Rude Raven (3rd and 13th NA Continentals)

Sokka 4623

3x Hostile!? Yeah I don’t like it either but it’s needed. You need to find at least one and it’s money when you score it.

I played this deck along with Core Set Waltz (which I won’t post again) against a tough field of 134 players, finishing with the 2nd highest overall SOS and landing me 3rd in swiss.

Heavy inspiration from The King’s Outfit. Huge shoutouts to him. This result would not have come without the hours spent play testing with him and getting tips from the original deck builder himself, although he ended up making some changes to his version on the cutoff day. Data Ravens are a very good inclusion here. While useful on the remote along with Border Control, The King and I both found that Data Ravens work very well on centrals as a single ice. It’s very easy to accrue a lot of bad pub with this deck to where breaking a single ice becomes free. Data Raven still forces a tag to be cleared. There are also criminals who like to install Boomerang on it and DoF. Raven makes that a net 0 and 3 clicks for the runner.

In the tournament, I lost 3 games with this deck (one of which was round 1 of the cut). All 3 loses were to operation flooding. Essentially, I would get an opening hand of some combination of operations and agendas. Sometimes you can gain a bunch of money (like consult for Too Big to Fail) and then score a naked SSL while bluffing Punitives like I did against NetDad on stream in round 3, but then he responded with a Stargate and kept me away from my ice for the rest of the game. Other times it’s just a slow and awkward life. You either draw through it and discard key punishment operations that will cost you the game later, or you try to keep your hand and hope R&D slowly gives you the right cards before the runner can set up their money. This deck is definitely a beast tho as long as the above doesn’t happen.

Huge thank you to everyone who helped me along the way, especially The King, and to Laury for enlightening me about FSM (something something noodly appendage). I don’t know what it is either folks but it got me a 50/50 on a Complete Image kill and a crucial agenda snipe off R&D with an Inside Job during the cut (although I still lost that game). Seems like something worth looking into 🤔.

Big shoutouts to the people at NISEI for running yet another large and successful tournament. The management, organization, and the streams are all beyond amazing! Let’s keep the best card game going! Looking forward to worlds!

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