Armaments 2:9-21 (1st Place @ Petrie's)

My first place Corp deck at the 15-player Petrie's Family Games Store Championship in Colorado Springs, Colorado on February 4th, 2017. I lost three games on the day, twice in Swiss and once in the first double-elimination game, all to the same player. I proceeded to win out through the lower bracket and beat that player twice in the grand finals to take home my second plaque this season.

This deck went 4-1 throughout Swiss and Double-Elim, beating Valencia, Sunny, a stealth Leela, and a Baba Yaga Leela. Also intentionally drew against a third Leela deck. The sole loss was to the Baba Yaga Leela deck in Swiss, mostly the result of an agenda flood and some unfortunate Leela bounces.

There's not too much to talk about here... Having taken down the last store champ I played in, I constructed a hybrid with my favorite pieces of recent Pālanā decks and brought it to the tournament with no playtesting whatsoever. I had played five different factions across my first three store champs this season, so I decided to play the remaining two (Jinteki and Criminal) for my fourth event. Badge hunting on Always Be Running, lol.

I got lucky against Val, top-decked the only Clone Retirement on turn two and scored it. Scarcity of Resources did tons of work all day long. Never saw Rumor Mill all day, but the combination of a single Clone Retirement and two Scarcity left me feeling somewhat comfortable about Rumor Mill's existence. I considered dropping the third Merlin for a second Crisium Grid prior to the tournament, and I wish I had done so; the deck would have been far better positioned against this particular tournament's meta (FOUR Leelas in the top four!).

I very rarely locked Runners out with ice alone, three of my four wins came off winning Batty psi games. With the prominence of Leela, Batty going off behind a Cobra or Lancelot and wrecking Criminal rigs single-handedly won games by itself. Batty also saved the day against Sunny after she was set-up in a rather unfavorable match-up (turns out, grail ice and extra subroutines do nothing against Sunny's rig).

I think Macrophage would have been great in more common Anarch match-ups, but I didn't see them at the top tables for this event. Excalibur is obviously not as great here as it is in RP, but it still has great synergy with Caprice and Batty on scoring remotes, and it can help to counter Medium/Indexing plays on R&D as well. I packed Lotus Field and Friends in High Places to counter ice destruction that I never saw. Friends in High Places was great at recurring Caprice and Batty anyway.

I lost two Future Perfect psi games in the game that I lost, so there's definitely an argument to be made for running GFI over TFP if your TFP psi game skills are as piss poor as mine. =)