Spark Agency, v. 1

The initial version of my Spark Agency deck did quite well. Which, I guess, isn’t a big surprised: I’d been playing a netdecked fast advance deck before then, so I’d gotten a better at playing that style, and building a deck with those same capabilities but with econ attack and some horizontal assets mixed in turned out to work fine.

In fact, I left it alone for two or three weeks: the only thing I was sure about from the early playtesting was that Adonis Campaign wasn’t the right choice: I wasn’t going to defend it, and it’s too expensive to rez just to cost the opponent a credit. I was pretty sure that a straight up swap with Launch Campaign would have been an advantage, but I mostly wanted to get my deck down to 49 cards instead of do a small tweak. Also, I kept on forgetting to use Team Sponsorship, but I wasn’t yet convinced that that was evidence that the card was a bad fit: it still seemed like a good idea to get advertisements out of the trash.

One of my coworkers was playing an Apex deck, and I was more vulnerable against that than I would have liked: Apex can attack both aspects of Tollbooth just fine, and Wraparound is also no problem. But I didn’t want to focus too much on that, either.

Ultimately, I decided that the big experiment that wasn’t working was Rebranding Team / Media Blitz. Yes, having more assets marked as advertisements is useful, but I don’t have that many non-advertisement assets, and chances are some will already be out before Rebranding Team comes into play; and if my goal is to cost my opponents money, then most of the time NAPD Contract will cost them more money than Rebranding Team would. And, without Rebranding Team, Media Blitz is useless; and, again, it’s not at all clear that Media Blitz will hurt my opponent more than it will cost me, even if Rebranding Team is there.

So I got rid of both copies of Media Blitz and replaced three copies of Rebranding Team with two copies of NAPD Contact (adding to the one I already had). That put me at 51 cards, so I had to get rid of two more to make it legal; I got rid of Adonis Campaign for one, and that freed up some influence that I could use to replace my third NAPD Contract and my License Acquisition with a Global Food Initiative. (I was sad to see License Acquisition go, but not sad enough to want to ditch something else.) That put me at 49 cards, with one influence to spare; I used that influence to swap one Wraparound with an Eli 1.0, and I also swapped my second Tollbooth for a second Assassin. (I’ve really liked how Assassin plays; and I’d doing well enough scoring without a particularly well-defended remote, whereas putting an Assassin in front of a central can really mess up my opponent.)

Here’s the result:

Spark Agency, v. 1

Spark Agency: Worldswide Reach

Agenda (10)

• 3x AstroScript Pilot Program
• 1x Global Food Initiative •
• 2x NAPD Contract
• 3x Project Beale
• 1x 15 Minutes

Asset (12)

• 2x Daily Business Show
• 2x Jackson Howard
• 3x PAD Campaign
• 2x Team Sponsorship • •
• 3x Turtlebacks • • •

Upgrade (5)

• 1x Cyberdex Virus Suite
• 1x Product Placement
• 3x SanSan City Grid

Operation (6)

• 2x Biotic Labor •••• ••••
• 2x Hedge Fund
• 2x Sweeps Week

Barrier (3)

• 1x Eli 1.0 •
• 2x Wraparound

Code Gate (7)

• 1x Archangel
• 2x Enigma
• 3x Pop-up Window
• 1x Tollbooth

Sentry (3)

• 2x Assassin
• 1x Turnpike

Other (3)

• 3x Special Offer

15 influence spent (max 15)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Data and Destiny

I like it, and it’s been doing well. I can keep my opponent off their game, I can either run horizontal economy or make them spend money trashing that economy. It’s low on icebreakers (once you get ignore the six advertisements), but it’s got enough to slow them down and I’ve got enough money and tools to be able to score agendas without much protection. (I don’t like rezzing a San San knowing that my opponent will trash it next turn, but it turns out that I’ve got enough money to make that work.)

I imagine the next tweaks that I make will be on the ice: e.g. I’m not convinced Turnpike is a great fit, or that I need three copies of Special Offer. And I’m tempted to add in Launch Campaign and/or more copies of Product Placement. We’ll see how the new version does.