By Tiisia Karlovna of the Ghost Council

Episteme shift. Lets look at things from below for once.

The Black Scroll says that “Some runners fight nature themselves, and build decks that try to achieve something. They want to steal all the agendas at once, or make the corporation's life miserable in a particular way, by trashing cards or taking credits. “.

Let us dig into that. On a certain level of abstraction, the scroll states that if you can trade card for card, click for click with the corp without an advance in board state, eventually the corporation will lose, due to the dual nature of agenda concentration becoming too high, and the threat of deckout. This is also why we consider multiaccess a charitable execution. Trashing cards and draining credits are thus means of destroying the corporations resources to achieve its goal. Not all corps are equally affected by this – some have means of fighting back against trashes, others bounce back relatively efficiently from a credit crash.

Vampirism is my philosophy of taking away everything they have. A good friend once described a different card game as a sword fight. Two skilled players will trade relatively even, but a singular mistake can be fatal for either side, leading to them lying on the floor, bleeding out and ultimately perishing (in a game). If the corporation gives you an opening, take their whole hand. Use openings to breach them further, do not let go until every last little bit of credits and cards have been taken from them.

The Anarch faction is notoriously good at trashing cards, while the Criminal faction is good at reducing their credit total. Where Vampirism differs from other control builds in that we work on making their pain our gain.

I have described Der Kaiser Sebastiao as a simulation of industrialising a nation in the 19th century. A 59 card deck is a clunky thing, and our engine is complex, but we can bootstrap the process by feeding corp cards into an infernal engine that converts tags into installs, installs into trashes, trashes into tag clears, tag clears into draw, and draw into breaks, installs and tags for value. Connecting a Hot Pursuit is often game ending early, but icing HQ was not on people’s mind against Anarch turn 1 traditionally.

Vampire Hoshiko, my latest deck, works on a related logic. We are very strong, but we must feed on the corporations cards every so often to keep our engine running, and stop them from locking us out. Crack open the bit between the corp’s head and torso and begin the process of extraction. If they fail to ice R&D in a timely manner, the game might just end on the sheer tempo advantage a Bling + Illumination popoff confers.

Where we hark back to the Black Scroll is in that from turn 1, our prime question should be: “How is the corporation trying to win the game? And how do I stop them?”. Neither Kaiser Seb nor Vampire Hoshiko are particularly interested in stealing agendas, it is merely a necessity of sorts. If the corp reduces their tempo to score 3-4 points early on, we are not at all upset, no, we are happy, for they have sacrificed too much to remain in the game. The answer then, is to always be running. To always be draining. To not let go until corp has drawn their last breath, and inexorably dragged into the depths by their rigid structures.