In trying to reboot my old noise deck from a little over a year ago, I've found an interesting problem: there are way too many viruses to choose from now! I began thinking about what a virus heavy/all virus deck might look like and whether it would be viable as at least a 2nd tier deck. Essentially, the question boils down to this, "Is fester enough of a deterrent and is progenitor enough mitigation against constant purges to run a virus heavy deck?"

With Clot screwing over fast advance and Lamprey prevalent in Headlock decks, Cyberdex Suite is enjoying some decent stock right now. It's a kick in the sprouts to Noise especially. What does Noise want to do? Mill agendas and steal them from lightly defended Archives. What does CDS do? Trigger from Archives.

Right now the hotness for Viruses is the "Reina Headlock" template which you should be able to find multiple examples of on NRDB.

That makes sense, though I'd imagine people would still protect archives more than normal against Noise. That being said, I was actually thinking more of a hunter deck where milling R&D is more to put pressure on the Corp scoring the remaining agendas, while still needing to keep an eye on Archives, thus spreading his/her ice out as much as Noise normally would. Throw in Archive Interface and there is a way to even deal with CDS.

Well, here's the thing: if you're not gaining much benefit from which cards you mill into archives, if you're just trying to reduce the Corp's options, then Milling means nothing, not until it gets to absurd levels. Every card in the deck has an equal chance of being milled or not milled. To reduce the corp's options, you're much better off trying to go for R&D Lock with Medium, or blowing up their hand with Wanton Destruction (repeat after me: HQ is where the agendas are .) But milling itself doesn't put anywhere near the pressure on than running their servers or wrecking their infrastructure. Noise gets good when he can push milling on top of all those other annoyances and the corp truly can't deal with what he's doing.

That's exactly what I was getting at. If I can focus the viruses and other cards on targetting remotes, pressuring centrals, or trashing infrastructure, then milling cards is just icing on the cake and the Corp having to protect archives spreads out ICE, making any of those jobs easier. If they decide to leave archives open, then they will have to deal with the consequences of doing so with so many cards milled.

I guess my question has kind of morphed a bit. Which of the three primary objectives I gave above (certainly add more if I missed any) would be helped most by Noise and a virus heavy deck? I'd imagine the infrastructure trashing one, but I'll have to refocus my deck when I have time.

That being said, my original question was about whether festerx3/progenitor would make a a Corp wanting to purge be set back as much as I would be.

So, I've been playing and tweaking and I've kinda hit a wall. My friend runs a fairly standard Weyland econ deck and he crushed me pretty bad. In almost all cases, I was locked out pretty quickly and my rig took so long he had basically already won by the time it was even close to being able to run. I'm not sure if it was his deck or mine, but I certainly feel like this deck doesn't flow as well as I'd like it to. I'll have to try my stealth shaper against him and see. As far as the deck is concerned, I decided to focus on ICE destruction to have free access to servers, but I kept drawing the cutlery set before I had my rig set up to use it (i.e. dead draw in the early game). My latest change (which I haven't tested) was dropping all cutlery for incubators (which I didn't think I had room for before).

I'm open to suggestions, or telling me it's a lost cause.