An Honest Politician (3-1 Winnipeg Regionals)

Creaphis 136

Liza Talking Thunder deserves some credit as one of the few honest politicians out there. Even when she's engaging in outright criminal activity she provides full disclosure. When she uses her clout to sabotage a corp, she makes sure they know every single thing about her - including her shoe size - and her every action is documented by a team of paparazzi and broadcasted to a weirdly apathetic, scandal-fatigued public.

The basic game plan is probably obvious enough but here it is anyway. Keep up with the corp's tempo by drawing cards with Liza and slowing them down with Diversion of Funds. Use Paragon and Blueberry Diesel to find your meat damage protection package: Paparazzi, Dummy Box and Wireless Net Pavilion. If you're against a kill deck you might want to use The Class Act instead of Liza to try to dig these pieces out and keep your tag count at a minimum, but I usually just start playing tag-me immediately and race to get everything installed before the corp draws High-Profile Target. Even if you're not playing against a kill deck, Wireless Net Pavilion and Dummy Box are great for keeping your high tempo economy assets alive - Rogue Trading is a huge tempo swing in your favour if you don't have to worry about clearing the tags, and you can actually use Dummy Box to block the trash ability on PAD Tap. Once you're set up, and reliably contesting the corp's scoring remote, you can fast-forward to a win with a Counter Surveillance run on R&D.

This decklist could definitely be refined and tweaked depending on your local meta and your personal preference. Aeneas Informant is here to help maintain tempo against asset spam decks, but I think the correct number of this card to include is either 3 or 0 because you can't really start profiting off of exposed Gagarin remotes unless you have all three installed. Hostage could be slotted in to make it easier to find Film Critic, The Class Act and your third Aeneas Informant in relevant matchups. Gbahali is here as another resource to throw at Dummy Box and a way to cheat out accesses during Counter Surveillance runs even when your breakers are trashed. However, there might be a better way to spend that influence. Lucky Charm could potentially do Gbahali's job better (aside from being hardware) since it can prevent the corp from ending your Counter Surveillance runs by popping Border Control. Film Critic is nice to have against SDS Drone Deployment in a deck with few breakers and no recursion, but there's an argument that the restricted card should be Levy AR Lab Access so that you can recur your copies of Counter Surveillance and so you can throw a virtually unlimited number of resources to Dummy Box when the corp is determined to trash your Paparazzi. There could also be room in this deck for No One Home as I find that I tend to lose against net damage based kill combos - but that probably has more to do with my own inexperience against those decks, because this deck should actually be favoured against those decks thanks to the extra draw from Liza.

3 comments
15 Sep 2019 FreqKing

Really well played, congrats on making top cut. Did Gbahali do much work for you? You still have one spare with your full rig installed. Finding space for Datasucker would support the overall strategy I think. "Baklan" Bochkin seems like a strong choice too. Synergy with Datasucker is great. Even on the first run, BB gets you through Tour Guide and forces their hand on Border Control. Alternatively, you could use that extra for Grappling Hook, which frees up 2 influence and is a strictly superior to Gbahali for your stated purpose (and provides another possible sacrificial lamb for SDS).

15 Sep 2019 FreqKing

Unless the ice has only one sub of course. Duh. I retract my assertion that Grappling Hook > Gbahali in all cases.

16 Sep 2019 Creaphis

Those are really good points. I didn't actually use Gbahali for its effect at all yesterday, so there likely is something better to put in that spot. Grappling Hook definitely makes sense, and Datasucker probably makes even more sense since it would let you cheat out multiple accesses with an underdeveloped Aumakua. I'm just hesitant to reduce the number of resources because kill decks absolutely will try to trash Paparazzi repeatedly and you need a lot of resources to contest that. "Baklan" Bochkin probably should be included. I had it in an initial list but took it out because I figured the resources in this list should either cost 0 (so that even if you don't have Wireless Net Pavilion and Dummy Box installed, it's still more painful for the corp to trash them than for the runner to install them) or should provide immediate value (like The Class Act and Gbahali). "Baklan" Bochkin is more expensive to play initially and usually needs to hang around for a bit before it does anything. However, I totally forgot that some relevant ICE has very low starting strength. Unfortunately, "Baklan" Bochkin still doesn't really accomplish much during Counter Surveillance runs - the corp will just pop it before you break it's two measly subs instead of after.