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.

I’d gotten a non-FFG alt-art GRNDL at a recent tournament, so I decided to use that for my next corp. I wanted to hit some of the same beats as I’d had in my Next Ice deck, while adding in some Weyland meanness.

I start off with an economic advantage; I wanted to have that feed on itself. So partly that meant throwing in three copies of Restructure, but I also included three copies of Oaktown Renovation and two copies of Corporate War in my agenda mix. Hopefully I can get them out early and defend them enough to score them, at which point my economic advantage grows.

But this is Weyland: I still want to be able to blow people up. I didn’t feel like going heavily on 3-point agendas, and Punitive Counterstrike is less good in a Film Critic world, so Scorched Earth. Which means that I need to land tags; I decided to throw in both SEA Source and Midseason Replacements. (My Next Ice deck showed the power of rig destruction: even if I don’t yet have enough copies of Scorched Earth, Midseason Replacements can let me take out resources.)

When originally building the deck, I forgot that I only had 10 influence, though: with Midseason taking 4 influence, that’s a real problem. I decided to solve that via tutoring: three copies of Project Atlas, and two copies of Aggressive Negotiation. That way I’ll be able to get out Midseasons early; depending on how things go, I can also use that for Scorched.

I decided to include two copies of Underway Renovation (probably my Laramy Fisk deck was inspiring me there): if I get enough money and a defended remote, I might just end up riding that for a while, accepting that I’ll lose one agenda point from it at some point. And I doubled up with resource destruction by including a couple of copies of Corporate Town (since I’d had so much fun discarding agendas for Archer!); also, one Shattered Remains to blow up hardware and three Archers for programs.

The ice is pretty standard; 20 pieces, it turned out a little more advanceable than I expected, but that’s fine.

It ended up at 54 cards: I was including a little bit too much stuff. But hey, given that I have 5 cards in there that have an agenda as part of their rez cost, having extra agendas isn’t bad! I don’t expect it to stay that way, though; if I had to guess, maybe I’ll end up getting rid of two copies of Underworld Renovation, two copies of Corporate town, and one other non-ice card. (And probably swapping the third Archer with a slightly more standard ice.) We’ll see, though, I want to see how it goes.

Here’s everything:

GRNDL, v. 0

GRNDL: Power Unleashed

Agenda (12)

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

Asset (8)

• 2x Corporate Town
• 2x Jackson Howard • •
• 3x PAD Campaign
• 1x Shattered Remains

Upgrade (1)

• 1x Shell Corporation

Operation (13)

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

Barrier (9)

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

Code Gate (3)

• 1x Builder
• 2x Wormhole

Sentry (7)

• 3x Archer
• 1x Errand Boy
• 1x Nebula
• 1x Swarm
• 1x Taurus

Multi (1)

• 1x Orion

10 influence spent (max 10)
22 agenda points (between 22 and 23)
54 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Underway

I’d had some bad experiences playing against Noise decks recently; so, when I saw Laramy Fisk show up, I thought that maybe I could experiment with a Noise-style effect coming from Criminal. Get the corp to draw more than they’re comfortable with: partly I just want to make them feel unsettled, but I’m also hoping to get them agenda flooded, at which point either agendas will build up in their hand or in archives.

At least that’s the happy scenario; the unhappy scenario is that it causes the corp to draw exactly the cards they need, propelling them to an economic advantage, while giving them enough ice to protect the extra agendas! That’s honestly more likely, but hey, at least the effect will encourage me to run a lot.

In addition to the identity, I was definitely going to include three copies of Fisk Investment Seminar. I was thinking I’d use Vigil as my console, but when I was browsing cards, Keyhole caught my eye: he’s a classic combo with Noise, and why wouldn’t he work well with Fisk? I don’t have enough influence for both, though, so I need a criminal console, and Box-E gives me the 2 MU to host Keyhole and the extra hand space for the cards from Fisk Investment Seminar.

When planning my icebreakers, I figured I’d be running more on centrals, so I included both Breach and Passport. And for my emergency all-purpose icebreaker I decided to use Faust, with three copies of Special Order as my tutoring. (It feels pretty weird building a deck without Clone Chip!)

Hades Shard makes sense, both because of Keyhole and because agenda floods can feed agendas into archives as well. Thinking about that, I actually decided to include all three of the shards: Utopia Shard plus Legwork can let me access their entire hand (assuming I don’t force the extra draw), and maybe Eden Shard will act like a couple of Keyhole runs? My emergency countermeasure was two copies of Film Critic, I included a couple each of Forged Activation Orders and Inside Job as generic criminal goodness, and everything else was money.

Here’s the result:

Laramy Fisk, v. 0

Laramy Fisk: Savvy Investor

Event (20)

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

Hardware (2)

• 2x Box-E

Resource (13)

• 2x Daily Casts
• 1x Eden Shard •
• 2x Film Critic • •
• 1x Hades Shard •
• 2x Kati Jones
• 2x 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 ••• •••

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

Pictures from the August Minecraft session:

I wandered around my current favorite cave, trying to figure out if I could see a way to decorate the waterfall side.

Looking up the waterfall to the entrance

Peeking behind the waterfall

This bit next to the waterfall could turn into a room

Looking down from above

Then I flew back to the stockade, poking into a cave that’s between it and the above area.

Flying back to the stockade

There’s some water down in the cave

A room next to that water

The water flows down into darkness

The water splits in half

I’d never noticed that this house looks like a monkey’s head

After that, I went to check on what Miranda was building; she’d glassed in and lit up a piece of rocky shore.

A glassed-in bay

The bottom of that area

It’s wet out there

The view from above

Pat, meanwhile, had decided to build a huge glass structure in the middle of the water, close to Dan’s path:

Glass and sand in the ocean

Looking out at an island

There’s Dan’s path

It’s dark underwater here

Here’s the whole thing from way above

Finally, I followed Dan’s path back home. I decided to visit the original cave that we built way back in 2010; it’s kind of falling apart. Maybe I’ll try restoring it some next time…

This door has seen better days

Another unfortunate half door

The prior version of my Chameleon deck was starting to show promise: I gave up on one bad idea, added in Self-Modifying Code, and I’d had some proof of concept that I could cut through big ice when I wanted. It was at 43 cards, so I wanted to slim it down, and see if I could focus it a bit more.

I didn’t actually make a lot of changes: I’d had good enough experiences with Film Critic that I figured I could afford to get rid of one Plascrete, I got rid of the Sharpshooter, since Deus X was clearly the more important emergency special purpose icebreaker, and I somewhat reluctantly got rid of the Forged Activation Order copies. And I added in two copies of Legwork: I’d had the most success with the deck when I picked my runs, so I wanted to increase the effect of those runs.

Here’s the result:

Chameleon, v. 2

Chaos Theory: Wünderkind

Event (7)

• 2x Legwork •• ••
• 3x Sure Gamble
• 2x The Maker’s Eye

Hardware (10)

• 2x Clone Chip
• 2x Cyberfeeder • •
• 2x Dinosaurus
• 3x LLDS Processor
• 1x Plascrete Carapace

Resource (11)

• 2x Armitage Codebusting
• 2x Daily Casts
• 2x Film Critic
• 1x Ice Carver •••
• 2x Kati Jones
• 2x Personal Workshop

Icebreaker (5)

• 3x Chameleon
• 1x Deus X
• 1x Gordian Blade

Program (8)

• 2x Datasucker • •
• 2x Parasite •• ••
• 2x Sahasrara
• 2x Self-modifying Code

15 influence spent (max 15)
41 cards (min 40)
Cards up to Old Hollywood

I’d felt that the deck had possibilities but wasn’t great: a little low on money, and a little slow. So my guess for the tournament was that it would go 2-3, and, honestly, 1-4 wouldn’t have particularly surprised me. But I actually went 3-2, which did surprise me: I felt that my Next Ice deck was significantly better than this one. Though, again, luck played a factor: in particular, in my first game my opponent got super agenda flooded, and that combined with getting a Film Critic in my initial draw gave me an easy win. (I’ve forgotten the details, but Film Critic played a key role in at least one other game as well.)

The other surprise about that tournament was that I played against two other Chameleon decks! All three decks were pretty different; one of them looked really interesting, I wish I’d been taking notes.

Fun experiment; I don’t think I have a good enough feel for what to do with it to want to continue honing it, and I also don’t think it will be particularly useful for my coworkers to practice against. So I’ll be on to Laramy Fisk next.

I was starting to get happy with my Next Ice deck after the first set of tweaks, but I needed to prepare it for the tournament. I’d initially experimented with not having any traps, but I figured I should add some in; program destruction had been key to its success, so I went with two copies of Aggressive Secretary. And I’d been doing well with money (in particular, I’d frequently been able to ride Melange to a good amount of money), so I got rid of an Adonis and a Peak Efficiency; I also swapped a Hedge Fund with a Restructure.

After that, I noticed the Pop-Up Windows weren’t really paying off well, so I got rid of both of them; I used the influence on a Wormhole, and I added that third Hedge Fund back in to bring the money up a bit.

Here’s the result:

Next Ice, v. 2

NEXT Design: Guarding the Net

Agenda (10)

• 3x Accelerated Beta Test
• 1x Corporate War
• 3x NAPD Contract
• 3x Project Vitruvius

Asset (11)

• 2x Adonis Campaign
• 2x Aggressive Secretary
• 2x Jackson Howard • •
• 2x Melange Mining Corp.
• 2x PAD Campaign
• 1x Sundew •••

Operation (8)

• 2x Enhanced Login Protocol
• 3x Hedge Fund
• 2x Peak Efficiency
• 1x Restructure

Barrier (7)

• 3x Eli 1.0
• 1x Heimdall 1.0
• 3x NEXT Silver

Code Gate (5)

• 1x Lotus Field •
• 3x NEXT Bronze
• 1x Wormhole ••

Sentry (7)

• 2x Archer •• ••
• 2x Architect
• 3x NEXT Gold

Other (1)

• 1x Mother Goddess

12 influence spent (max 12)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)

It had done well at work: not great against a Noise deck, and it’s a little more vulnerable against ice destruction than I would like, but I feel like I know how to play it, when to go for money, when to go for agendas, when to blow up my opponent’s programs. (Answer: whenever you can, I’ve never regretted rezzing an Archer.)

Unfortunately, it went 1-4. Part of that was bad luck: in one game I fired an Accelerated Beta Test and had three agendas appear, and a couple of others could have gone either way. Still, it’s clearly not as reliable as I thought.

I’m going to keep it assembled, though: I think it’s a good enough representative of a glaciery archetype to be useful for my coworkers to test against. I’m not particularly planning to tweak it, but if I were, I’d consider getting rid of Sundew (it scares opponents, but I don’t have the ice to defend it), Heimdall 1.0 (it’s not having enough of an effect for me in this deck to justify the rez cost), and one or both Architects (people always seem to have an answer to it, so it’s really only a blip). And maybe even swap a Project Vitruvius for a Corporate War: three-for-two agendas are nice, but I don’t ever use the ability, while the extra money for Corporate War is really useful. (Hmm, actually: maybe I should instead start overadvancing Project Vitruvius…)

On to GRNDL for my next deck; I’m hoping I can use my experience from this deck when building that one.