DRAW My choice of draw for this deck is bafflingly unsung – is it too obvious? Is it too unwieldy? I’d wager the answer is it’s largely untested. And that’s what we’re here for.
I’ll be honest, the 3xCollective Consciousness is very much in its infancy of testing and it still is ringing a lot of alarm bells in my head. Excuse me, you want to stack MULTIPLE COPIES OF A 2-MU PROGRAM AS YOUR DRAW ENGINE?? I have some sanity, don’t worry -- much of the reason the deck moved away from Opus economy (other than click compression) is because of my reluctance to rely on two 2-MU programs (3 if counting SMC) despite the existence of Leprechaun.
MU is 3xLeprechauns and Toolbox. Collective Consciousness and Datasuckers are the pivotal programs to get on the table early and when your best draw tool (it is the only draw tool, therefore it is the best) is a cheap 2-MU program making that early rig sustainable hinges on having cheap MU as well.
For 2 credits, Leprechaun is at worst a Cybersolutions and at best it is two Cybersolutions. It’s flexibility at the cost of greater vulnerability, but you have a fail-safe in SMC + Sharpshooter – it’s truly very vulnerable only to Aggressive Secretary.
If MU is running tight, I find overwriting CCs to be quite painless really. Having 3 copies also mean I’m not really gonna live without it for very long, so that finicky need to draw your Lep before your CC is a non-issue, just overwrite or Scavenge the CC on the table for the Lep and it’ll be ready to host the next CC you draw.
Anyway I’ve played a few games since I added these cards as the ONLY secondary draw engine of this deck and I have to say that I like it a lot so far. The tempo of Nasir always felt like: pressure iced servers till rezzed > bounce > find cards to go around rezzed ice.
CCs can save you so many clicks there BECAUSE whatever tools you need to deal with that ice, you would want to feed it to your Workshop + Order of Sol engine. So you’d always have to divide clicks running, digging and hosting. Now you can run and dig at the same time, at Nasir’s tempo. In one game, I had a Lep with 2 CCs. I remember a turn where I ran first click: had an Eli rezzed on me > pushed money into Leprechauns on PW onto the table > drew 2 cards from CCs and gained 3 credits from Eli > double clicked Eli > trashed the asset behind the Eli. Last click: host the Atman I just drew from the rez on PW. If you’re keeping score, in one turn I pressured a server, trashed an asset, got 3 credits, installed memory, drew two cards, found a breaker that my rig can now support with that same new memory and is primed to leave the Workshop. TYING IT TOGETHER
If El-Ad’s Solidarity is about utility belt, lean, mean Stimshopping, my deck’s about burst and industry and exploiting the conundrum Nasir presents at ice rez: it’s about making a run on a 3-deep unrezzed server taking all their rez credits, drawing 6 cards and emptying the cards ticking on your Workshops, getting that access all in a single click. Then spend the rest of the turn emptying your hand onto the Workshops again for the next power run next turn. It’s about Criminal-flavoured ice rez combo synergy and how such a rig might look.
How has this fared through multiple games? Well it’s yet to be played very many times :3 I’ve played enough to say that on average, CC is a modest draw engine. You’re generally bursting 2-4 draws (2 CCs being the ideal setup) mid-run. If you draw right after, the cost in clicks is exactly the same tradeoff as playing a Diesel or a QT once the setup is in play. Personally, I love that – seeing 5 new cards at once was never comforting to me; most of the time I just couldn’t decide which cards to keep and which to trash THEY’RE ALL BEAUTIFUL CARDS. So the subdued burst tempo that feels like I could decide to pause in the middle of a Quality Time and go “OK I have the cards I need let’s stop” fits me very nicely.
Otherwise, hey it’s clickless draw at the tempo of your ID. Even 1 CC on the board starts pushing the Corp; defending their servers gives you money AND a card?!!?? Delicious. Remember, it’s two cost it’s HARDLY a tempo hit, it just prohibits your rig in which case just get rid of it when your rig needs to grow. And hey, remember that it helped you find the parts to make it grow in the first place!
SOME PILOTING NOTES As any Nasir deck, SMC or PW is an ideal card to start with to push your starting credits into something relevant to the board at the moment. In this deck, other cards you’d be fine with in your hand include Collective Consciousness, Leprechaun, Datasucker. The two games I’ve played both times I install a CC as soon as I find one and start pressuring.
The second game I played with this deck, I installed a CC first turn and sustained most of my draws on it. The game went a little less swimmingly because I drew all programs and little economy in the first 10 turns. IMO the lesson to learn is that faster draw doesn’t really help a bad shuffle anyway – Opus does. Hence its re-inclusion, at least as a 1x; it’s probably essential to get past that initial steep install of Atmans, if left without the support of Toolbox and Cyberfeeder.