corporal punishment (2-1+bye, Lexington SC, 2nd place)

stoppableforce 576

Based on Memes Come True, but with some changes based on jamming some games a couple days before my SC. From Frost's writeup:

The core of the deck consists of:

You must not change these.

The core of the ice suite are the IP Blocks, Slot Machines, and Surveyors. Efficient. Taxing. Humane.

This is about 34/44 cards and leaves you 3 influence to play with. Frost used their influence on an Afshar and Crisium Grid, which seemed fine enough for me. I also kept the Tollbooth, Jua, and Endless EULA from their iteration, as it seemed fine enough. Swapped Vanilla for a Rime because I had visions of messing with Surveyor math by making them odd strengths.

However, Frost had a package of 1 Waiver, 1 Peeping Tom, and 2 Standard Procedure that ostensibly worked together. I kept encountering one of two problems during practice, though:

  • A terrible inability to remember what cards were in people's hands, or
  • Runners who just ignored the Azmari ability and instead of sitting on their events or resources, would just play them freely and try to get a money advantage in other ways

As you can imagine, the first one's bad for Standard Procedure - I was regularly SP'ing for 0-2 credits, and that's a real feel bad moment. Peeping Tom with 2 subs is a lot less impressive too, and eventually runners figure out they can probably just take the tags. I don't have anything against Waiver, it just gets a lot worse if you're bad at the other two parts.

So I replaced them with:

  • A Hydra, which is just a big generically taxing ice even outside of Acme, and seemed like something a lot of the runners on the day might have issues with
  • A TL;DR, which is absolutely just a meme waiting to happen
  • Two Daily Quest - I thought for a little while that this might be fighting with NGO Front for the same slots and server, but then I reasoned that the only thing better than 3 assets that gave you money was 5 assets that gave you money. I'm glad I did, too - Daily Quest makes Punitive a lot easier to land, and you don't need much out of this deck to protect it (I think in both games that it was relevant, I had an opening hand of Daily Quest + Slot Machine to start my remote).

On the day, this deck went 2-1. It lost to a Smoke on the last possible turn (I had both the win in a fairly difficult remote next turn and a double punitive in hand if he only managed to pull 3 points out of my R&D, but instead it coughed up 6) and beat a goodstuff Leela and a variant of BPM Ken, both with the punitive kill.

2 comments
9 Apr 2019 Thike

Will always love this archetype. Ice suite seems solid. )Other than TL;DR. >.>)

10 Apr 2019 stoppableforce

Yeah, like I said, TL;DR is just a meme. :P Everyone has a pet card; this one is mine. I had a brief galaxy brain moment where I didn't notice that Afshar said "printed subroutines" and had visions in my head of a code gate that couldn't be gotten through.

That said, TL;DR is already out of the next iteration I've been tinkering with. There's only so long you can keep an underperforming pet card around.