Good Ice is good - 2nd Place @ 'Startup +' Tournament

'Startup +' is a Format put together by Vesper which allows the full startup card pool plus 1 ID and 1 full play set of cards from the standard card pool for each deck.

I went 6-2 in total on the day - only losing to Armin Firecracker who went completely undefeated on the day - Congrats to Armin for the decisive victory!

Much like Armin I choose Smoke as my runner (with Net mercur) and also much like Armin I noticed 2 important things about the available cardpool. 1. No Paperclip 2. No Hippo

Even with the most efficient fractors in startup, the games 'Big Boi Barriers' are cripplingly expensive to get through and after considering Bulwark Outfit and Chiyashi Aginfusion (Armins choice), I settled on Data ward ACME

Data Ward whilst being an absolute mountain of an ice to break is also effectively immune to both Botulus and Boomerang.

It’s big weakness is inside job but you have aneotic voids to put them to bed.

A matchup I was worried about was the potential for Diversion Steve with shutdowns and inside jobs which was one of my main reasons for slotting the crisiums - but they ended up being key in almost every matchup as a great way to slow down runners who want to stargate, deep dive, or even build up conduit counters.

Magnets were tech against botulused tollbooths and potential tranquillisers

For the agenda suite Cyberdex Sandbox was important as a counter to decks running leech’s which could be a good counter.

Because of this Vlad Grid was perfect - it can sit in the daily quest server while you tick up money and defend your centrals and then is ready for a score whenever you pull a Sandbox or Beale - most of my scores involved Vlad grid and it was a great outing for the new card.

The format as a whole I found a lot of fun, in both the deck building and all the games today - There was a nice element of building around a specific card in the deckbuilding stage which reminded me of the restricted cards on the NAPD list and is a style of deckbuilding I really enjoy. The games were all tense, often pretty tight and had the excitement of not knowing exactly what you would be playing against (unless you made it obvious as hell by playing ACME!)

Thanks to all my opponents on the Day - Shorty, Knorpule3000, Seebasss and Armin Firecraker and huge thankyou to Vesper for organising and running the tournament - check out the replay here - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1451980732