New Centralia

3-1 at a 10 person GNK. Lost to Calling in Favors Geist, beat Smoke, Alice, and Val. SSO is fun. Play SSO. You'll enjoy it.

The ideal opening is to stick a City Works Project behind either a Hortum or a Mausolus, enjoy the faceplant, and then play a fun mini-game called "How long do I dare keep this thing on the board?". By the time you actually score your agenda you need to have at least one, ideally two, triple advanced ice on R&D: this makes digging expensive and turns on your Mass Commercializations. Then you hunker down, draw, make money, and score everything else from hand.

It's often right to Biotic + Fast Track for a Hostile Takeover at the earliest possible opportunity, since you're in trouble if they both get stolen. This also clears annoying currents. Against non-Film Critic runners, pushing a City Works on the table as your second 5/3 is generally fine even if they can get to it, since that means damage and tempo loss for them, and at least one more set of advancement tokens for you.

"Clones are not People" is a theoretical third Hostile, since you will often score your first 5/3 mid-turn. Could also act as a surprise closer if a Runner lets the second 5/3 go, but that's never actually happened. Also it's a fourth current should Employee Strike be hanging around. I've got Paywall Implementation over Scarcity of Resources because it's free to play, deters aggression, and I needed the money because I cut most of the IPOs. Might not have been the right call. I'd have liked Scarcity against Geist.

Three Dedication Ceremony is right, I think: it's three advancements for the price of one, it's a secondary source of counters if you need to score your first 5/3 early, and it turns City Works into something deeply unpleasant. Only two Red Planet Couriers is less satisfying: my loss to Geist was down to the refusal of R&D to cough one up when everything else was in hand. Maybe the last IPO should go.

There's no Oduduwa because it's hard to justify a 7-cost code gate with an extremely conditional face-check. Occasionally it's great, but I went from two to one, and then to none, because I just never rezzed the thing. However, there's a new barrier in Kitara pack five that might justify revisiting this.

Didn't run into any Shapers with Clot, but that will be a problem. There is a theoretical counterplay where you install City Works Project, play your Red Planet Couriers, and have a 14-meat damage agenda bomb sitting on the table for a turn, quietly ticking, while they look for their Film Critic. Sadly this never came up.

This is a deck with real 5/3s, all of which get installed face-up, that leans hard on its ID ability, tries to push behind a single piece of ice turn one, and relies on important operations sticking around in hand until required. As such, while it can quickly build a highly intimidating board state, it is vulnerable to a number of hate cards, including but not limited to Indexing, Mad Dash, Employee Strike, Film Critic, Gbahali, Inside Job, Maxwell James, Ed Kim, Imp, Maw, Clot, and almost certainly some others. Fortunately (a) it's quick enough that you've usually got a shot, and (b) these are all super-obscure cards that nobody plays.