Decklist of the week

Aginrusion: Boop you, motherbooper!

Description by the author: ouroborosglyx 364

First off, thanks to Spags for coming up with the original shell of this list (notably the ice suite) and to Theo Clifford for passing it on to me. This, coupled with a boring-ass Andy list with a spicy Inversificator, took me to 5th seed at the Reading regional, at which point I proceeded to bomb out of the cut and come 7th. I don't have a full tournament report because I can't remember what happened yesterday let alone two weeks ago.

The meat of this deck is the aforementioned ice suite. If it looks ludicrous, then frankly that's because it is, but this is how you Aginruse. Your suite is cleanly divided into ice with horrible facechecks that are impossible to deal with, and whacky tech that you can proc your ability off if it's blank. Oh, and then there's Excalibur.

Your game plan is roughly as follows: put some really horrific ice on your centrals. Rez a Chiyashi if possible, and keep unrezzed ice and/or Caprice on key centrals: HQ vs. Siphon, R&D vs. Deep Data Mining. In case of Reg Anarch, deploy Macrophages first on R&D then every other central.

Once you're glaciered up you can start to worry about scoring remotes, which will generally be of the form Caprice, garbage, Excalibur. Against AI you may want a Chiyashi or something instead of garbage. The turning point is the first Nisei MK II, and once you've scored it, there's a fair chunk of matchups you've basically won. Score second Nisei MK II, score Obokata, gg.

Well ok there's a bit more to it than that, but it's quite matchup dependant at that point. You need to worry about Siphon throughout the game because money is crazy tight. But Dan you have like—yeah, trust me, this deck doesn't have enough money. In the easy matchups (i.e. no AI or no Strike or both) you'll be able to win off Agin/Nisei MK II/Caprice after Excalibur runs. When they have answers, you may have to put some real ice on the remote and rely on Caprice (if Strike) or Agin into some expensive piece of ice (if Rumor Mill) to close out the game.

Ok lets get into some card choices. I'm not going to talk about the ice suite here really; the only thing I've changed is -1 Cortex Lock -1 Assassin for 2x Komainu. I think the second Komainu might be a bit much, may well look at other sentry options for that last slot. The rest is basically A+ perfect, would never change (though you could juggle Macros/Swordsmans based on meta).

Agendas

Obokata Protocol

I was very skeptical of Obokata when it came out. I'm going to give you a quick talking point as to why this card is a monster and it definitely goes in this deck, but you don't have to believe me. Test it. I think you'll be surprised.

Anyway on to the talking point: Obokata has a couple things going for it which make the easy comparison to TFP misleading. By far the biggest of these is the wild difference in tempo impact between the two cards. TFP costs you (you! the Corp!) money (money!) to defend. Obokata costs nothing, and additionally imposes a much higher cost on the runner than TFP does (in fairness, at the expense of being deterministic). This card is more akin to NAPD than TFP, and by and large the cost of 4 cards to steal is vastly more painful than the cost of 4 credits. Consider that the runner is likely hoarding Siphons and multiaccess waiting for a window where the Corp is poor enough and they are rich enough, or a scoring window where the ability will be needed to defend an agenda leaving HQ vulnerable. If you liked NAPD face, you're going to love Obokata-with-two-siphons-in-hand-face.

The Future Perfect and Fetal AI

The logic here is simple: Obokata is hard to steal, but lets assume the worst and say the runner gets one; not an unlikely scenario by any means. Once the runner has an Obokata, the rest of our agendas need to be as hard to steal as possible. If you're running 2 Obo, 2 Global Food Initiative, 3 Nisei MK II and a Philotic, then once an Obokata goes the runner has 6 other juicy, defense-free agendas they can steal 2 of to just win. If you're on 3 Obo, 1 TFP, 1 Fetal and 3 Nisei MK II, that really just leaves the Nisei MK IIs as easy targets. Good luck stealing two of those.

Money

If your question was "do" you really need all this money, then the answer is emphatically yes. I'm really liking the inclusion of Sweeps, as it makes recovering from rezzing that lovely Chiyashi when you were on a meagre 14 credits much easier, plus it has nice synergy with the fear of Obokata.

Executive Boot Camp

Yeah you're right this should be Crisium. I just fucking hate Dyper ok?

No Batty?!

Easy cut honestly. What ice in this suite is Batty good with? None of it.

No currents!?

I have won current wars. I was CI. This deck is not CI. Don't fight current wars. Plus the reality is that you don't really need to; they can turn off either Caprice or your ID with currents, but not both.