Thematically Correct Titan - 2020 Euros 3rd Swiss/13th Cut

This is the corp deck that I took to the online Europe & African Continental Championships held on Jinteki.net. As my first major event in about 3 years I was incredibly happy to be able just to be competitive, and finishing the swiss third was a dream come true.

OVERVIEW

Whilst I still think Titan is a good deck, it was very very poorly placed in the meta for this event & underperformed in general. For me, I went 3-2 in Swiss with it & was heavily carried by my runner deck (which I will publish also of course). If your meta is seeing a considerable number of Leela & Geist players, do not play Titan.

The other thing to bear in mind before building/loading this deck is that it is a very high variance deck to play, and you have to be able to ride that roller coaster without getting tilted by it. Some games you will just score out by turn 6 no matter what your opponent does. Some games (e.g. my loss in the cut with it) you will just lose to single access on centrals because your ice is so porous. I believe it is a mistake to try to shore up this weakness - every resource/slot you invest in defence makes you that much slower, and speed really is your greatest weapon.

INTERESTING CHOICES

For the most part this is a fairly down-the-line Titan FA deck. I’ve just pulled out a few differences to other Titan lists I’ve seen floating around:

No HHN/Boom - I don’t think you want to spend influence on anything other than your primary score plan of drawing agendas & scoring them, let alone the further slots that it would take. Speed is king.

3rd Biotic Labours vs 2x Red Level Clearance - often you can only FA an agenda if you have it in hand at the start of turn, but your opponent is checking the top card of R&D every turn. RLC lets you draw two cards and either regain the click (for FA) or keep the economic tempo high. There are enough FA tools in the deck to draw/Atlas into them whenever necessary even with only 2 Biotics.

3x Spiderweb is essential in any Titan deck in my opinion - it is the best ice available to deal with Boomerang and makes it a lot more taxing for any Criminal to check a remote. Additionally, you can often etr a DoF as blind Boomerang -> DoF is not a rare play.

The 1x Archer was only drawn, installed & rezzed once, but definitely pulled its weight. It’s best off vs Anarchs running MK Ultra so is something of a meta call - I was expecting more Freedom/Apoc Hoshiko than there was. Having said that, as soon as the both sides hit 1 Hostile Takeover the 3rd becomes useless to both players as an agenda point.

Finally, we come to the main event, and the real reason to play Titan. Playing Titan means you are thematically obliged to include the most Executive of Executives, the man, myth, and legend himself, Mark ****ing Yale. Seriously though, as a 1x he’s a great card in this deck as well as being criminally overlooked. Not only do you get the tell-tale pause of “huh, that’s interesting” from your opponents whenever they see it but you also get a whole bunch of money. With 1 token he’s a 1-cost hedge fund. With 2 tokens he’s Too Big to Fail without the downside of the bad publicity. And that’s before we even come to the warm fuzzy feelings that having such an adorable mascot in your deck gives you.