Running on the Wyldside - Chaos Theory

Chaos Theory

Can't feel my love anymore

Can't feel my legs anymore

But I'm still running

I'm still running...

- Phantogram, All Dried Up

Introduction

Reader, I fear I must first confess to you: I am in love with a little girl. That she happens also to be a card has not doused the inferno of my passion for her; rather, it has only inflamed it further. My very soul burns and radiates like a star with the fire of life that she has given me.

The sterling object of my love, as well as unfortunate obsession, is of course the new Shaper runner, Chaos Theory: Wunderkind (Cyber Exodus). Apart from having the coolest haircut on this side of the galaxy, Chaos Theory also has a little pet console called Dinosaurus (Cyber Exodus), thinks school is trash and spends her time hacking into corporate servers instead.

That Chaos Theory will go down in history not only as the best runner ever, but also the greatest card ever designed in any card game may be the subject matter of many a conjecture by the wizened and bearded men of the future. As for the present, alas, what can we Android: Netrunner players do but lament the rest of humanity's ignorance of the prodigal wünderkind?

Pardon my enthusiasm Mr. Ingoramus, but did you not realize what hit us? A mean, green, 40-card comet the size of bejeezus, and something that just redefined the word ‘cool,’ here she is in all her glory and her beauty:

[lightbox='an/med_chaos-theory-cyber-exodus.png']an/ffg_chaos-theory-cyber-exodus.png[/lightbox]
What could be cooler than a little girl hacker?

Player A: ‘A 40-card deck? Dude, that’s freaking INSANE!’

Player B: ‘I know!’

- imaginary conversation

5 Cards Less or 4 Cards More?

Chaos Theory was previewed some months ago by Fantasy Flight Games; in November, in fact. One of the reasons for doing this was to reveal, in a radical way, the future direction of the game as well as some of its latent design potentials, particularly insofar as are related to the aptly named Gensis cycle, the first expansion set for Android: Netrunner.

In the back of the Android: Netrunner rulebook, in the deckbuilding section, there is a hint of future 40 card minimum decks, as well as 50 card minimum decks, but in both cases in reference to the Corp. This is mentioned in the section on page 24 that governs the agenda point requirements per deck size, which I will quote for you here:

A Corporation deck must have a specific number of agenda points in it based on the size of the deck, as follows:

- 40 to 44 cards requires 18 or 19 agenda points.
(Note: Identities in this set have a 45 card minimum.

- 45 to 49 cards requires 20 or 21 agenda points.

- 50 to 54 cards requires 22 or 23 agenda points.

Any person would read this to imply that some future Corporation identities will vary from the minimum deck size of 45 and allow builds starting from either 40 or 50 cards. Whatever the case is, Chaos Theory was previewed early on in the game’s life and will precede any 40 (or 50) card minimum Corporation deck, making her the first identity in the game allowing you to start with a different minimum deck size; in this instance, a smaller one.

My personal belief is that there might be a 40 card NBN identity with a fast advance theme, but this is merely speculation my my part. While I think that the chances are reasnobly high of seeing a 40 or 50 card Corp identity in the Genesis cycle (NBN and Weyland being the two Corp identities left), even if we don’t get either of those in it, we should still see one fairly soon in the future. As a side note it will be interesting to see identities which allow a different amount of influence from the normal 15.

But, to return to our original question: how much of a difference does 5 cards make? For this is the number of cards Chaos Theory allows you to slim your deck by compared to the regular Runner minimum of 45, as with the other Shaper Runner, Kate Mac McCaffrey: Digital Tinker (Core) from the core set. 45 is also the minimum threshold for Corp decks, but here we should note that there is a strong and marked trend for Corp decks to dilute their agenda density by taking an extra 4 cards for a 49 card total.

At first when I started playing the game I was against this the idea of including 49 cards in my Corp decks, but in practice I found that the Runner stole agendas far too easily against 45 card decks, and so I eventually ceded from my former opinion. But the concept of 49 card Corp decks is one that I will discuss in relation to Chaos Theory’s 40 card deck size…

Chaos Theory allows the runner to take 5 cards less than normal in her deck, while a majority of Corp players are opting to take 4 cards more than their minimum. In these cases we have a Runner identity that is more efficient than the median 45 cards, and Corp decks seeking to become as agenda-sparse as possible in the hopes of protecting themselves from the runner and thus ideally increasing their overall chances of winning the game.

So when it comes to deck size, let’s ask a radical question: what is the Corporation’s purpose? The Corporation’s primary purpose is of course to win the game by advancing agendas (or flatlining the Runner), but in order for this to happen, they have to stop the Runner from stealing a sufficient number of agendas to win the game themselves. Thus, before attempting to win the game, the Corp must first and foremost try to not lose the game to the Runner.

This, if anything, is the truth behind Corporations diluting their decks beyond their minimum size requirement. Doing so makes it more difficult for the Runner to access agendas because there are proportionately fewer agenda points present in in the deck in relation to the total number of cards.

There is a massive difference between a 45 card, 21 agenda point Corp deck and a 49 card, 20 agenda point one, both of them being legal for a 45 card Corp identity. Assuming an even distrubution the first deck carries an agenda density of 0.467 agenda points per card while the second deck contains an agenda density of only 0.408 per card by comparison, which, again, is a substantial difference.

Invert those numbers for clarity and we get an average of 1 agenda point per 2.14 cards in the first deck and 1 agenda point per 2.45 cards in the second deck. Either method of calculation reveals a difference in agenda density between the two decks which has the potential to be decisive. Thus, at the cost of decreasing the efficiency of their decks by including more cards than are strictly required, many Corporation players have been prioritizing, shall we say in the true highbrow nomenclature, ‘saving their asses’ against the Runner in the early to mid game, when the Corp is at its most vulnerable, by shoving 4 extra cards into their decks.

The Effect of Deck Size

In deck building card games there are certain theories about deck sizes and their effect upon game play. However, most of this theory is assumed rather than written because of its obvious nature, though sometimes some people, often dubiously, try to go against the grain of the common opinoin.

The most basic theory of deck size is that you shouldn’t take more cards in your deck than the minimum number necessary because it decreases your chances of drawing your best cards like Sure Gamble (Core)/Hedge Fund (Core). There are always some more important and more powerful cards in each deck, relative to each other. The idea of including what one thinks are some extra good or useful cards and in this way overstepping your minimum card limit merely exacerbates the belief that including those extra cards in your deck is going to make it better, more powerful or more efficient overall.

The simple fact remains that whatever those the extra cards are being included, there are always more powerful and important cards which ‘should’ be in your deck and other cards which are nice but which you don’t need. There are people who will always play 61 cards in their Magic decks or 46 (or more) cards in their Runner decks. These kind of players are not the kind of players who will like Chaos Theory. It’s often hard enough to fit everything we want to take into a regular Runner deck, and so how much harder will it be when we are allowed to take a whole 5 cards less?

The extra effort it takes to build a streamlined Chaos Theory deck is worth it, however. We will reveal some of our thought-processes as we make our own Chaos Theory deck later on, but for now let us take a final look at the impact that deck size has on efficiency.

Earlier on we mentioned that many if not most Corp decks are prioritizing not losing to the Runner, and diluting their agenda density by taking some extra cards. If the mulligan rule were different, like if it favored the Corp more, this might not as necessary, but as it is the design of A:NR decks gives the leeway of several cards for Corporation decks depending on their total agenda point count, and players have been trying to take advantage of this.

One current Netrunner theory, for the most part at least, ascribes to notion that the decreased deck efficieny of taking 49 cards for the Corp protects against easy early to mid-game wins for the Runner gives them the Corp a higher chance of winning the game overall than taking by a 45 card deck. Whether this is objectively true or not is quite unclear, but as I mentioned earlier I was intially against the idea myself, but results proved me wrong and I changed my opinion.

The Runner can’t lose as easily early on in the game like the Corporation can (except through mistakes), and so the theory of intentionally diluting a Runner deck can’t be applied in the same way because the Coporation alone is the gatekeeper of agenda points (besides some cards like Notoriety (Trace Amount)).

The reason why I love Chaos Theory so much, and why I think she is so great, is because I think she takes deck building card games to the next level. What do I mean by this exactly? Well, in the original Netrunner there were certainly no identity cards, as well as no card limits, both of which appeared to give a larger scope to deck building than we currently have in the game.

But an identity like Chaos Theory is a total win in my opinion: both the concept and execution of her design are perfect. Getting access to identities like this makes the game so much better, and in this case advances on the original Netrunner by allowing you to take a smaller deck size than you are normally allowed. If all we got in Android: Netrunner were lame Runner and monkey Corporation identities then the idea of identities might indeed be bad, but, as it is, when I think of Chaos Theory, I think that FFG didn’t merely hit the mark, by so far exceeded it that they set a new high for card games in general.

There are hardly any cards in other card games which allow you to take a smaller starting deck size, which is why I feel Chaos Theory is so unique in the world of card gaming: she is truly a phenomena, a wünderkid. She’s one of the things and characters which makes Android: Netrunner so awesome.

Well, as a last comparison, this is a visual view of what 40, 45 and 49 card decks look like in relation to each other:

A 40 card Chaos Theory deck.


A 45 card Runner deck.

A 49 card Corp deck.

This visual approach will hopefully give you a better idea of the impact that deck size has on game play. You are much more likely to draw a card which is present in three copies, or simply one copy, in a deck of 40 cards, than in a deck of 45, or 49 cards.

Likewise I feel that Chaos Theory is an identity which is actually going to improve over time. The higher the quality of new cards that come out, the more easily you will be able to draw them in a Chaos Theory deck, as well as assemble 2 or 3 card ‘combos’ together, if we do get any, however powerful or simplistic they may be, or whether they are simply cards that have synergy with each other.

Even if it’s hard to trim a deck down to 40 cards, something that will no doubt be a more difficult task in the future, once this is done, we will access have to such a powerful identity in Chaos Theory to be able to try new things.

The math behind working out the differences in drawing cards in 40, 45 and 49 card decks is actually quite complex and I don’t claim to know how to be able to do work such things out, which is why I have opted for a visual presentation of the matter. If you look at the last row of each of the three above decks you can clearly see that a 45 card Runner deck has 5 cards more than the Chaos Theory deck, and the 49 card Corp deck 9 cards more than it, or 4 cards more than the 45 card deck.

The Corp deck appears fat and clunky by anybody’s measure, while Chaos Theory’s deck appears exceedingly lean in relation to the 45 card runner one – and almost too good to be true. Just imagine what a 50 card Corp identity deck would look like diluted to 54 cards – quite bizarre indeed, I would imagine, especially in relation to a Chaos Theory deck. That’s an entire 14 cards more!

Thus, while not claiming that deck size is the be-all and end-all of card gaming it is one of its most important aspects. We have found that Corporation decks have been diluting their decks from 45 cards for a certain end, namely to not lose the game, first and foremost, while Chaos Theory provides a thinner deck for the opposite reason, which is to become more efficient at winning the game than the regular 45 card decks. A theory of a fascinating contrast.

The Influence of Identity Cards on Play Style

Chaos Theory is all about efficiency. We should contrast her to Kate because the two play very differently and should employ very different-looking decks. Kate excels at installing programs and hardware because of her ‘discount’ ability, which makes her effectively richer than Chaos Theory, in as much as the extra credits she saves the number of times she uses her ability.

In playing all of the Runner identities in the core set I came to a number of conclusions. The most important one was that the runner identities which encouraged running in some form were more powerful than those that didn’t because they taught the Runner player good habits. This is to run frequently from the beginning of the game in order to put and keep the Corporation under as much pressure as possible. Running accomplishes a number of different aims, among them being stealing agendas, trashing key cards, and, quite importantly in the abstract, forcing the Corp to rez their ice, which simultaneously keeps them poor and lets you know what most of the ice is which is allocated to each server.

The act of running, apart from being so intrinsic to the game, probes weaknesses in the Corporation’s defences and garners otherwise hidden information from them, which is one of their primary inherent advantages over the Runner. A Runner identity like Gabriel Santiago: Consummate Professional (Core) is so powerful because each time his ability triggers it creates the equivalent of 2 free clicks worth of credits; but perhaps more important than this is that it forces the Runner player to use his ability as often as possible (well, at least once a turn) by running on HQ aggressively, often with the help of Sneakdoor Beta (Core).

The ability of Noise: Hacker Extraordinaire (Core), by comparison, is indirectly related to running but, more than that, is directly connected to the scoring of agendas. Noise has the capacity to mill a high number of the Corporation’s R&D into their Archives during the game, and he can run on Archives multiple times or in one big run in order to score X agenda points, X being the number of agenda points that he milled. But he almost always steals a decisive number of agendas in this manner, it being his primary strength and strategy.

Now we can look at Kate in relation to these other two runners. I used to like Kate a heck of alot more than I now do because now I essentially think that she is a trap, not because she actually is, but because her ability tends to lead the runner into an excessively defensive style of play in which they install more programs and/or hardware than are strictly necessary to win the game, and not make enough early, probing runs.

To take this to an extreme I can give you an example of something that happened during a game I played. Usually when I play Gabriel and Noise I play them ultra-aggressively, running frequently on unrezzed ice with little heed of peril, but in this game I was playing Kate against Jinteki: Personal Evolution (Core) using decks I had built myself. What happened was that, on my first turn I had a really good hand and thought, ‘My hand is so good, I don’t want to have anything discarded,’ knowing full well how many copies of Neural Katana (Core), Snare! (Core) and Fetal AI (Trace Amount) were present in my opponent’s deck (i.e. 3 of each).

And so, instead of making a run on the first turn (a good generalization to make is that the runner should perform at least one run on their first turn), I didn’t make any runs for quite a while before I built up my rig with one and then two icebreakers because I was so ‘scared’ of having the good cards in my hand discarded to net damage. What ended up happening in the game was that it was close enough to come down to the last agenda but Jinteki ended up winning because the advantage he gained from the lack of pressure the Runner put him under proved to be enough to be decisive.

I learned a few lessons from that game, one of them being that runner identities are extremely influential in determining not so much a player’s play style, but their in-game habits, and perhaps whole mode of psyche itself. I don’t think that Kate is bad but that she can lead to unfavorable habits on the part of the Runner if the Runner is not aware of the necessity of making early and frequent runs.

If the player is not aware of an undue effect that his or her identity is having on them it can lead to the accumulation of negative habits and a weakened mentality like I experienced in my game against Jinteki. The combination of Kate not rewarding running ,and rewarding things other than running (i.e. installing stuff) with the fact that Jinteki excels at repelling early runs and punishing the Runner with net damage, led to me playing one of my most defensive games so far. I only realised that I was losing the game precisely because I wasn’t playing aggressively enough when it was too late.

What I like about Chaos Theory is that her identity doesn’t force you to play in any fixed style, whether defensively or offensively. Her 40 card deck and +1 MU are completely passive towards the actual style of game that you play with her and only contribute together towards her speed and efficiency. It cannot be denied that Shaper are the least aggressive of the Runner factions, but at the same time I do not regard them as defensive either; they are simply effective. Cards like Diesel (Core) and The Makers Eye (Core) both do something more efficiently than the normal rate. Add this all together and I feel that Shaper are a faction that are misunderstood, more than anything else.

Building a Chaos Theory Deck

We now come to the last part of this article in which I attempt to build a Chaos Theory deck. I have been tuning a Chaos Theory deck for a few weeks now, if not months. It has been an interesting experience to say the last because of how hard it has been trimming the deck down to its bare essentials. At 40 cards you sure don’t have the space and luxury to take the kind of cards that you do in a 45 card one.

When it comes to designing a Chaos Theory deck the first thing to note is that Kate is much better than her at installing cards. And so Chaos Theory, by inference, has effectively less money, should take fewer programs and hardware in her deck to reflect this, as well cards with overall lower costs than Kate. At the same time building a Chaos Theory deck is so refreshing because it teaches you what is essential in a Runner deck and what is not.

Usually when I build a Runner deck I regard the icebreakers as the central and most important function of the deck, with the events being the next most important thing. Icebreakers are repeatedly used throughout the game and will garner a long term advantage or disadvantage depending on how effective they are cost-wise, whereas events signify effectiveness on the smaller scale of more specific, singular occurrences.

It is important to take the best and most efficient icebreakers you can even if you have to spend alot of influence on them. This is because you continually use icebreakers throughout the game, and the costs of an inefficient icebreaker like Aurora (Core) will quickly take its toll. Too many players get ahead of themselves in my opinion by taking fancy out of faction cards and sticking with a crappy icebreaker or two from their own faction, even though it is so bad that they shouldn’t run it in principle - for example Pipeline (Core) in Shaper, which I think is quite a bad killer in general, and has very little going for it.

Special Order is an excellent card and the Runner would be weaker than the Corp if it wasn’t printed in the core set. We have to contrast it with Test Run (Cyber Exodus), one of Chaos Theory’s accompanying cards from Cyber Exodus. There is no doubt that Test Run is a very good card and the fact that you can return a program from your heap that has been destroyed or discarded by some form of damage makes it extremely versatile.

At the same time we have to take note of the inefficiency of drawing and reinstalling the chosen program the following turn, if we choose to do so. The best use of Test Run, in my view, is to abuse cards like Femme Fatale without installing them, as well as being an access point for taking a singleton copy of Sneakdoor Beta in a Shaper deck, which might come as a moderate surprise to the Corp, though it shouldn’t be.

When Test Run was semi-previewed I was worried that the cost of the card would be high, but also that I could tell it wasn’t strictly efficient in the sense that Special Order (Core) is as a tutor. Test Run is more of a card for tricks and the like, and not something that I think should replace Special Order altogether in Shaper decks.

Thus, in one of my earlier versions of the decks, I dropped 1 of the 3 Special Orders I was taking in favor of 2 Test Run as well as 1 Sneakdoor Beta as a means of attacking the Corp’s Archives. One of the main reasons for this is not so much scoring agendas (though this is true) as stretching the Corp’s ice thin across too many servers, thus weakening them. This is one of the strengths of the Criminal Faction (Sneakdoor Beta) and Noise (his identity’s ability).

In either case after a while I realised that Sneakdoor Beta clashed with Notoriety somewhat in that you were unlikely to ever score Notoriety if you had a Sneakdoor Beta in play or in your deck. Admittedly Sneakdoor would give you access to HQ for the purposes of Notoriety but I was more concerned that the Sneakdoor would be more likely shut down my chances of ever scoring Notoriety. The Sneakdoor also took up a hefty number of influence for one card.

I wanted to go in a different direction and dropped the Test Run I had been fooling around with, which I view as more of an experimental card than anything, and went back to taking 3 Special Order. This meant I could run Notoriety because I really, really like that card. I also thought that Special Order is a much more straight forward, cheap and efficient card than Test Run for Chaos Theory.

The earliest version of my Chaos Theory Deck took 3 Notoriety, but I eventually trimmed this number down to 2, and consider it a solid number in a 40 card deck. It’s an excellent card that gives you another unexpected angle of attack against the Corp that they can never be sure about defending. It’s the kind of card that can help you win the game if you need it to but which you are otherwise not forced you use just because you have it, though you can try to depending on the situation.

Chaos Theory has 5 MU and I have interpreted this for her to be able to take one icebreaker of each type, and Magnum Opus (Core) as her main economy card, without having to take any memory upgrades like Akamatsu Mem Chip (Core). Now I will provide the reasonings for which icebreakers I will take for the deck.

I don’t like Battering Ram (Core) because it is inefficient at breaking the lower cost barriers like Ice Wall (Core) and Wall of Static (Core), which are more prevalent than the higher cost ones like Hadrians Wall (Core) and Wall of Thorns (Core). Its extra MU requirement also rules it out of contention for the deck. I think Corroder (Core) is an excellent barrier breaker because it is so cheap and efficient at what it does. Battering Ram might be better against breaker bigger walls, but Corroder is better against the smaller barriers. So I opted for 2 Corroder because it’s my favorite barrier breaker and the one I have the most experience with.

The second step is choosing sentry breakers, which was a trickier process. Once again I looked to Criminal for access to a better killer. In the beginning I was going for 2 Ninja (Core) because it’s cheap and one of the best sentry breakers. After a while, however, and with some experience piloting Criminal, I found out how nice it was to have both a Ninja and a Femme Fatale out at the same time because they were both efficient at breaking different sentry ice. So 1 cut one Ninja for one Femme Fatale (Core) partially for this reason and partially because it would give me a long term back-up plan at being able to sneak past an expensive ice in a key server multiple times for cheaper than it would otherwise cost.

Swapping out 1 Ninja for 1 Femme Fatale also freed up 1 influence for another key out of faction card which I really wanted to take, which I will mention later. When it came to code gate breakers I have always been a huge fan of Gordian Blade. It’s more efficient than ZU.13 Key Master (What Lies Ahead) in a longer game after repeated uses (taking into account the different install costs), whereas Key Master, while much cheaper to install at first, can lose you money over Gordian Blade if you are forced to use it too many times. Plus Gordian Blade can be take advantage of Being Modded into play, whereas there is no point doing the same with Key Master.

At one point in my deck I opted for 2 ZU.13 Key Master because it let me have one of each of my icebreakers in play, including Femme Fatale, in addition to Magnum Opus without needing a memory upgrade. This is very good, but the inefficiency of Key Master having one less strength than Gordian Blade (Core) nagged me at the back of my mind. It costs Gordian Blade 7 credits to get past a Tollbooth, which is already so much, and 1/2 to break Enigma, while Key Master Requires 8 and 2/3 to do the same. While code gates may not be the most common ice type in the game they are still quite prevalent and in the end I opted for the card that I originally liked more and think is better in Gordian Blade.

The fact that Gordian Blade’s strength boost lasts for the whole run whereas Key Master’s doesn’t was the tipping point for me in this decision. I went with 2 Gordian Blades to be on the safe side, rather than taking one 1, which is sometimes possible, but also risky. Yog.0 (Core) was one of the alternatives which I spent a lot of time thinking about, especially in conjunction with the strength boost of being hosted on a Dinosaurus, but I felt that I couldn’t rely so heavily on this combo and went with the trusty Shaper decoders instead.

To round my programs off I took 3 Magnum Opus to maximize the chance of getting one into play as early as possible. One of the questions in my mind from an early point was whether it would be necessary to take any copies of Armitage Codebusting as a backup plan to this, but in the end the answer was negative. The deck is already so thin and Diesel will help you find anything you are looking for so quickly. I even considered taking 3 Armitage Codebusting and ditching Magnum Opus altogether because of its lower install cost, despite you having to install multiple copies of it throughout the game. It’s still something I’m not sure about but I think Magnum Opus is probably the better choice even though it is so much more expensive to install outside of a Kate deck.

The earlier choice of opting for 1 Femme Fatale instead of the second Ninja left me with a strange conundrum. Despite Chaos Theory having 5 MU, I would somehow need to find a sixth MU space in order to have the Femme Fatale in play in addition to my other programs. But I specifically didn’t want to take a card like Akamatsu Mem Chip for this purpose because I felt like it occupied a redundant spot in the deck.

I had solitaire tested Dinosaurus (Cyber Exodus) against some Corp decks and found some drawbacks in the card. Apart from being quite expensive for a console it also needs to be installed before you install an icebreaker hosted on it, making it less flexible than other consoles. The combined cost of Dinosaurus + X icebreaker was quite a high one to pay in the early to mid game and so I was left wondering whether it was worth taking in a Chaos Theory deck at all, despite being her own personal console.

In the end, due to certain reasons like wanting to make Femme Fatale work in the deck and having 2 slots open in the deck for Shaper or neutral cards, I decided to go for Dinosaurus over other possible options. What is Dinosaurus? It’s 2 The Personal Touch (Core) and 1 Akamatsu Mem Chip in one console. It’s definitely a good card, I don’t doubt that; it’s just expensive for Chaos Theory and needs to be installed before you install the icebreaker you want to install on it, so it does have certain drawbacks. But in a long game and with repeated uses, the strength boost that it provides to its hosted program could bring the Runner a huge advantage and save potentially you alot of credits.

To round off the hardware section I opted for 3 Rabbit Hole (Core) because it’s one of Shaper’s best defensive cards. Once again it’s worse than with Kate because it costs one more credit to install the set of them, I have spent some time considering not taking this card at all with Chaos Theory because installing 3 Rabbit Holes can literally put you in an economic hole if you aren’t going to use them in the game. But eventually I realised that you shouldn’t install them against a deck that you won’t need them for and that spending clicks and credits on installing them just to thin your deck just by two cards was a very bad move. Rabbit Hole is a card which you only really need against trace heavy decks like NBN: Making News (Core) and Weyland Consortium: Building a Better World (Core).

One thing I have realised so far from playing Netrunner is that, especially as the Runner, you shouldn’t install something just because you can or just because it’s in your hand. Doing so can often set you back further than it moves you forward because you are both expending unnecessary credits which you will need later in the game as well as using a click to install the card, which could be used to gain a credit instead. As I rule I think it is well to say that, as the Runner, you shouldn’t install more than is necessary to in the game, and that you should only install cards which you think will help you move forward in the game, more so than they set you back. It’s very important to try to conserve credits when playing as both the Runner or Corp by not paying for unnecessary things and using unnecessary clicks to do so.

The resource section of the deck looks very minimalistic. It costs of a single The Helpful AI (What Lies Ahead). I regard this as a superb value card that enables Chaos Theory to attain a maximum link of 4 in addition to the 3 Rabbit Holes. You can trash an installed The Helpful AI during a key turn to give one of your icebreakers a decisive burst of strength. The fact that the strength boost lasts for the entire turn makes The Helpful AI one of the most underrated cards in the game at the moment in my opinion. It’s dripping with value and something that from now on I would always take 1-2 copies of in any Shaper deck I played, even if I wouldn’t splash for it in other factions. It’s good enough to take 2 of in this deck, but because it is unique and Chaos Theory’s deck is so small at 40 cards, I went for the single copy in the end. Only having 1 resource in the deck to trash if tagged might be nice although it is more of an afterthought and I think that it is something that would probably rarely be an advantage during actual games.

Lastly, the events section of the deck occupied by far the most space. I wanted my Chaos Theory deck to be fast and efficient and so my build was heavily reliant on the effects that events provided. Probably the most important of these was 3 Modded (Core). Being poorer than Kate, Chaos Theory is much more reliant on Modded as a means of saving credits. Modded is a Sure Gamble (Core) for installing programs and hardware; it’s as efficient as Sure Gamble because it installs the program or hardware in the same click that the card is played. I went for the maximum of 3 copies and took specific note of the targets in the deck which it would install without wasting anything, like it would with Corroder, which only costs 2.

The targets are: Ninja, Gordian Blade, Magnum Opus, Dinosaurus and Femme Fatale. Femme Fatale is more of a specialist breaker, late game card or a last resort; whereas the other cards are more important. You want to use Modded wherever you can, sometimes possibly even waiting for one before you install something expensive. Either way I added in 3 Diesel, 3 Infiltration and 3 Sure Gamble because they are all such efficient cards. Infiltration is necessary because of how many traps there are in the game, and it can always ‘cycle’ itself for credits, while I like the speed that Diesel brings to a Runner deck.

I also went with 3 Tinkering (Core), despite this being a more unclear choice. Some players probably regard this card as bad or unessential, but personally and in my experience I think it’s very good, though sometimes hard to use. It’s something that gives your icebreakers extra reach in the early game while also being able to help you through some sticky situations later on in the game. I rate The Maker’s Eye as the best Shaper card because it is so good at scoring agendas. Without it Shaper might even be weak, but for me it is the main attraction of them and a card I often splash 3 of in Criminal.

Stimhack (Core) is the last card choice in the deck that deserves attention. I usually always run at least one copy of this card in my Runner decks, but their numbers have varied in the past. I take 2-3 in my Anarch decks and have been taking 1 in Criminal but I think I have tended to not take it in Shaper. After realising how good Stimhack is by experience, both by playing with and against it – it’s possibly the best Runner card in the game – I wanted to take 2 copies instead of the regular one I was tending to take in Criminal. I love event: run cards like The Maker’s Eye and so Stimhack is no different.

The Maker’s Eye and Notoriety give the deck alot of ways to score agenda points, while Stimhack and The Helpful AI can give you big boosts when you need them during a critical run.

The 2 Notoriety and 3 Special Order mentioned earlier rounded off my list. This is what it looks like:

Overall I am pretty happy with the deck, although it's more of a starting point than anything else, and I will continue to tune and change it wherever and whenever possible. It’s definitely my little pet deck now, something that is part of me. The two open slots which are currently occupied by Dinosaurus are the main and most immediate things that can change, but if any really good new cards come out I am sure I would be able to replace an event or two with them. I don’t know how much I like Personal Workshop, but it is something I can test out in place of Dinosaurus to see how it fares in comparison. But I think Dinosaurus is pretty cool, and has been growing on me. 2 Plascrete Carapace is another possibility.

I built the list to be very fast and aggressive. The idea is to not sit back and install more stuff than you need like Kate and never run, but to run all the time and install the bare minimum of what you need to. Cards like The Maker’s Eye, Stimhack and Notoriety are there to help you win the game, while the rest of the deck is about seeking to do things more efficiently than the normal in-game rate. I think it’s more important to reveal the thought-processes behind selecting a deck than merely posting a deck list, and so these were my rather lengthy thoughts on the matter. The deck list isn’t finished and set in stone, but something that will continue to grow and change as I test it further.

I can’t wait to play Chaos Theory competitively, as she is by far my favorite Runner identity (the other being Noise). To be quite honest I don’t know if I will ever play another Runner again after playing her! It is like falling in love with someone so much that you don’t care about anything else. As a card game fan and deck builder I’m truly love-struck with Chaos Theory. What a little genius. And what cool hair too.

Angrist