Streets Ahead

One of the avenues for making a few dollars in Megacorp we haven't explored yet is trading in the property market. In a world where business is war, there is still the option to work behind the scenes and establish a financial empire without engaging another company's assassins and enforcers in open combat - and with enough capital, simply purchasing your opponent's assets and putting them to work in your empire.

If this sounds like fun to you (and it does to me, despite the borderline unethical aspect of corporate poaching) then you might enjoy playing an "infrastructure/civilian" deck in Megacorp and taking responsibility over thousands of lives...for your own profit, of course; why else would you care!

Board extender plus your gateway to the
lucrative property market of Aohu, it also
allows for defensive blocking plays with
the searching ability

The beginnings of such an infrastructure/civilian deck is the self-propagating Highway. It provides several advantages to such a deck. Firstly, the card is a straightforward way to trade in the property market, allowing you to purchase a Highway from the resource deck for $2m, which can be sold, at minimum, for its valuation cost of $3m in the next divest phase. Don't underestimate this ability; it's the sort of useful on-board ability that is active even if you draw a defensive card rather than an action card and have no plays for the turn. Secondly, the same ability can also be used defensively, similar to the way we have discussed activating Driverless Car Fleet in previous articles, mid-combat, to provide an instant-speed blocking consumer as long as the card you want to defend is adjacent to an empty space near Highway - and the card's ability to move your characters and equipment can easily position your important assets in such a spot. Slightly more restrictive here (it can only defend against BQ attacks) it is still a useful passive ability to have. Finally, the deck's money comes from other cash flow machines that require a critical mass of cards with certain hashtags, and Highway provides the necessary #infrastructure and #road tags required to take advantage of those cards. Note that none of the abilities on Highway are cashflow abilities - it can be freely engaged for resources if necessary.  

A reasonable buy-and-hold investment,
but a quick sale and re-buy on the sly
is where the real money is at here! We
absolutely want to max out on this card
as it interacts with every other card in
the resource deck (see final list, below)
and is the key to our most profitable 
 divest sales at the end of the turn. It is
almost useless to other decks that are
not running the same strategy, and in
the mirror match, it provides cash flow
while in play and is an extremely       
unattractive target to purchase from 
the opponent's network.                      

The cash flow machines we're talking about, the ones that take advantage of Highway and its #civilian counterpart Street, are Hypermarket and Automated Toll System. The Hypermarket provides enough cash flow on its own, provided it is adjacent to a #civilian card or two such as the aforementioned Street and Toll System - or another Hypermarket, which immediately adds another $2m - but the real money is in buying and selling the property itself. If your network of roads and other #infrastructure has extended as far as the necessary three cards with that keyword, the Hypermarket you purchased for $4m can be resold in the divest phase for $9m. Assuming for a minute that  your opponent isn't also playing some kind of weird infrastructure/civilian deck (like us) they won't be interested in purchasing the Hypermarket from your open market; hopefully you can repeat the transaction during the next turn. It is one of the most profitable properties to trade in, and we want a full set of these in our resource deck, despite the lack of the #infrastructure keyword that it requires to operate - it would be disgustingly good if that keyword was included on the Hypermarket itself.

Now, making over 100% profit on a transaction, as per the above example, is great, but Megacorp includes two important cards can help boost the gains from property sales. Lake increases the valuation of buildings on it by $1m, a minor boost, but worthwhile because of the very low opportunity cost of playing a small amount of #terrain in the resource deck (a single piece changes none of the odds of hitting any cards) while the expensive initial investment in a Central Business District would seriously pay off while making this sale - and any future sales - increasing the amount of cash received to $18m, and potentially even more if we have more #infrastructure in play than the minimum requirement of three. This works out to 80% profit on the first sale, but as we don't count the cost of the CBD in the profit calculations for the second sale, our profit margin on that, or any future Hypermarket flips, is a staggering 450%++

#Military decks in Megacorp have some of the highest cash flow rates in the game, but these figures dwarf the amount of cash a #military deck can generate - each Barracks at full capacity only provides $6m in cashflow - and a bank account of this size can easily be used to purchase half the opposing business network, should anyone be foolish enough to attack our massive property empire!

"Bane of any road user" but we are the
administrators here, not the users. Also
note that the ability that grants money
is not a cash flow ability; the Automated
Toll System can be freely engaged for a
couple of trait resources!

Automated Toll System provides the other way to take advantage of Highway and Street, this time interacting with the #road keyword. A very low initial investment, all that's required is to place a few characters adjacent to the self-propagating roads, and the cash starts rolling in. We'll have no choice but to play a few characters in the deck - all the cards we've discussed so far are resource deck cards, and they'll need defending - so a little careful positioning can be richly rewarded. Automated Toll System includes both the important #civilian and #infrastructure keywords that are rewarded by playing Hypermarket, and incidentally (it rarely comes up) so does my favourite resource deck card in the game, Driverless Car Fleet, which we should definitely be playing in this deck here as well. Highways and Streets make their own way into the network, but we don't want to be stuck playing a single resource card per turn when we have access to all this money; we want to be re-investing it with an eye to future profit! For exactly the same reason our main deck will include no less than four Incarnate Donor, to help accelerate our plays and get multiple money producing resources onto the battlefield as possible. Activate the deck-thinning search abilities of Highway and Street before playing Incarnate Donor or activating Driverless Car Fleet if possible, which will increase your chance of hitting one of the more valuable properties in the resource deck. As discussed early in the article, Highway and Street do not have intrinsic cash flow abilities and can be freely engaged to pay the resource cost of cards like Incarnate Donor, so we need not worry about running any consumers.

*yawn* every deck article, blah blah blah
sick of seeing this card yet again, whine.
It can fetch four Automated Toll System
from the resource deck in one shot; we
would be insane not to run this bad boy!

Now, we'll need to consider what to play in the main deck, aside from those four indispensable Donors. We'll discuss a few alternatives without locking down anything, except - and you're likely sick of hearing me talk about this card, because I do it all the time -  we have to run four Corp Executive in this deck, and possibly two or more Maxim Glazhov, Cyborg Commando as well, for increased redundancy in having access to the Dead Drop 4 ability. The reason for this is simple; Automated Toll System, unlike the other cards in our resource deck, is not a location - it is an equipment - so Corp Executive can fetch both our cash flow producers (the Toll System) and our board extenders (the Driverless Car Fleets) at the same time. This ability to extend and ramp up cash flow simultaneously is not available to any of the decks I have previously discussed in Megacorp articles, and provides an incredibly powerful base to begin the #infrastructure deck's game plan. Picture turn one as follows:

* Reveal Highway and purchase for $3m, deploying adjacent to our founder
* Play Corp Executive adjacent to the Highway, searching up four Automated Toll Systems.
* End turn. Do not make the mistake of divesting anything here!

Positioning of the assets is very important, like playing with Mekk-Knights in Yugioh. With just these two characters adjacent to #roads and the Automated Toll Systems in play, we've established an income of $8m per turn. After paying the now almost trivial upkeep cost of Corp Executive, who can defend our Toll Systems with the aid of our founder, we have positive cash flow of $5m per turn waiting for us when we next have an accounting phase. While absurd, keep in mind that going below $2m at the end of the first turn can be dangerous against certain opponents; Political Corruption - or revolution by Disruptive Gnost elements - is a city builder's worst enemy! 

Other beginnings to the game can be less risky but similarly absurd, e.g.

* Reveal Street and purchase for $3m, deploying adjacent to our founder
* Deploy Corp Executive, anywhere this time, searching up a Driverless Car Fleet and two Automated Toll Systems.
* Deploy Corp Citizen adjacent to the Street
* Divest Corp Executive at the end of turn.

This opening line establishes a slightly smaller positive cash flow of $4m per turn, but leaves $5m in the bank instead of the previous example's $3m. Depending on how aggressively you bid to go first, or what your opponent is playing, this more subdued start may be in order, but either opening line puts you in a position to purchase a Hypermarket revealed at the beginning of the next turn...with enough #infrastructure cards in play to be able to sell it for $9m at the end of the turn. 

Dancing in the streets!

Celebrations will ensue in the Streets when you play Public Holiday on your opponent's turn when they attempt to break your board with character combat, or the versatile uncommon Misdirection or powerful rare Timely Interception if they attempt to do it with events. The #infrastructure deck is a little fragile - the price we pay for having access to awesome cashflow in this game - so playing defensive cards like these is going to be essential if we want to establish any kind of a board presence. Although, as per the above couple of examples, it isn't going to take long to do this. So, we've established a small property empire that, if unimpeded, has per-turn expenses of $4m and incoming revenues of $13m, and stifled our opponent's ability to break our board position.
What's next?

Well, unfortunately they probably still have a board position, because we haven't been putting them under any pressure yet, and after noticing the awesome influx of cash to our bank account (bloody corporate spies are everywhere, no idea where they obtain these top-secret financial details) they may not wish to oblige us by doing something foolish like "engaging their business for trait resources" or "attacking with a powerful character" or "activating their founder's ability" because we'll simply relive them of that asset during our next turn. In return, we may not wish to attack with characters that are serving important defensive functions such as protecting Automated Toll Systems and Central Business Districts, both in order to not lose access to those cash flow producing cards in a retaliatory assault, and because our opponent who didn't attack us last turn - or who had their attack stifled by our Public Holiday - will have no difficulty blocking those attacks. Combat is likely to devolve into a stalemate; how do we win the game?

We've got more than a few options and it's possible that we'll have room for several of them in the main deck. All we have to do is avoid the challenge phase whenever possible - and Megacorp provides a couple of different ways to do this. Firstly, we can use the ability of Corp Executive to search up the old 20th century standby weapon Vulcan Cannon, which gives an additional activated ability to the bonded card, and is able to be wielded with ease by that Executive; this comes with a very minor deckbuilding cost, as we are already running four of the Dead Drop searchers. We simply blast things out of the way and freely attack afterward. Triggering the ability of Dash Dingo, either with Executive or the self-propagation ability of Street and Highway is our second possible way of keeping the board clear, particularly of the smaller characters our opponent might play; again, a fairly minor deckbuilding cost as we are already playing full sets of searching cards. We can force the opponent to engage cards by playing characters with the Suppressor ability - although this doesn't avoid using the combat step, and won't always engage the target that we want to purchase. We can play Economic Hitman, Guided Munitions and Tobias Maschinekraft E5 Grenadier like we did in our article about the Azrielle's Assassins deck, again being forced into using the challenge phase - and it has restrictions, being unable to Hitman anything exceeding $3-4m in valuation...

A card I've been unable to find a use for
up until now due to the expensive cost
of his ability, plus the upkeep cost of 
both cash and trait resources - but he is
perfect here; just buy out the enemy!  

Or we can harness the awesome power of WHISKEY with Fluffy Langel, Celebrationist! Fluffy is all about plying the opposing characters into abandoning their defensive posts for a life of reckless hedonism. He's got a bit of a sinister side to him, however; a penchant for forging the signature of opposing characters while they are drunk, installing some #nano, then renting their bodies out combat vassals - they wake up, hungover, as valuable members of your property management empire, pointed right back at their point of origin. It's not a cheap method - we are essentially buying the character at twice its cost, although the opponent only receives half of this amount - but it has the advantage of avoiding the challenge phase, and is a repeatable effect, able to be activated multiple times per turn, only costing the target's valuation in $m, and can be used if Fluffy himself is engaged. I've been looking to find a use for getting my opponent's characters drunk, so we'll give it a shot here

Let's take a look at a preliminary #infrastructure deck list:

Dash Dingo here is how we build our 
board advantage up. Ideally, we will use
him to pick off a consumer, or another
weak opposing character (or building)
whenever we search our resource deck
with Highway or Street or make a Dead
Drop with Corp Executive

Resource Deck
4 Highway
4 Street
2 Driverless Car Fleet
4 Hypermarket
4 Automated Toll System
2 Central Business District
2 Actor
1 Lake

Main Deck
4 Misdirection
4 Timely Interception
4 Public Holiday
4 Corp Executive
4 Incarnate Donor
4 Corp Advisor
4 Corp Citizen
4 Anubian Tracker
2 Maxim Glazhov, Cyborg Commando
2 Fluffy Langel, Celebrationist
2 Vulcan Cannon
2 Guided Munitions

Ha - I say "preliminary" and we've hit 20/40 with no difficulty whatsoever - in fact, we've gone over in the resource deck by three! Generally, maximum consistency is necessary in deck building; every card that we have four-of in the main deck is one we would like to see in the opening hand. The two-of cards are our backup starters (Glazhov) and game-winners (Fluffy, Cannons, Munitions) which for the latter, we won't want to see immediately, and for the former, are there for decreasing numbers of brick hands. We can't keep a hand without a Dead Drop 4 character with this deck; don't try - it's too slow

Note that in the main deck, we don't go above forty cards because we want to increase the chance of opening any one of our four-of key cards. In the resource deck, however, we are making a minor sacrifice to consistency in order to enable certain important plays - and to increase our percentage chances of hitting cards with certain keywords.  We are playing a defensive and controlling deck here and it is essential that we enable both our early defensive plays  - it is entirely possible to lose by the second turn in Megacorp - and our opening turns with the highest potential.

Accordingly we have to account for the following - and get ready, because there's a little mathematics involved here. Skip ahead a page if you need to.

1) Statistically, the play that leads to the most instant wins is a turn 1 Misdirection on your opponent's attack or main event, i.e. Telekinetic Slash or Kidnapping. While this effect is available on turn zero (engage business for trait cost, engage founder for additional cost) we want to enable this outside of those cards where possible, so our founder and business are free for action! The main deck is running 16/40 ways to enable this and the resource deck is running 4/22 - two Central Business District (which we really don't want to engage for Misdirection, but it's better than losing) and two Actor. We can't afford to cut either of these cards. With regards to probability, our chance of having a main deck turn 1 Misdirection source is ((16/40)+(16/39)+(16/38)+(16/37)+(16/36)) which is added to our odds of a turn 1 resource deck Misdirection source (4/22 - technically we're running 23 resource cards, but we don't count Lake because it's free and replaces itself) and we absolutely cannot afford that second figure to become 3/21 or less (a decrease of approximately 3.89%.) The main deck figure, of course, doesn't change. Actor's #civilian tag, and the fact that he's a character that can attack from the resource deck - like a creature-land in Magic - are additional benefits to running him, plus his ability to make trait resources of any colour assists in playing and paying for various abilities in the deck

2) Our highest financial potential on turn 1 is from the first example discussed; four Automated Toll Systems and two characters adjacent to roads. So we cannot afford to cut an Automated Toll System, or we cannot even make that play; despite not wanting to open-flip a Toll System (we'd rather search them out) the cash flow potential is too high not to run maximum numbers. Neither can we afford to cut any of the roads - the first one cut is 3.3% less chance to open-flip a turn 1 road for this play

3) Playing a single Driverless Car Fleet is an unacceptable risk to our long game and too many is a risk to our explosive openings. We do not want to open-flip it on turn 1 either, for the same reason as above, but cannot afford to have the only one destroyed with the corresponding 100% reduction to our buying power from within the resource deck.

4) Cutting a Hypermarket severely reduces our odds of hitting that valuable property from 4/22 to 3/21 - a significant loss we cannot afford to take - so we need to max out on numbers of this card. As discussed earlier, it interacts with every card in the resource deck in some way and is our key to maximum cash flow in two ways; cashflow itself, and huge divest sales.

5) Cutting any of the Central Business Districts is also a 100% reduction to our chance to draw into the Hypermarket/CBD combo, which is unacceptable for the long game, but it's a poor first turn card; as with Driverless Car Fleet we have to balance the odds of open-flipping it on turn one with the power level of the card.

6) This is where it gets tricky. Cutting #civilian cards reduces the cash flow potential of Hypermarket while increasing our odds to draw it; technically this is complicated by the fact that Hypermarket itself is also a #civilian card, but see point 4) above, we aren't cutting that card in any case. The resource deck has 18/22 #civilians; cutting one of them changes our odds of hitting one to 17/21 (approximately 0.87% reduction) while increasing our chance to draw Hypermarket from 4/22 to 4/21 (the same percentage increase) but when it comes down to it, we can't even look at making this trade-off! Points 1-5 above cover all #civilian and #infrastructure cards in the resource deck that are essential to our game play, locking in 22 resource cards - and we'd rather hit a road first turn than a Hypermarket in any case - so the slightly lower odds of hitting Hypermarket on T1 rather than another #civilian card isn't the huge deal it otherwise might be, and may even be preferable. We'd love to see it on turn 2 or 3, after making a few of our starting dollars back

Highest long term potential, but also 
the highest initial investment in the
deck, means we don't really want to
open on CBD - so we don't play four.
Ideally, we'd like to place it next door
to an established Hypermarket, then
sell that market off immediately to   
realise our massive levels of profit.

I'm a long way from being bad a maths, but mathematics, probability and trading cards is still likely a topic for a better mathematician than myself! Odds of drawing specific cards always change with every draw step, every search, and every purchase from the resource deck - you can use a hypergeometric distribution function to calculate these odds - but in this deck, those numbers are subject to sudden and serious change. Take, for example, the strongest opening discussed above; when four Automated Toll Systems are fetched from the resource deck on the first turn after purchasing a #road from the top of the resource deck. Suddenly, your chance of revealing Hypermarket next turn isn't 4/22, but 4/17. Numbers are a delicate balance in deckbuilding, and haphazard changes shouldn't be made without at least a little calculation regarding the odds of opening a great hand, utterly bricking, or drawing key cards at important times. I've seen so many players of Magic cut two lands and two cheap removal spells from a decklist to accommodate four huge creatures, then complain that "I can't draw any lands" or "I never draw removal anymore" or "this second copy of this huge guy is a waste of a card in my hand" without even giving a thought to WHY this is happening. Most of the time, readers - and I've learned this the hard way several times - you should trust the deck designer! Brewing is fun - you should never stop - but accurately calculate your odds of the Magical-Christmas-Land first-turn kill before shouting to the world "this list is viable and the greatest thing the community has ever seen!" I'm pretty bloody sure my theorycraft on resource deck numbers is correct, but if anyone better at maths would like to correct me, please sound off in the comments below or contact me via Facebook. For example, it's not correct to add a second Lake - it increases your chance of bricking on a resource deck buy to above 0% and given how essential our resource deck is to our game plan we can't afford to do that!


The last thing we need to consider is our founder. We've made no mention of it up until now, which suggests that the deck doesn't require any specific founder. I believe, however, that the best founder for this deck is going to be Heracles, Senior Counsel.

Not most players' first choice for founder
but ideal for this deck

Now, I can hear you all now: "dear god Simon, what in the nine hells are you thinking here?" but hear me out before you judge me here! We are a defensive and controlling deck; despite our lack of direct removal cards in the main deck, we are all about shutting down our opponent's plays, and Heracles is a very strong defensive founder. The deck has two main weaknesses I've been able to identify so far; the early turns require heavy investment in order to obtain an early pay off, making it susceptible to Political Corruption - and our cash flow setup can be stifled by Kidnapping characters that are located next to roads. Heracles' ability to cancel the effect OR deployment of an unethical card is an excellent backup to the mountain of Misdirection and ton of Timely Interception we are running in the main deck; we've maxed out on numbers, but there is still no guarantee they will be in the opening hand! Heracles also has the correct mix of trait scores to pay the costs of certain cards in the deck, e.g. 3IQ covers Misdirection's cost, 4MQ covers the high trait cost of playing Fluffy Langel, and 1MQ covers Fluffy's upkeep trait cost. The other important thing to note is that other #action-based (Azrielle, Xu Huang) or searching (The Glass Man, Illithis, Seti Spaghetti) founders don't even get a look-in here, as we aren't playing any of the cards that interact with them (aside from Dash Dingo) or even any cards that can be found by them; Chi, Corp Socialite is not a defensive founder despite her ridiculous stat levels - she wants to be attacking - while Raamaa is a poor choice when your resource deck contains two characters; the sacrifice of consumers is what makes her strong!

Play to defend your property empire, and see how your #infrastructure/#civilian deck performs at Rabblemaster Games' next Megacorp Constructed Monday from 6pm.

-Simon Driel; Director, Rabblemaster Games and Megacorp enthusiast