Blue Sun Lockout, 5th Seed at Norcal Regionals

This deck went 6-1 in Swiss, carrying my stealth Andy deck, which only went 4-3. This earned me 5th seed in a pool of 89 players. I was sadly knocked out in the double elimination rounds (both games as Runner), but since I'd never made top 8 at an event like this before, I was still stoked. I'm still beating myself up though for not playing this deck in the 2nd elimination game, since I had the choice.

In Swiss I played against stealth Hayley, Prepaid Kate, Headlock Reina, Noise, Au Revoir Chaos Theory, Gabe, and Leela. The loss was against Noise, who nabbed Government Takeover off the top of my deck after stealing a Priority Requisition from the mill. Still, Government Takeover directly won me two other games with Punitive Counterstrike, and it was the winning agenda I scored in 3 of the other 4 won games.

Some highlights of the tournament:

1. Au Revoir Chaos Theory accessing a 6-advanced Aggressive Secretary, losing all 6 of their programs. I scored the Government Takeover for the win shortly thereafter.

2. Reina accessing a 4-advanced Aggressive Secretary. I started advancing Government Takeover, they laid down a Crypsis, scored it, and then I Punitived.

3. This one is for my runner deck. My opponent was doing NEH FA and ended up scoring all three astroscript, each with tokens. There was a rezzed SanSan on the board, and I needed 4 more points. I just ran R&D like crazy while he dug for a final agenda. Somehow, I managed to win before he could draw another agenda. He would have won the next turn regardless since his very last draw was a Fast Track.

Anyways, about this deck. The basic game plan is to build a credit lead to threaten Punitive, score early behind ETR ice, and trash their programs along the way. I'll talk about some of the specific card choices below:

Agendas: This is my favorite agenda spread for Weyland. It's usually easy enough to score at least one 5-3 early in the game, which is powerful because it means you're now on game point assuming your next agenda is the Government Takeover. This enables super scary traps that Runners will often run. It also means that an IAA trap that isn't run isn't necessarily a failed trap. If they don't run it, advance it twice more and Hedge Fund. Advance to 6 and install an ice, and you've got one hell of a scary trap. Government Takeover is also great bait for Punitive. In one game I even installed it naked and started advancing it the following turn.

Aggressive Secretary: This card did serious, serious work, trashing some 15 odd programs over the course of the day. Program trashing is really bad for just about anyone but Noise. It completely wrecked the Criminals, and essentially locked them completely out of all my servers for the remainder of the day.

Blacklist: Tends to hurt Shapers and Anarchs most. I used it to prevent Hayley from clone chipping in her Corroder which let me safely score Government Takeover for the win.

Elizabeth Mills: Didn't do any work; my thought was to use her to kill Personal Workshops with programs on them, but that never happened, as well as for BP removal. I think I'll cut this and maybe EBC for something else.

Corporate Troubleshooter: Didn't do much at the tournament, but it did good work in practice games beforehand, and I like it so I'll keep it. Blue Sun can get such a huge number of credits that you can very likely get a program trashed with this. It's also great against runners who use Mimic/Femme as their sentry breakers.

Power Shutdown: Another MVP. Against Au Revoir CT, this really slowed down their startup and let me get enough space and credit lead to start scoring agendas. It also kills Faerie, SMC, stealth components, Clone Chips, etc. In a practice game I installed and rezzed Blacklist in what was previously my scoring server, followed by trashing their only Corroder with Power Shutdown. I love this card.

Ice: This is probably the most flexible part of this deck. I chose a mixture of cheap binary and taxing ice to both score agendas early, and tax a runner whose programs are still on the board. I chose them to be resistant to Atman, which as I've learned can get into the Blacklist remote when you least expect it. In a previous version I had even more barriers (a la Uncorrodable) and fewer code gates, but I changed that up since sometimes you'll trash the decoder and not the fracter and you still want to be able to lock them out. The sentries are great. Saggitarius trashed Leela's second Corroder (after I'd trashed the other one with Aggressive Secretary), and Lycan also trashed at least one program. I never saw Grim, and I never had to rez Archer. Archer in particular is not expected by many people with this agenda spread :)

All in all, it was a fabulous day of Netrunning. I really love this deck and believe it is competitive in the current meta. I think I might switch to Whizzard instead of Andy though to help deal with the NEH/RP meta...