The wonderful Richard Hammond managed to put on an excellent tournament in Sheffield to raise money for charity. I was lucky enough to attend and (with a remarkably favourable ID pairing - HB and Hayley of all things) managed to claim second place.

Inspiration

I have transitioned from "The ETF player" to "the Oxford player" now, but as should be clear I could never abandon my roots. I have been dabbling in the propaganda arm of the local news network recently, but you cannot keep a good capitalist off message for long.

Y u finally play Vitruvius?

As the title suggests, glacier has become increasingly difficult to play well these days because FFG seems to want Princess Space Kitten to blank everything. The Temüjin Contract has also come along and forced people to play faster, so I opted for an agenda mix and a plan that can play at increased speed.

There are two advantages of playing FA out of HB at the moment, and neither of them make it better than NBN - which speaks to the power of that archetype.

The first is that with the combination of Jeeves and Biotic in faction, as well as money, you can do ridiculous things like FA a GFI from hand. That is a wonderful feeling and is often a surprise closing move (though I am not sure why it surprises people) when the runner thinks they have at least another turn. The second is that because HB has a beefier set of ice, and has been given a big bump recently in the form of Fairchild 3.0, you can turtle up and play glacier in a pinch. This is particularly useful against Shapers attempting to clot spam you to death. Maxey's Jammy Rushy HB that was doing the rounds a while back was good, but I always felt that it couldn't extend the midgame long enough against certain factions and IDs. This was an important consideration at a tournament where you could face practically anything. It is also the reason I opted for a mix of assets and operations for economy - Ed Kim and Whizzard both exist and you want to have the ability to deal with either.

This is not the best HB deck, but it is fun and reasonably competitive.

Tournament Performance

The deck went 4-1 over the five rounds on the day, losing only to Stealth Kit of all things in the deciding match for first place. Not to take credit away from Peter who set up way more quickly than I expected, but seeing 7/9 agendas by turn 3 and only one piece of ice did not help at all. The game managed to get to 4-6 before Peter won but I could not find the winning GFI in time - which tends to happen a lot in this deck.

The wins it scored came against Laramy Fisk, the Professor, Omar Keung, and Gabe Santiago.

Changes

I think this deck is in a reasonably good position and I would be comfortable taking it to a SC, though not confident in its ability to win. I do think, however, that it comes down to a combination of the right meta call for the event and practice to make sure that you eliminate the mistakes that I have made while playing this deck over the last few months. It can beat Dyper, both variants of Whizz, and most Nexus shapers if given the right start.

That said, I am thinking post rotation and the most obvious losses are the Vitruvii, Elii, and Jackson...ii. Given Eli 2.0 is around the corner (spoiler alert) and the fact that the only time I ever really trigger Jackson is after I have fired an ABT, which is actually an ideal time to play Preemptive Action with your bonus Jeeves click, I am not too worried about it at the moment.

Obviously, any and all suggestions are welcome :)