, Taurus) hasn’t been working out in practice. Also, I need to give up on trying to use Errand Boy, it’s not a good card. Finally, the ice is a little barrier-heavy, which is especially problematic with the bad pub: e.g. once they get Corroder out, Ice Wall is useless.

The basic problem with assets is PAD Campaign: with the bad pub, it’s too cheap to trash. So I either need to have defended agenda assets or I need to switch my economy more to operations. And I have yet to use Corporate Town as anything other than run bait. (Though I will say: run bait is pretty useful, especially when your opponents are playing Blackmail…)

With that in mind, I made a bunch of changes (bringing it from a 54-card deck to a 49-card deck in the process.) I got rid of two copies of Underway Renovation, one Corporate Town, one Archer, two Pad Campaigns, and Errand Boy. And I added in a second Spiderweb (which makes me still more barrier-dependent, but at least it costs a bit of money to get through…), and an Amazon Industrial Zone as experimental Blackmail protection.

Here’s the result:

GRNDL, v. 1

GRNDL: Power Unleashed

Agenda (10)

• 2x Corporate War
• 1x Government Contracts
• 1x Hostile Takeover
• 3x Oaktown Renovation
• 3x Project Atlas

Asset (5)

• 1x Corporate Town
• 2x Jackson Howard • •
• 1x PAD Campaign
• 1x Shattered Remains

Upgrade (2)

• 1x Amazon Industrial Zone
• 1x Shell Corporation

Operation (13)

• 2x Aggressive Negotiation
• 2x Hedge Fund
• 1x Midseason Replacements ••••
• 3x Restructure
• 3x Scorched Earth
• 2x SEA Source •• ••

Barrier (10)

• 2x Fire Wall
• 1x Hadrian’s Wall
• 3x Ice Wall
• 2x Meru Mati
• 2x Spiderweb

Code Gate (3)

• 1x Builder
• 2x Wormhole

Sentry (5)

• 2x Archer
• 1x Nebula
• 1x Swarm
• 1x Taurus

Multi (1)

• 1x Orion

10 influence spent (max 10)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Underway

It’s still not great, though I still think there’s a seed of a good idea here. And, more importantly, I frequently play it wrong: it’s tempting to use GRNDL to get out some agenda early, but if I do that, I’ll lose my economic advantage (unless the agenda is Oaktown Renovation or maybe Government Contracts, but those are the two hardest to score early), and I may even lose an agenda from my hand or deck in the process. And, if I don’t have an economic advantage, then I’ve lost my identity power benefit and I’ve given my opponent a bad pub, which means I’m behind with nothing to show for it. (There’s a variant of this where I try land a Midseasons early; again, though, that’s not useful because I won’t have the Scorcheds yet for the kill and they won’t have resources out to trash, and I’ll be behind on money anyways!)

So I need to slow down. I should start by defending centrals and starting to build up a scoring server but not actually trying to score right at the start; then I can get to a situation where I’ll be excited to see a Corporate War, because I’m pretty confident that I can score it and increase my economic advantage in the process, instead of going broke. Or, indeed, to see any of the agendas, because they all have their uses: Government Contracts gets me money; Hostile Takeover feeds into Archer and Corporate Town (if I keep the latter in here, which I probably won’t); Oaktown Renovation and Corporate War get me money; and an overadvanced Project Atlas sets up a kill combo as well, and in a pinch a 3/2 agenda is never a bad thing. Also, these all feed into Aggressive Negotation, which has been a very useful card for setting up the kill combo.

But I also need to fix the ice. There are too many barriers; and one of my coworkers is having great success playing a strength 5 Atman against it. (And, like I said, it’s vulnerable to Blackmail; I’m not sure how much I should worry about that, but in general baiting non-agenda runs to drain my opponent’s economy is probably useful.) I’ve got another week before the tournament; we’ll see if I manage to improve the deck and, more importantly, improve my playing of the deck enough that it can hold its own.

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.