Always Be “Fast” Running 2.0 on NRDB

Nerdbears! Shhhhh. Step softly, and put this safari hat on. We’re about to bear witness to one of nature’s miracles: the life cycle of a rare and exotic jankzal.

These rare creatures are quite numerous in their youth, incubating in the darkest corners of NRDB, they subsist primarily on comments and likes. Despite this, it is rare to behold such a creature that has reached maturity without being mercilessly culled by nature.

Ah! It’s hatching now…

Quetzal: Free Spirit Event (22)

3x Dirty Laundry

1x Déjà Vu

2x Employee Strike ••

2x Forked

3x I’ve Had Worse

2x Immolation Script

2x Knifed

2x Kraken

2x Spooned

3x Sure GambleHardware (4)

2x e3 Feedback Implants ••••

2x Turntable Resource (13)

3x Always Be Running ••••• ••••

3x Daily Casts

3x Data Folding

2x Human First

1x Kati Jones

1x Symmetrical Visage Icebreaker (2)

2x MimicProgram (5)

3x Medium

2x Parasite 15 influence spent (max 15)

46 cards (min 45)

Cards up to Data and Destiny

Wow. Look at all of that… plumage. Appropriately, the plan for this deck is completely bird-brained:

Click-draw until you have ABR

Encounter an ICE

Realize like most ICE, it has more than 1 subroutine

Click-draw until you have E3

Maybe finally get an access with your Medium

Proceed to spend 75% of your clicks every turn on a single run until you lose or get lucky

The author presumes to always have money and his combo online to gleefully trash ICE and apply pressure. I say you will spend your whole game making the most click inefficient plays imaginable until your opponent steamrolls you with tempo. Reality is likely somewhere in between; however, one of the classic NRDB blunders is to expect the best-case scenario for your cards.

Quetzal is an excellent ID. In a vacuum. In the current metagame, this bird is hounded by the existence of 1 card:

Take a look at, literally every corp deck and you will notice that all of them are running 4 barriers, and 3 of them are Eli. Lady is so good, people have largely just given up on barriers – the ones that we do see either have 3 or more subroutines, or are so good when Lady isn’t around that you play them anyway (Eli).

This makes dante77’s decision to include 10 copies of situational ICE removal and 0 copies of D4vid confusing and infuriating. Parasites are still great; however any joy or relief felt over the inclusion of parasite is heavily overshadowed by the despair of having no support cards for said parasites. Sorry friend, I already went to 46 cards to include Kraken and Human First, there is simply no room for a third parasite in this ice destruction deck.

“Fast” is the last word I would use to describe this deck. When the core of your strategy is “turn every ICE into Turing” – speed is beyond your grasp. I can only assume dante77 put it in quotes as a sort of inside joke, because the only thing “fast” about ABR quetzal was how quickly it took me to my angry place (aka the 7-11 that sells malt liquor).

I do this all for you nerdbears, diving on grenades weekly so you don’t have to.

Before you sleeve up…

The shell needs some major tuning. Symmetrical Visage and Kati Jones as single copies, while playing Human First and Immolation script as double copies? Immediately cut the Human firsts – you already have 10 situational events that you have to discard before you draw your combo, don’t stack situational economy onto that.

These ICE destruction cards first require that you draw into one of your two copies of E3 before you can use them, most of them will hit the heap. Same Old Thing would ease some pressure on your hand a little bit, playing more draw effects would ease it a lot.

When building a new Anarch deck, it’s best to begin with a proven shell and scale back from there to fit your strategy. In this case, you can look to event heavy anarch decks and see that they run best with sustained draw effects like Wyldeside and Earthrise. Swapping out the Employee Strike’s for Career Fairs would support that change as well. Which is a shame, because Employee Strike is the best card in this deck.

Quetzal is outstanding against the few 1 sub barriers that see play (wraparound) consequently she found a nice niche for herself as a faust wielder.

Faust-Quetzal is a cool deck that can work – To anyone interested in Quetzal, I suggest checking out Faust Must Feed by Matthopkins, the shell could use some tuning, but it will serve as a much better jumping off point for you than trying to wrangle this beast.

Now, hand me that shotgun – I have to put right what nature done wrong.

RTG,

-Chill84