In the Loop When the CEO and the Board are breathing down our neck for ever-higher productivity, how do we meet their demands? One answer, discovered by corporate managers in Adelaide, Australia, is to increase workplace efficiency. "The Loop," as it has been dubbed, is a deck that relies on difficulty-reduction agendas to speed up the scoring of subsequent agendas. A word of warning: good help does not come cheaply. Most Loop deck recipes rely heavily on rare cards, and a few executives are pursuing the corporate Holy Grail: an all-rare deck. Aspiring project managers who reject this philosophy will probably not find fulfillment in The Loop. Plan, Do, Check, Act The heart of The Loop is agendas that assist one another in reducing their difficulty. Genetics-Visionary Acquisition is a Gray Ops agenda that reduces the difficulty of all Research agendas by 1. Artificial Security Director, a Research agenda, reduces the difficulty of any Black Ops agenda by 1, and Executive Extraction is a Black Ops agenda that reduces the difficulty of all Gray Ops agendas by 1. All of these agendas are initially difficulty 3, so they can be scored quite early. Once we have scored one of each type, the difficulty of all agenda becomes 2, which allows us to play and score in one turn. Should we ever score three of any one type, its related agenda becomes difficulty 0: our procedure becomes a simple matter of drawing to agenda, then playing and instantly scoring. The snowball effect is so rapid that few Runner stacks can stand up to it. The Loop's efficiency is further increased by useful nodes like Chicago Branch, which doubles the advancement rate of installed cards. Some versions also include fast-processing operations like Management Shakeup or Systematic Layoffs to ensure the earliest possible scoring of agenda. Quick bits from Efficiency Experts, Accounts Receivable, and BBS Whispering Campaign keep the research budget plump. Such a deck does not require heavy icing of subsidiary data forts: once it gets going, agendas are scored as soon as they hit the table. However, there is value in our protecting supporting nodes, and early in the game, HQ requires some defense. But by far the most important fort to protect is R&D. A Runner stack that is based around deep R&D attack is The Loop's biggest enemy. For this reason, serious Loop decks do not bother with weak ice, though a mix of walls, code gates, and sentries are necessary to slow the Runner down. Even damage-dealing ice will not intimidate a Runner who is prepared to take her lumps while pillaging R&D. Killers (whose subroutines trash programs) are preferred both for their strength and the ultimatum they pose: if the Runner doesn't pay through the nose, she will lose icebreakers, and if she does, she will not be able to run very often. Either way, the Runner ends up short on actions and bits. Of the killers, Colonel Failure from Proteus is the nastiest, with its three "Trash a program" subroutines. A Typical Loop Deck Agendas 6 Genetics-Visionary Acquisition 6 Artificial Security Directors 6 Executive Extraction Operations 5 Accounts Receivable 4 Systematic Layoffs Nodes 6 Chicago Branch 3 BBS Whispering Campaign Ice 3 Colonel Failure (or other tough sentries/killers) 3 Haunting Inquisition (or other tough code gates) 3 Rock is Strong (or other tough walls)