Deck Doctor - Firebombing with Raamaa

Consume! Devour! Scam the insurer!

In Megacorp draft, we frequently run across the synergy between Life Insurance Policy, which is a common, and Raamaa, Incarnate Heirarch, who can be freely chosen as a proxy founder. Raamaa's ability to annihilate in order to survive is the key - the Insurance Policy is simply played next to the annihilation target - being an event, it can be played in response to another card - and Raamaa survives while the opponent has spent their valuable card (or their attack with a strong character) plus financial and trait resources...in order to give you two million in currency. This is a pretty big swing and sometimes pretty hard to come back from - and particularly in draft, where removal is thin on the ground. Does this sort of nonsense have a place in constructed as well? Probably.

A key part of the firebombing engine,
Banshee has an MQ trait cost, despite
being a Gnost card, which will prove to
be quite convenient in this deck list

In draft, we sometimes come across another dirty annihilation combination; this one between two uncommons, Dormant Volcano and Banshee - or its rare equivalent, Basilisk. One of our regular customers and the local distributor for Megacorp, Theo Pollard, mentioned to me the idea of using this synergy after reading our last article on Azrielle's Assassins, where we discussed using a founder that has an ability that interacts with the main deck's premise, the way the deck in that article interacts with Azrielle's #military keyword. He had a preliminary deck list running all of the above cards and asked for a hand in "deck doctoring" it to completion. Theo also expressed a desire to play with Economic Hitman - which he pulled at a Rabblemaster Games draft last weekend - so here's the first in our article series of Deck Doctoring; Raamaa's Firebombers, by Theo Pollard.

Let's get to work!

A very powerful character, combining
high trait scores for its cost and a host
of powerful abilities that are enhanced
by being given the ability to deal area-
of-effect damage, like we are doing in
this deck list here

The above mentioned cards - Banshee and/or Basilisk, Dormant Volcano, Raamaa and Insurance Policy - are going to form the core of the deck, and work together like a jigsaw puzzle. Annihilating characters keeps Raamaa alive to threaten our opponent, gaining us money when those characters are next to Insurance Policy, and Banshee functions as a way to do that if Raamaa happens to have been taken unawares and removed from the network, while also functioning as a potent offensive threat; Banshees don't take damage in combat thanks to their Suppressor ability. Dormant Volcano functions as a way to take additional advantage of this exchange, adding a damage bonus to every annihilation - and we aren't talking about a small amount of damage here. The maximum output of a Dormant Volcano is 18BQ - two damage to every card in a 3x3 radius centered on its target - which is one of the highest potential damage amounts in the game. With this spread of damage, and the way Economic Hitman enjoys being able to spread damage around, we are going to be focusing on enhancing the AOE damage potential of the deck through equipment, in particular the Tobias Maschinekraft E5 Grenadier and the free deployment ability of the Railgun Lunasys MK6, and otherwise doing what we can to ensure the maximum chance to draw our puzzle pieces and make the deck tick over while we wait to do so.

You're probably sick of seeing this card
in articles written by yours truly, but
in this deck, she does everything we
want, and more besides.

Now, as far as the rest of the deck goes, obviously we need to be running a good amount of each of the individual pieces (4-5 Banshee and/or Basilisk, 4 Dormant Volcano, 3-4 Life Insurance Policy) and our founder acts as a combo piece as well, but we have to note here that none of Theo's suggested individual pieces are searchable! This means we're going to need to construct the deck to have the greatest chance of drawing the key components. In Magic, we find our combo pieces by playing cantrip spells like Preordain and Ponder, digging through the deck and/or shuffling useless cards away until we locate what we're looking for. When we play Yugioh, cards like Pot of Desires help clear away the chaff and put the important cards into our hand. We can't do this in Megacorp - card draw is very limited - so what we need to do is increase our percentage chance of drawing the cards we want. We'll need to do everything possible to reduce the effective size of our main deck and our resource deck, since we need cards from both of them.

Four Corp Advisor - the only raw card draw in the Welcome to Aohu set - will reduce the effective size of the main deck to thirty-six from forty, increasing our chance to draw Banshee or Life Insurance Policy, but the deck, in order to run at full power, is reliant on finding Dormant Volcano from the resource deck. The synergy between Raamaa and Life Insurance Policy is great, but without access to Dormant Volcano, the engine only makes money, it doesn't deal any damage. We normally see only one card per turn from the resource deck, so we need to find a way to play as many cards from this deck as possible, in order to ensure we see one (or hopefully, more) of our Volcanoes during the course of a game. Naturally, here, we turn to our old friends Driverless Car Fleet and Incarnate Donor, the core set's most powerful acceleration cards, in order to do this. Donor has the upside of having the #human keyword, so we can crunch it with Banshee to set a Volcano off - and it won't go to the open market where our opponent could otherwise buy it - while Driverless Car Fleet is equipment and is easily searchable by the same cards that will be searching for the Railgun Lunasys MK6 and Tobias Maschinekraft E5 Grenadier. The searching card in question is, of course, Corp Executive; the backbone of basically every deck that I build. He provides several advantages to this deck, as a powerful body that finds important cards and reduces deck size.

You're probably sick of seeing this card
as well, but there has long been a maxim
in deck building, "good decks play good
cards" and Corp Executive is a very good
card, providing card advantage along   
with hitting the opponent like a truck.

Now, I'm not biased towards Corp - I simply prefer to have access to the necessary cards when I play the game, rather than relying on the top of the deck. There are a lot of powerful equipment cards in the game that I enjoy having access to, Megacorp is not a game where you get to draw a lot of cards from the top of the deck, and Corp Executive can search up multiple cards from either the main or resource deck - and can find some from each if necessary. Running Corp Executive provides the important benefit of deck thinning, increasing our chance to draw the key cards from the deck during our draw step, and can be re-used via a #mech suit, further thinning the deck and adding to our board position. Dead Drop's ability to obtain multiple cards is a boon to the deck thinning ability of the card; if we search for, e.g. a Grenade Launcher and Guided Munitions, that's two less chances we have to draw the wrong combo piece next turn. Neither of the cards we searched for are bad cards - we want them in play to equip to Economic Hitman - but they are not the combo pieces we want to draw. It isn't worth playing a card solely for its deck thinning ability, but the search function also contributes to the deck's main strategy. We'll also need to ensure we have enough humans for Banshee to annihilate by playing plenty of basic consumers in our resource deck, which won't need any other special additions outside of the Dormant Volcano and Driverless Car Fleet cards, as our main deck is a little human-light. Raamaa, of course, can annihilate anything thanks to her Vorachai lineage, so we don't need anything to help her out aside from a fair chunk of characters.

As far as building a resource base goes, the majority of our cards have MQ trait costs; we've got a couple that include IQ and a few more that include BQ, but note that we mostly want to be doing BQ damage, to go alongside the damage of Dormant Volcano and our AOE weaponry. We'll want a healthy portion of Selfish Consumers, since Banshee, Corp Executive, Economic Hitman, Corp Advisor and Basilisk all have MQ trait costs, but the rest of the cards suggest a slant towards Compulsive rather than Savvy Consumers - partly because the good removal cards Kidnapping and Assassination Contract have MQ/BQ trait costs, and we'll definitely be running these - and partly because playing an early Incarnate Donor is far more important than playing an early Economic Hitman. What we'll essentially be playing is a Corp/Donor core combined with the firebombing Banshee core - and we probably won't have much room for extra cards on top of what we're doing with those two cores.

Let's take a butcher's hook at a preliminary deck list here:

Characters

Oh no, my Incarnate Donor appears to
have died horribly in some industrial
"accident" so pay up, scam target...
excuse me, I meant to say "Insurer"

4 Incarnate Donor

4 Corp Executive

4 Corp Advisor

2 Economic Hitman

3 Banshee

1 Basilisk

Non Characters

2 Tobias Maschinekraft Grenadier

1 Vulcan Cannon

1 Railgun Lunasys MK6

2 Horizon Industries Mining Suit

2 Guided Munitions

3 Kidnapping

1 Assassination Contract

3 Life Insurance Policy

3 Rail Gun Strike

2 Misdirection

2 Timely Interception

Resources

4 Dormant Volcano
3 Driverless Car Fleet
8 Selfish Consumers
5 Compulsive Consumers

Now, I say "preliminary" deck list, but we've hit 40 cards already, and there really isn't anything I want to be cutting from this list. It's really a question of balance, testing, and metagame specific cards for the local shop, and whether we need to enhance or reduce certain capabilities of the deck. We have the options of making changes like the following:

Trim a #mech suit or a Rail Gun Strike for some tech like Critical Hit, taking advantage of the Banshee's suppressor ability. Here we are trading consistency and the ability to flood the board, plus general damage output, for the potential of a surprise Raamaa kill.

Cut a Banshee for a Maxim Glazhov or Battle Angel, enhancing the deck's search power, the effectiveness of Guided Munitions and increasing weapon-based AOE damage, but decreasing the chance of a firebomb launch

Remove a Corp Advisor and Timely Interception for two vanilla human characters like Gnost Layman, reducing the deck's velocity and chance to draw combo pieces, and reducing defensive capability against events - Timely Interception is the stones - in exchange for increasing the reliability of Banshee annihilation and the deck's defensive capability against characters. 

Theo, let me know what you think about what I've done with this list. Is there anything you'd rather be playing in here that I haven't considered? What do you think doesn't have a place here - or have I hit the nail on the head with this build?

Don't forget to join us for Megacorp draft at Rabblemaster Games on Sunday afternoons, or constructed on Monday nights.

If you've got a deck idea you'd like doctored up, don't hesitate to submit it!