Scorch SYNC / London 1.1.1.1 tournament

Built for the London Thameside Casual Onesies tournament in Feb 2017. Team 3, the mighty Jank Bank, finished in a glorious last place.

Basic gameplan is fairly simple. Get Data Ravens over key centrals - including Archives, since you'll likely have to discard some agendas - and pootle around not losing until you've found a Hard-Hitting News, a kill combo, and established a credit lead. The next time they run you land the tags, and the turn after that you blow them up.

Cards

To aggressively reconfigure the urban landscape in an ultimately profitable way, you need to have more money than the Runner. So the NAPDs, SSCG and PADs are all there to provoke the Runner into wasting their precious money on things that aren't 'not dying'. SSCG is particularly good for this, acting as a virtual Mumbad Virtual Tour. The Special Offers are (a) pseudo-Sweeps Weeks, (b) unexpected credit swings, and (c) fun. Ghost Branch landed once in testing to extremely useful effect and then didn't turn up at all in the tournament. Ghosts are terribly unreliable.

Since Data Ravens are too valuable to waste on remotes and tags tend to end the game quickly either way, the QPM should have been a 15 Minutes, to be scored from hand for 24/7 shenanigans or clicked back to annoy the Runner. Closed Accounts was there in case I could land the tags but didn't have the kill combo yet, which never happened. Psychographics was useless in a deck that isn't trying to score and should have been something else: probably a second 24/7; possibly another Ghost Branch.

Corporate Shuffle was in the deck as a pseudo-Jackson and never showed up either. It probably isn't very good anyway, since it takes two clicks and forces you to discard your whole hand, including those lovely Scorched Earths/HHNs you've been hoarding. Meanwhile it does nothing for agendas that you've already had to Archive. It does draw you five cards from any number, which could be good if nothing's turned up. But this is a 44 card deck, so something useful or important is always turning up.

Games

Two wins and a loss. The wins were against Smoke (w/ stealthy things) and Kate (w/ Sifr) and went pretty much to plan: credit lead, HHN, then Scorched-Archived Memories-Scorched. In both cases, the combo was ready before they could find either First Responders or, I assume, Aaron Marron.

The loss came against an extremely dapper Apex deck that won without landing a single Apocalypse. Achievement Unlocked. Instead, my opponent used Account Siphon and Inside Job to great effect, rudely refused to trash any of my assets, and danced around Hard-Hitting News range long enough to get to game point with an NAPD in the bin. At which point, naturally, I finally landed HHN. They ran into Archives through the now useless Data Raven for the win; in truth, since they had Heartbeat and more than 8 cards installed, they were probably safe anyway. An extremely fun game.

Kudos to WorldSerpent and Bruno for, respectively, organising and running the tournament: it was great fun.

Packs used: Core Set, Data & Destiny, Double Time + Hard-Hitting News x3