Financial Advice for Megacorp Business Owners

In a world where business is war, having the ability to fund your ongoing business activities is essential, because, just like in the real world - as I can personally attest to - corporations go bankrupt or survive based entirely on cash flow. Those who have drafted Megacorp know of the struggle that comes from only being able to access one basic consumer per turn. In constructed, if your opponent is any kind of a deck builder,that's not going to be anywhere near enough to deal with the nonsense they will be churning out. Your constructed deck will either need a financial engine of some sort, to ensure you can deal with the problems created by your opponent's business, or it will need to play in a style where cash doesn't matter. Luke Seti decks tend to be of the second type, saving a heap of money by using the free search ability, but most decks have a few expensive cards and need to have a way to make a few dollars in order to play them.

If you're running a financial engine, it will need to be increasing your cash flow by more than the $1m/turn you would get from playing 100% basic consumers, or there is no point in doing so. Now, there are more than a few options for creating wealth in Megacorp, so we'll go over a few of these, and what you can do to build your deck around them.

Pollution is no real concern; the game   
should have ended well before it matters

Making use of the "Industrial Complex" is one of the more straightforward ways of building a resource base. Factory provides steady cash flow with bursts of cash when required, provided you've got some terrain free to deploy it on - which is a minimum of four in a twenty card deck - but of course you can't go too heavy on terrain, or your resource reveal in buy phase is terrain => terrain far too often. Now, eventually Factory's pollution destroys the terrain it is deployed on, but the majority of games will end well before that terrain is exhausted. If, however, you're worried about the potential environmental consequences, deploy your factory in the middle of the Sea! It has the ability to remove a pollution counter from a deployed card every turn, making the Factory last forever, or at least until the opponent annihilates it. The cost of Factory can be deceptive; it might state $3m on the card, but it can be $1m when you need it to be - you can recover $2m by engaging it immediately. Note that a Factory that begins a turn disengaged can produce $3m in cashflow on that turn, and one that begins engaged can only make $2m. Factory is weaker than the terrain surrounding it, with a BQ half that of Sea, so it needs a little defense. Otherwise it is a reliable income source that can fit into many different decks. The choice of terrain can vary, depending on the remainder of the deck, as the Factory can be deployed on any terrain. For example, if Horizon Industries Mariner Suit is part of your decklist, Sea, Lake or Mangrove become the terrain of choice.

Common. Sometimes rarity is not always
indicative of power level

Driverless Car Fleet finds a home in many decks that want to increase the rate at which resources are purchased from the resource deck, usually in conjunction with a lot of low-cost basic consumers. Because it's an equipment card, not a character, it is easily found via Dead Drop abilities, so the fleet can get to work for you in the early game, when it matters. The #vehicle, #civilian and #infrastructure tags allow it to interact with a variety of different cards and decks, e.g. you can bond a Vulcan Cannon to a Driverless Car Fleet; the ability to unbond and redeploy a bonded character can allow for tricky tactical plays, and it allows you to purchase from the resource deck at the end of your opponent's turn, to avoid exposing your consumers to enemy attacks. It is one of the game's most powerful cards, and shouldn't be overlooked. The ability is similar to that of Incarnate Donor, which has the advantage of being a character for attack and defense after doing its job of expanding your board state, but Driverless Car Fleet is both reusable and easily searchable, and has no trait cost, so it can be played in any deck, while Incarnate Donor is a little more restrictive, and requires a #mech suit in order to be reusable. At Rabblemaster Games we have found it to be one of the most in-demand cards, and we can't keep them in stock longer than a day or two. Something to always keep in mind is that versatility in trading card games is essential; the best cards are usable on both attack and defense, and cards that are only good when you are winning, or only good when you are losing, are not "good cards"

Let's compare Lightning Bolt - a spell in Magic: the Gathering that deals 3 damage to any target at the cost of one mana, and Blazing Hope - same game, same single mana cost, but which has the effect "exile target creature with power greater than your life total"
Lightning Bolt is good at any stage of the game. Blazing Hope is a highly situational card that only functions properly when you're actively losing the game, either with average creatures having 3-4 power and you having 2-3 life, or you've got a reasonable life total and they have some giant 15 power creature threatening to crunch you in one hit. It may be efficient, but when you're winning, you can't use it to remove an opponent's average blocking creature, then rack up the points for the match. It's only good when you are losing, and losing badly. It is not a good card!

Now, back to our regular scheduled programming...

Buk buk buk - farming for cash is viable!

One of the oldest professions on Gaia, or any other planet, is the food production for sale to consumers; after all, everything that doesn't photosynthesise must eat to survive. Farming in Megacorp is certainly a viable option for making a few million, and is best combined with a founder that actively attacks - Luke Seti, Raamaa or one of the action-based founders - in order to keep your opponent's attention away from your chicken flocks and cow herds. The principle is simplicity itself; make use of the self-propagating Desert to expand your available terrain, deploy flocks and herds there, and divest them in a turn or two after their valuation increases from the small amount you paid for them to a reasonable amount. Alternatively, cards like Restaurant and Cafe allow you to remove food counters from your chicken and cow cards to convert into money directly - but they take up valuable space in your resource deck which is likely to already be filled with farm animals, terrain, and Driverless Car Fleets for the automated transport of animals from that deck into the network. One of the advantages of making money from the sale of livestock in Megacorp is that not all decks run terrain, so that after selling off your stock, your opponent may not be in a position to purchase them from your open market, meaning you can purchase them again with no competition at the low price. This, of course, doesn't apply if you're in the Restaurant trade, when you want your animals to stay where they are and continue producing turn after turn.

Refer to our earlier article on building military decks in Megacorp to hear about the financial advantages that come with running Barracks, and the restrictions it places on your deck; Barracks requires a full commitment to a military strategy, including a minimum of 12-15 characters with the #military keyword, and locks in various other aspects of the deck's construction - the article goes into this in detail, but suffice it to say, there isn't going to be much room to customise your deck. In exchange for this, you obtain the ability to have cash of $6m per turn flowing into the coffers, an advantage to all those compulsory #military characters in the form of a morale boost, and a place to hide them away when targeted by an opponent's cards or effects. Barracks is a poor card when you are behind on the board and can't produce the full amount of cash from it, however, and the card is physically weak for a location with only 3 BQ, plus vulnerable in two other stats. Note that Barracks is a high risk, high reward card that needs your protection and attention, so remember: your military characters only need to begin the turn inside the Barracks; they can be left in a relevant position in the network to defend where necessary and bonded to it at the end of turn, just in time for a few dollars to be made in the next turn's cash flow step. Beware of engaging Barracks for trait resources, as it won't provide cash flow during the next accounting phase!

Making money with your founder is an   
attractive proposition, as it requires no
additional up-front financial investment  

Some founders can be a financial engine all by themselves; The Glass Man and Chi, Corp Socialite are the two best examples of this. Requiring little to nothing in the way of investment, either in additional cards or financially, making money with your founder can be an incredibly attractive proposition, as it leaves your other deck space free for your main deck ideas for winning the game. Chi's method is pure brute force and she requires no help to do this; simply declare a challenge, and the money rolls in slowly but steadily, increasing her EQ stat as it does - provided you are attacking using that stat. Several cards interact nicely with Chi's "when she declares a challenge" ability; notably Rampage, which allows her to make multiple challenges in one attack step; and Siren, which is normally used to force two opponent's characters to hit each other, but can also be used to make Chi declare a second challenge - even if she is already engaged from making an earlier one. Chi's ability to replace other traits with her EQ trait score means she can make a challenge in BQ, then switch to an IQ challenge next time if her BQ stat was reduced too low in the previous challenge. I've ranted several times in previous articles about how much I love the Corp Socialite as a founder, but we discussed earlier how important versatile cards are in trading card games, and Chi is a very flexible founder, able to turn from a rock-solid defender to a cash machine, then into a serious threat at a moment's notice. The Glass Man is a very different kind of financial engine, requiring the card Glass Man's Gambit to get the ball rolling. Fortunately, it's a #moral #assault card, and can easily be found by his own search ability. He isn't normally used for attacking; his low BQ stat leaves him vulnerable and his search and re-use abilities normally take priority - particularly when he's at the head of a controlling deck - but things change in a hurry when he's in a gambling mood. Using his base stats, The Glass Man obtains $3m per challenge while his Gambit is on the field, as long as you aren't challenging using that pathetic BQ trait of one. Rampage is again a fantastic card to use with this strategy, knocking out multiple assets with each challenge at $3m profit per hit; dealing double damage via Muay Thai or Critical Hit gainst you twice the profit - or if challenges are not viable because of a strong defensive set-up by your opponent, you can simply divest The Glass Man for $10 million straight up thanks to the increase in his valuation. 

This is the decklist I'm currently running for our constructed tournaments at Rabblemaster Games, which combines several of these ideas into one deck, along with several attacking options to devastate the opposing board state or disrupt the opposing business, and plenty of defensive options to tactically outplay the opponent. 

One of the core set's most powerful gun
cards, Vulcan Cannon grants an activated
ability to the bonded card that directly
deals damage, rather than just replacing
the card's next attack. This ability can be
used at any time and can eliminate entire
columns of cards at the very low cost of
simply discarding an unwanted card. The
equipped card can do it while engaged,
and this deck puts the card to great use
by equipping it to mech suits, or even
the versatile Driverless Car Fleet, in an
emergency, can be turned into an engine
of mass destruction

Main Deck
4 Corp Executive
1 Corp Consultant
4 Corp Advisor
4 Incarnate Donor
1 Maxim Glazhov
1 Michael Basa
2 Horizon Industries Mining Suit
2 Horizon Industries Mariner Suit
1 Jump Jets
2 Vulcan Cannon
1 Railgun Lunasys MK6
1 Railgun Strike
3 Kidnapping
1 Rampant Bribery
2 Political Corruption
2 Mech Pilot Training
3 Blue Chip Shares
2 Misdirection
2 Timely Interception
1 Guided Munitions
Resource Deck
2 Driverless Car Fleet
4 Sea
1 Mangrove
4 Factory
3 Compulsive Consumers
6 Selfish Consumers

Ways to make money in this deck include the following:

1) Challenging with the founder Chi, Corp Socialiate
2) The permanent cash generation of Factory and Sea
3) Purchasing additional resources via Driverless Car Fleet and repeated use of Incarnate Donor's "on deploy" effect via the Horizon Industries mech suits, massively increasing the number of resource cards on the battlefield
4) Selling the cards that have been Dead Dropped onto the battlefield during the divest phase of the turn; not ideal, but a great way out of a tight spot
5) Reducing the opponent's amount of cash reserves via Disruptor effects. This isn't quite the same as making money, but leaving yourself with more resources compared to the opponent is a similar effect
6) Main deck cashflow via Blue Chip Shares when the resource deck doesn't provide enough of its own.

It's particularly difficult to score an "economic victory" against this deck, due to the sheer amount of resources it can add to the battlefield in a turn - a single Corp Executive in the opening hand can find a Horizon Industries Mariner Suit, Jump Jets, and two Driverless Car Fleets by spending a total of $5m, 3MQ and 1BQ, and $4m of this can be recovered by divesting the Corp Executive during that phase. The Driverless Car Fleets then take over the role of bringing multiple resource cards out on each turn, hopefully including some terrain and a Factory, further accelerating the deck's cash flow. The deck makes heavy use of the bond and redeploy ability of the mech suits in order to re-use the Dead Drop and on-deploy effects of Corp Executive and Incarnate Donor. This helps to build an advantageous and flooded board state, which protects - via the surround rule - important characters like the powerful financial engine Chi, Corp Socialite, and can be difficult to break via conventional means. It's simple math; if you have ten cards in play to your opponent's four, barring some silly effect like a Rampage, they simply aren't going to be able to attack everything in play!

Owing to its tendency to flood the board, the deck is a little weak to sweeping effects like Tidal Wave and Telekinetic Slash, but these aren't always cheap effects, and the deck is poised to take advantage of that resource expenditure by #unethical means, like Kidnapping the opposing founder and/or strong attackers while the opponent cannot afford to pay the ransom, or laying a Political Corruption at the foot of the opposing business

Other uses of some of the cards in this deck are discussed in an earlier article, "Building around the Corp/Donor Core" but several cards that are part of that core are missing due to card availability - we haven't seen enough Assassination Contracts opened at Rabblemaster Games, because we only have a core of 6-7 players. Come and join us at a few more events, pick up a few packs during a draft, and perhaps you'll open a Battle Angel or Economic Hitman to build a new Megacorp deck around, and win some prizes.

Get into Megacorp at Rabblemaster Games today - Monday and Tuesday nights - but remember to pack a money-making engine into your deck, or you'll be facing financial ruin before you know it!

#Unethical control with The Glass Man

and a little about playing the control strategy

Physically weak but packed with powerful
card advantage abilities, The Glass Man is
ideal at the helm of a controlling deck

One thing about Megacorp that becomes apparent after a little time spent building and designing decks is that the amount of direct card draw is very limited. This is obviously a design feature rather than a mistake, leaving aspiring deck builders to find other ways to obtain card advantage, and increasing the power of abilities like Mutation and Dead Drop, which allow players to extend their board position. As partial compensation for this, several of the founders come with massive card advantage abilities attached, which include the ability to search the deck for cards with certain hashtags, giving the game a little bit of the feel of the Commander/EDH format of Magic: the Gathering. The Glass Man - Corp by alignment but still a #human character rather than a Cyborg - is one such founder, allowing you to search your deck OR open market for a card with the #moral and #assault tags and put it into your hand. He also has the ability to return a card with the same tags from the network to your hand, allowing it to be re-deployed and its effect used again. This allows you to keep your hand full, and in particular, full of answers. This is what we want to do as a control deck; answer the opponent's plays efficiently, retaining as many cards as possible in our hand, because more cards =  more options. If you refer to our previous article on Making Money in Megacorp he also has the ability, through the use of the card Glass Man's Gambit, to turn into a money-making machine. This is again ideal for a control deck, because - just like a control deck in Magic: the Gathering requires a lot of mana - we'll need access to a lot of money to play all of our cards.

The Glass Man comes in a starter deck with many cards that work well alongside him, including his Gambit, and a few that could easily be considered "filler" so let's take a look at this starter deck list and explore what is worth keeping around, and what could be better replaced with a more powerful or less situational card. Here's the initial list, which as you might have guessed from the tone of the article so far, will be modified to a more controlling list, to take advantage of those previously discussed card advantage abilities:

The deck's main win condition. The Glass
Man can search for it, and the objective
of the deck is straightforward: use your
masses of #unethical removal to break
the opponent's board position, forcing 
them to spend money to avoid losing the
game from having an orphaned business.
Then, send them broke by playing one of
these in their network, in one of those
nice little holes you opened up with a 
removal card, right next to their business

1 The Glass Man

1 Corp Enterprise

4 Corp Advisor

3 Corp Executive

2 Bomber Drone

4 Corp Citizen

2 Horizon Advanced Restraints

2 Avatar Industries Mariner Suit

1 Powered Armour

4 Kickback

1 Tidal Wave

1 Assassination Contract

1 Population Displacement

1 Glass Man's Gambit

3 Sentry Drone

3 Sniper Drone

1 Anti-Gravity Field

3 Kidnapping

2 Rampant Bribery

2 Political Corruption

10 Selfish Consumers

5 Affluent Consumers

5 Entertainment Facility

Of the cards in this list, many of the removal cards are searchable via The Glass Man's effect, including Rampant Bribery, Political Corruption and Kickback, as well as the Glass Man's Gambit. Other removal cards in the deck include Kidnapping - one of the game's cheapest and most effective removal cards, and Assassination Contract - the game's most permanent. We'll be retaining all of these cards in our final build; as a control deck, we want to make sure we've got answers for our opponent's characters, although the number of Kickback is likely too high, since we'll be able to search for it and re-use it. Space may be better used for some other cards. We'd like to cut the Horizon Advanced Restraints as well, as they are a weak form of removal - their only real advantage, aside from being searchable by Dead Drop, is in not sending the removed card to the open market. We aren't taking advantage of the lockdown ability to land a Critical Hit or anything like that in this deck.

One of the game's most versatile cards,
and better than the Magic: the Gathering
spell of the same name, the ability of 
this card to redirect attacks as well as
events is what elevates it to god-tier   

Characters are not going to be the only part of the opponent's plans, however; they will no doubt have some events of their own to affect the game, and we'll definitely be wanting to stop those happening as well. Two Timely Interception - the game's version of a counterspell - and two Misdirection will be added to the final list to be able to deal with this kind of problem, so we'll have to find a few cuts. First to go is Tidal Wave; firstly, despite the potential for card advantage, allowing your opponent to search their deck for a #crisis card is usually a fairly bad idea - and secondly, it's very expensive. We can find a cheaper board sweeper - and we'll need one, as trading one for one is no way to establish a board advantage. Railgun Strike is likely the best choice; the ability hit a row or a column plus the more convenient trait cost makes it a superior choice to Telekinetic Slash, easily making up for the additional financial cost. Additionally, although expensive in trait costs, we actually have the ability to pay the cost of activating the Disruptor bonus effect on Railgun Strike; we have no characters with Magellan cells to gain the bonus effect on Telekinetic Slash. The other board sweeper we'll add is Vulcan Cannon. While technically a piece of equipment, it effectively grants the equipped character the ability to play board sweepers for you, discarding a card to BQ attack an entire column. Powered Armour is on the chopping block as well; the main use of it is to protect physically weak characters against removal effects, but there are other cards in the list that have the same function, and some better ones we can add in. Population Displacement is just as likely to hurt us as it is the opponent here; we've got plenty of civilians in our deck.

We're then going to look at the character suite and cut about half of it for more powerful cards. While the drone cards have their advantages, including immunity to two different damage types and having the ability to move, albeit at a steep cost, their inherent attack power is fairly weak, and only strong in greater numbers. As a control deck, our cards will be spent stopping the opponent's plans; accordingly, we'll have less characters in our deck, and each one will need to be individually more effective. We'll retain the ones that provide card advantage - Corp Executive and Corp Advisor - and replace the drones with other individually effective or card advantage-based characters.

The resource deck is another part of the deck that needs some serious modification; there is no way to accelerate resources out of the deck, so we'll need to replace a few cards with Driverless Car Fleets - easily searchable by our four Corp Executives; we are running the Horizon Industries Mariner Suit, which can't be targeted if adjacent to terrain with #water, but the list has no terrain with #water to prevent it from being targeted! There is little to no cost (5% chance on missing out on a cashflow producing resource) in running two pieces of terrain, and Mangrove is ideal here; anything that can make our characters harder to target is to our advantage, and we only want to run Sea if we are running Factory. In addition, five slots are taken up with the inefficient Entertainment Facility, which is never worth the $4m cost to deploy, and we've got too many Affluent Consumers; since we'll be adding four ways to accelerate resources out of the resource deck, which we'll have to buy if we want them, we want them to be cheap!

A control deck's best friend (see text)
thanks to the ability to make multiple
kinds of trait resources and attack if
necessary. Far better than the weak
Entertainment Facility in the original!

The expensive resource card we want to run in this deck is Actor. Many of our cards, and in particular our removal cards, have differing trait costs - Kickback is MQ and EQ, Kidnapping and Assassination Contract are both MQ and BQ, Rampant Bribery an EQ, Misdirection is two IQ and Political Corruption, one of our win conditions, is three MQ. Actor's ability to make the trait resource of our choice each turn is ideal for this type of deck, as long as we have a little advance planning skill. Actor can also engage for three different trait costs directly and defend in all four, while Entertainment Facility only does two and two, and because he's a character, he can do things like drive a mech suit or be a backup attacker when required. He serves a similar function to a man-land in Magic: the Gathering, and note that these cards regularly feature in two different types of decks; controlling decks, where they turn from resource generating lands to attacking creatures once control of the game has been established, and resource limiting decks, where they serve the same function after the opponent's board state is cut back to the point where they are unable to do anything.

So, the following cuts will be made to the main deck, to get rid of the average quality cards that we just discussed, and remove the "vanilla" characters, i.e. the ones with no additional abilities

-1 Powered Armour
-1 Population Displacement
-1 Tidal Wave
-1 Kickback
-2 Bomber Drone
-3 Sniper Drone
-3 Sentry Drone
-1 Anti-Gravity Field
-4 Corp Citizen
-2 Horizon Advanced Restraints

And we'll be adding in the below cards instead; hard-hitting characters with saboteur abilities, board sweepers, and some heavy weaponry to Dead Drop onto the field. Note the addition of a Corp Executive, as we're adding in three more main deck and two side deck targets, and the addition of Dash Dingo, who will function as removal when we are searching our deck - or the opponent is. We are, however, adding several cards with an upkeep cost, so we'll need to ensure our resource deck can keep up with these. Incarnate Donor, despite also having an upkeep cost, will help us do just that by finding extra resources when it is deployed:

+2 Misdirection
+2 Timely Interception
+1 Michael Basa, Data Obfuscator
+1 Economic Hitman
+2 Anubian "Dash Dingo" Tracker
+3 Incarnate Donor
+2 Railgun Strike
+1 Railgun Lunasys MK6
+1 Vulcan Cannon
+1 Horizon Industries Mining Suit
+1 Corp Executive
+1 Jump Jets

We'll remove these cards from the resource deck, to eliminate the expensive cards and to balance out our trait generation, since we've added a few more cards that require BQ:

-5 Entertainment Facility
-4 Affluent Consumers
-2 Selfish Consumers

And we'll replace them with our alternative resource generation cards, terrain and acceleration to form a resource base any business owner could be proud of. A singleton Purchase Order sneaks in as a way to find equipment at instant speed and trigger our earlier addition of Anubian Tracker:

+2 Driverless Car Fleet
+2 Mangrove
+3 Actor
+3 Compulsive Consumers
+1 Purchase Order

For those who read these articles just for the deck lists (I know nobody comments on them, or shares their deck ideas with the author) here's the final list for #Unethical Glass Canno...I mean Glass Control

One of the game's best "saboteur"
cards, smashing bank accounts and
assets alike, and returning them to
your side of the field. Gross, really.

4 Corp Executive
3 Incarnate Donor
2 Anubian Tracker
4 Corp Advisor
1 Michael Basa, Data Obfuscator
1 Economic Hitman
2 Horizon Industries Mariner Suit
1 Horizon Industries Mining Suit
2 Misdirection
2 Timely Interception
3 Kickback
3 Kidnapping
1 Assassination Contract
2 Rampant Bribery
2 Political Corruption
1 Vulcan Cannon
2 Railgun Strike
1 Railgun Lunasys MK6
1 Glass Man's Gambit
1 Guided Munitions
1 Jump Jets

The deck is, as mentioned earlier, a little character-light, but the use (and re-use) of all of that cheap #unethical removal is more than enough to hold the fort until the cannons come online or the corruption takes hold at the root of the opposing business. Vulcan Cannon and Railgun Strike take out multiple targets in one shot, and granting a saboteur like Michael Basa the Precision ability via Guided Munitions will devastate the opponent's hand. The Horizon Industries mech suits allow re-use of Corp Executive and Incarnate Donor's abilities to continue adding to the board, and the control elements of Misdirection and Timely Interception hold back the opponent's stronger plays until the deck takes over. Given the powerful resource generation abilities of the deck, this doesn't always take very long. Consider the following opening sequence, assuming we've paid $2m for the privilege of taking the first turn:

1) reveal Selfish Consumers, engage business for 10 MQ to purchase
2) play Corp Executive from hand for $4m ($4m remaining) and dead drop a Driverless Car Fleet and Horizon Industries Mariner Suit into play
3) engage Driverless Car Fleet for BQ, pay $1m to bond the Corp Executive to the Mariner Suit ($3m remaining) and pay the BQ to re-deploy the Executive, dead drop another Driverless Car Fleet and Jump Jets into play
4) Play Corp Advisor, drawing a card ($1m remaining)
5) Engage Driverless Car Fleet to purchase the top resource card, revealing a Mangrove
6) Purchase the Mangrove for zero and deploy another resource card, reveal another Selfish Consumers and purchase it with one of the remaining MQ
6) Divest the Corp Executive at end of turn ($5m remaining)

The only cards we have played from hand are Corp Executive and Corp Advisor, and given that we are running four of each, it isn't that unlikely a beginning to the game. At the end of this turn, we have nine cards in play - business, founder, two DCF, Mariner Suit, Corp Advisor, Jump Jets, two consumers and the terrain - and still four cards in hand. We have $2m in cashflow and $2m in upkeep on the board, and $5m still in the bank. Left to our own devices, we'll be able to add $3m in cash flow to the board next turn; the usual reveal, plus two Driverless Car Fleet activations, and start some real cash flowing into the business.

Corp Advisor and The Glass Man both remain disengaged to pay the resource cost of  Misdirection, kidnapping or Rampant Bribery - or to defend our business. We'll never want to leave everything engaged at the end of our turn! All interactive cards in Megacorp have trait costs attached so doing this indicates to the opponent that they can proceed with their plans unopposed, and an important part of playing the control role in trading card games is to buy time to make your big plays by making the opponent play with "the fear" that you'll counter their play. If they don't make a play as a result of this fear, you are winning - at the end of their turn you play the card advantage spells and effects that you were holding onto (in this deck, activate one of the Glass Man's abilities, play removal cards, or both!) and only then begin your next turn. Advance your board state a little, and end the turn with resources free, threatening to interfere with your opponent on their next turn.

Coming to a control deck near you on
Friday, 27th April 2018. 

Teferi, Hero of Dominaria is, by this standard, the absolute epitome of control cards. Planeswalkers in Magic: the Gathering are permanents, so they add to the battlefield when you play them, and you can activate one of the abilities each turn if you have enough counters on them - and then you adjust the number of counters up or down from the ability. In most cases, you would play Teferi for five mana, then use the first ability to draw an additional card, leaving the same number of cards in hand as before. Then at the end of turn, you untap two lands, leaving the ability to play spells on your opponent's turn when they try to remove your card-advantage machine from the board. Conveniently, in the format where Teferi is legal, two spells will be legal that both cost two mana - one is white and one blue - one that exiles an attacking creature, and one that counters a non-creature spell. If you're in a position where you are behind, Teferi instead functions as a removal card that deals with any nonland permanent and leaves a way to catch up on the battlefield for later. 

Imagine a Megacorp character with the abilities "unique" "this character cannot attack" and "0: at the beginning of the next A phase, draw a card and add one trait of any type to your trait pool. Use this ability only on your turn and only once per turn."
Unless you're playing a hyper-aggressive deck, you're likely to be playing four of this card, correct? Eventually you'll just bury your opponent in cards - which is what we want to do as a control deck. When you have six cards in hand to your opponent's one...that's when you start playing the cards that actively defeat your opponent.

It could be a ham sandwich for all you care. You won the game when you established control of the board state and your opponent; the rest is merely a formality. Play a control deck in Megacorp at Rabblemaster Games today!

AND...ACTION!

Today we'll be exploring another of the main archetypes in Megacorp; action decks. A very different approach to the game than the Corp battlefield-flooding dead drop or Luke Seti's mutation search strategy, action decks are all about tactically out-playing your opponent to get huge chunks of damage into where it matters.

You'll need plenty of ways to produce
  trait resources in an action deck led by
Azrielle, but she's very difficult to kill.

We have noted before that there are two founders suitable as the head of an action based deck; Azrielle, Independent Enforcer and Xu Huang, Gnost Monk. Both founders have potent abilities that massively increase their battlefield lifespan, and decks built with these founders have plenty of cards in common, but a few key differences.

    You can't kill Xu Huang with normal       
  removal cards; he's very hard to get off
   the battlefield as a result, and hits like
   a truck                                             

We'll look at Xu Huang first. This character has a very interesting play style - he never wants to stay in one place for too long. He can move whenever his network space is targeted by an action, whether yours or your opponent's. Defensively, this means he can't be Kidnapped, Assassinated via contract, Bribed or targeted for a Kickback, as he can just move to a different location, cancelling the effect. Offensively, when you target him with a positive action, he can be moved into melee range in your opponent's network, where another of his abilities comes into play - when he challenges an adjacent card, half his MQ trait score is added to his BQ score. Xu Huang isn't a melee card, however; he can stay at range when necessary. His last (or first) ability comes into play after he destroys an adjacent asset and is left all alone, disconnected from your opponent's network. The Independent ability allows him to be moved back to a secure space in your network, or elsewhere in your opponent's, where he can cause more havoc. AND he comes into play with Magellan Cell counters - which at first glance isn't relevant, but allows him to work with a few other powerful cards.

What do we want to put in a deck with Xu Huang in charge? Actions, so we can shift him from one place to another where he'd raise a little more hell, of course! We can take advantage of his adjacent card challenge bonus with a card like Rampage; with each target he takes down, his BQ stat will get higher. Muay Thai is likely a good choice here too, allowing for double damage; Attack of Opportunity to prevent retaliation damage seems also to be a good choice; Acrobatic Takedown works like a dream with Xu Huang, since we can move him into position to take down the target of our choice instead of relying on an adjacent character being in position. All these cards are also great with Azrielle, however; what makes Xu Huang decks different is the inclusion of the exquisite rare Ascendant Palm. Turning the regular attack into a cone pattern that can hit up to nine targets and demolish buildings in its wake is a powerful game plan - and Xu Huang has the precise stats required to make use of the card; a high enough MQ stat, those Magellan Cell tokens we mentioned earlier, and most importantly, the ability to move into the most dangerous place for the opponent when you target him with the action card!

There's no space in the text box to put
"play me in a Xu Huang deck" but trust
me, it's on there. Look harder!             

Similar to the Luke Seti deck we looked at last time, most of the attacking will be done by our founder, so we'll want a fair whack of characters to hold the fort while he does his thing. In an action deck, the Martial Artist cards make for great secondary attackers and defenders, as they can make use of the actions we've already stuffed the deck full of. The other card we'll definitely want to be running is Gnost Paladin; he's the only other character in the Welcome to Aohu core set that meets the requirements for Ascendant Palm - 3 or more MQ and at least two Magellan Cell counters. 

Then we need to ask ourselves "do we want to run Anubian Tracker" and the answer is probably still yes, because dear god is that a good card, but it's not a given, unlike in a Luke Seti or Glass Man deck. Xu Huang doesn't search, so the answer will be determined by how many other cards do. We can look at running the Merc Rapid Response Team, which provides an action-oriented search function at a very low cost; it is likely to be in as a four-of. All the Martial Artist cards have a search function, although it's not a particularly reliable one - it won't trigger every turn - and Dead Drop cards are a bit of a maybe at this point.

Let's consider a preliminary list for Xu Huang

1 Gnost Congregation
1 Xu Huang, Gnost Monk

A great addition to any action-based
deck, allowing tricky instant-speed play
and a searching effect, at a low cost    

4 Gnost Martial Artist
4 Merc Rapid Response Team
4 Gnost Paladin
4 Gnost Layman

3 Acrobatic Takedown
3 Ascendant Palm
2 Attack of Opportunity
3 Muay Thai
2 Rampage
2 Infiltrate
2 Telekinetic Slash
1 Telekinesis

2 Driverless Car Fleet
4 Actor
4 Magellan Cell Migration
7 Selfish Consumers
3 Passionate Consumers

Leaving four empty spaces for modification to your local metagame.

We'll take a look at Azrielle in a moment, but there's something important we need to note about the resource deck cards included here. One of the main problems in running an action based deck is that all the actions are usually financially cheap, but high in trait costs - and they not always the same trait costs. Most of the time we want to fill the resource deck with cheap cards, in order to play expensive ones from the main deck, but that isn't necessarily the case in an action deck. Take note of some of the card costs!

I've been taught a few things about thighs
than seem to have eluded our Actor friend

Attack of Opportunity costs an IQ and a BQ; Rampage costs a BQ and an EQ; Muay Thai also costs an IQ and a BQ; Ascendant Palm is 3MQ - and is the most expensive cash-wise at $1m - the others have no monetary cost attached. Neither founder allows you to play the actions for free, however, so you still need to come up with the trait costs to pay for them. It's a bit less of a limitation with Xu Huang than Azrielle; the Gnost Monk is usually targeted only once or twice per turn, where the Independent Enforcer can reveal five or six actions with her ability. We'll have characters to engage for traits in the main deck, since we'll be limiting the majority of our attacking to just our founder, but in the resource deck, Actor is one of the better choices. Many other resource cards, such as Place of Worship and Forest add both cashflow and traits to the pool, but they are $4m buildings, rather than $3m characters, and they only add a single type of trait each turn; Actor lets you choose a different trait type each turn to match the action you want to play - and he can attack in a pinch, with decent EQ and IQ stats, although typically for actors, and amusingly, he has no moral compass. In particular note that we want to include Magellan Cell Migration in the Xu Huang deck, as it conveniently engages for the trait resources to play Ascendant Palm or Merc Rapid Response Team, but it may not be ideal for Azrielle.

So now, to Azrielle, Independent Enforcer. Straight-up immune to Kickback, Kidnapping, and Rampant Bribery, as well as surviving a Telekinetic Slash or Psionic Scream, Azrielle rivals my favourite founder, Chi, Corp Socialite for toughness; she's one of the hardiest founders in the game, and also packed with keywords on her type line. Here, we're going to take advantage of the #military one and slot her into a military-based action deck. Many of the cards from the previous Xu Huang deck are going to transfer straight across, but we'll be leaving a fair amount behind, partly because Azrielle is a Corp character, partly because their abilities are no longer relevant, and partly because there might not be space, because taking a lesson from our previous article on military decks, we want a fair concentration of #military cards to help fuel the cash generation ability of Barracks, which serves an additional function in this deck; should Azrielle be targeted by one of the few removal cards she isn't straight-up immune to, she can hop into the Barracks for safety. A bonus of running a #military deck is that the cards should provide plenty of IQ to fuel Azrielle's ability

All #slave cards in Megacorp provide a 
good stats to cost ratio, at the minor 
cost of reducing your business's moral 
quotient. It's touches like this that bring
Megacorp to life at Rabblemaster Games

Being an action-based deck, we'll be attacking with our founder where possible, but we have an issue playing Azrielle that Xu Huang doesn't encounter quite as much. Ascendant Palm is essentially unblockable, while Azrielle's attacks are not - so we'll also need a way to ensure those attacks get through to the relevant target, or we'll be fighting an uphill battle. The Tactical Vassal has our back on both of these requirements; he's a low cost #military card with no upkeep cost, and his Dead Drop is the perfect size to grab some Guided Munitions or Armor-Piercing Ammunition from the deck to empower our attacks. Azrielle isn't naturally armed, although most of the rest of our army is, but her BQ of three is the right size to pick up a Railgun Lunasys MK6, or preferably, a Vulcan Cannon. Being a military deck, we'll want to power some equipment like this out as a matter of course, but if we have too much, it will interfere with Azrielle's ability to find those action cards we want. As a result, we'll be upping the amount of searching the deck does, with four Corp Executive, and since we've got twelve main-deck seach cards - we're retaining the Merc Rapid Response Team from the Xu Huang Deck - some Anubian Trackers, and probably a #mech suit or two in order to re-use the dead drop abilities. We probably want Incarnate Donor if we're running mech suits, but I'm predicting this will be a very tight list, with very little room for customisation. There are so many things we want to cram in.

Have at it!


4 Tactical Vassal

One of Azrielle's favourite ranged weapons
especially if she's dealing double damage,
or can't be blocked. Or, preferably, both!

4 Merc Rapid Response Team
2 NSA Member
2 Maxim Glazhov
1 Michael Basa
4 Corp Executive
2 Anubian Tracker

2 Acrobatic Takedown
2 Attack of Opportunity
2 Rampage
2 Muay Thai
1 Critical Hit
2 Superhuman Leap
1 Rampage

1 Armor-Piercing Ammunition
2 Vulcan Cannon
1 Jump Jets
1 Horizon Industries Mariner Suit
1 Horizon Industries Mining Suit
1 Lunasys Battle Tank MK1
1 Lunasys Y-1600 Lancer
1 Guided Munitions

2 Driverless Car Fleet
4 Barracks
4 Savvy Consumers
2 Mangrove
8 Selfish Consumers

Even tighter than I first anticipated, there isn't even any room for Incarnate Donor. But we have plenty of options for tricky plays, including the nasty Superhuman Leap on Michael Basa to knock the opponent's hand straight out, stopping attacks with an Acrobatic Takedown via a quick Merc Rapid Response Team, transporting characters around via Jump Jets-equipped mech suits, or wiping out multiple cards with a sudden flurry of hits from a Rampaging Azrielle.

Both action-based decks have a very tough to kill founder and offer plenty of ways to outplay your opponent; if using combat tricks and having the ability to eliminate the opponent with a sudden combination is your style of play in trading card games, you'll enjoy playing an action deck in Megacorp. Join us for constructed on Monday and draft on Tuesday at Rabblemaster Games, and get ready for #action!

The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence

Meme creator, format dominator and bad
boy eliminator; his last name comes from
an old NASA program, S.E.T.I, the Search
for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, run in 
the 70s and 80s; a wide-ranging radio   
telescope search of the cosmos, sadly, 
turning up nothing. Strangely, this is      
nothing like Luke Seti's searching ability
which is actually highly effective!           

Who knew a search every turn of the game would be a broken ability? Oh that's right - me. After twenty two years of playing games like this, I like to think I can spot a broken card. But...I didn't design this game, and the creators of Megacorp clearly have similar views, as they have put several hefty restrictions on the extremely potent ability to tutor your deck every turn and given the character weaknesses in an effort to balance him for constructed play. These are;

1) one search per turn only,

2) reducing the BQ of your business when you do so,

3) only being able to search for a mutation card, and

4) the mutation must target Luke Seti.
5) a low MQ trait score, increasing vulnerability to common removal cards such as Rampant Bribery, Character Assassination and Kickback

Despite all of these restrictions, Luke Seti remains one of the most potent founders to build a deck around in Megacorp. The restrictions aren't as bad as they may seem at first glance. First, take note that the 'once per turn' restriction isn't once per turn cycle, but rather once on your turn, and once on your opponent's turn, meaning by your second combat phase, Luke can have three mutations attached to him. Reducing your business's BQ stat is actually a very minor cost, almost to the point of being nothing - consider that a Corp deck playing any of the vassal cards with #slave reduces its MQ stat by 2 for each vassal in play. The third and fourth 'restriction' is really no restriction at all, because we want to build a deck around Mr Seti, mutating the hell out of him and using him to smash the opponent's business into oblivion. His major weakness is mostly offset by the ability to search out Rapid Tissue Regeneration and survive the removal cards everyone seems to be playing in their constructed decks.

So, he's the boss. Let's explore what goes best in a deck with Luke Seti at the helm:

Foolish dingo! You must find and devour
the seven crystal babies or spend eternity
trapped in deep didgeridoo. Ahahahaha!

Yep, it's our old pal Dash Dingo again. With Luke in charge, we'll be searching the deck once per turn minimum, and sometimes more than that, if we're running other cards with the mutation ability. We want this good boy - and we want four-of, to ensure he's in our opening hand and picking off consumers or other weak characters as soon as possible. Ideally, we also want to be playing first; if we are second, our first search is made on the opponent's turn and we don't have the benefit of having Dash in play for it. Four of this boy go straight into the deck, and they don't leave for any reason. He's also a great insurance policy in the mirror match; the 2MQ trait vs. Luke Seti's 1MQ means he can pick the opposing founder off as soon as a search is triggered, and a great counter to Illithis, Gnost Prophet and The Glass Man decks to boot. Dash deserves a treat and a scratch behind the ears!

The next thing to consider is, of course, mutations. We'll need a range of costs, since the ability of Luke Seti allows you to search for a higher-cost one each time, and there's a few specific effects we want from the mutations, but the most important ability Luke Seti can be granted is the ability not to be placed in the open market! We are essentially running what is known to the Magic community (especially Commander players) as a voltron deck; the name is based on the old cartoon where more and more things piled up on top of the original base to make a massive robot. This means that above all else that we need the thing we are piling everything up on top of to survive, and we'll be attacking with Luke Seti far more often than anything else in the deck. The mutations we need to ensure we can find are Grow Wings (essentially unblockable) and Gallian Lineage (Initiative to avoid return damage) and then Rapid Tissue Regeneration, (surivability) Augmented Metabolism (survivability, in the form of mobility) and Hydriodic Acid (permanent damage) because our plan is to go straight after the opponent's business - not quite ignoring everything else, but close.

Obviously we'll also need a character base. Our business's BQ stat will shrink every turn, so we need some guys to defend it with while Luke is on the rampage. It's an Incarnate deck, so the first character to look at is going to be Incarnate Donor; we'll have no trouble paying the trait cost, and the extra resources, while not as essential as in a Corp or Military style deck (Luke Seti saves you $6m over his first three searches) will always be useful. The other main character we want to play is Incarnate Hierarch; despite the high upkeep cost, she's a brilliant 'finisher' card as well as useful mid-game. The Mutation 3 allows you to find either Hydriodic Acid to get permanent damage in, or Grow Wings to make use of the Disruptor ability to wipe the opposing business of their last few million.
The character we want to avoid is Incarnate Inheritor; Mutation 2 turns out to be far weaker than 3, as we can't search out Hydriodic Acid, and because the Inheritor has no native abilities, there's no advantage in granting it the Initiative of Gallian Lineage or the ability to Grow Wings. We end up paying upkeep for essentially nothing; not a good use of the business's cashflow.

Curiously, the game rules do not consider
this card to be an "asset" but I'm pretty 
sure my accountant would disagree here.

These 11-12 characters aren't going to be enough, and there isn't much else that supports Luke Seti's main strategy, so we probably need to run 'filler' characters here that provide a good stats to traits ratio, in order to protect our reduced-BQ business from retaliatory attacks. Incarnate Neonate is ideal for this purpose, and can also be used to engage to provide traits, plus we'll want a few main-deck resource generation cards, which serve the same function while providing all-important cash flow. Remember that Incarnate Bond and Blue Chip Shares aren't considered "assets" by the game rules - they are permanent events - and can be deployed at the end of your opponent's turn to avoid being exposed to challenges, or deployed as a surprise block during the challenge phase. Learning to play on your opponent's turn where possible is an important part of mastering Megacorp play, and will come naturally to players who enjoy control decks.

The last thing to look at is a way to accelerate the kill; Luke Seti munches on your business's BQ every time he makes a search, so if the game drags on too long, you might end up devouring your own business in your hunger for victory! The Welcome to Aohu core set has a couple of ways to do this; Critical Hit is a great card in draft, because it works with any attacking character on any given trait, but in constructed we probably prefer Muay Thai - it's less conditional, given that we'll be attacking with BQ damage in any case. Rampage will offset the fact that Luke Seti is our only attacker by allowing him to deal damage to multiple cards in one combat phase.

A preliminary Luke Seti decklist might look like this:

Not actually a #GMO character, but she
fits into most strategies like a glove, and
this one is no exception. She's the boss!

1 Luke Seti, Memadapt
1 Incarnate Collective

4 Incarnate Donor
3 Incarnate Hierarch
4 Anubian Tracker
4 Incarnate Neonate

2 Blue Chip Shares
2 Incarnate Bond

3 Grow Wings
2 Gallian Lineage
3 Rapid Tissue Regeneration
2 Augmented Metabolism
3 Hydriodic Acid

2 Muay Thai
2 Rampage

Then, we want to fill the final four slots with removal cards and/or ways to protect Luke Seti. The deck is weak to cards that prevent regeneration, such as the commonly-played Kidnapping - two Augmented Metabolism is our only defense, and if the opponent waits until after we search for a $2m target, that's essentially nothing at all - so in a vacuum, or an #unethical metagame, I like Misdirection or Timely Interception. In a metagame infested with Raamaa or other Luke Seti decks, you may get more mileage out of running your own Kidnapping, while Assassination Contract is more appropriate if you'll be encountering Azrielle or Heracles decks. Numbers of mutations can vary slightly in favour of more removal cards, depending on what opposition you'll be facing, but I recommend against cutting any of the Hydriodic Acid or Grow Wings, as they are integral to the main plan.

Now strategically, the deck is pretty much an utter faceroll; it follows almost the same attacking plan in every game - get in permanent damage to the opposing business until it collapses like a house of cards - and it likely falls apart in a multi-player setting. It does, however, offer several large advantages to the discerning consumer. It's tricky, with plenty of ways to tactically outplay your opponent; the attack plan is not very cash intensive - Luke Seti begins the game in play and searches the deck every turn for $0m - leaving more funds for removal, defense, or the all-important "not going bankrupt" ability; the deck is particularly fast, hitting for 3-4 permanent and difficult-to-block damage from the second turn;  and it's cheap in the real world, not containing any more rare or ultra rare cards than the founder himself, although staple cards like Anubian Tracker and Incarnate Donor can be a little hard to track down. 

Luke's Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence is a potent aggressive package that can derail any deck's strategy when it has to pause to deal with an overpowered, heavily mutated founder; try it next Monday at Rabblemaster Games' constructed Megacorp nights, from 6pm.