Belphegor's Blood Red Carpet (Stevenage GNK 2nd place)

Rahrhino 147

Come in, dear runner... Riches and glory await you!

Took this along with my Steve deck for a smoll GNK (5 players). While its performance was not exceptional, it's fun factor absolutely was.

Essentially, it has 26 cards which will make the runner sad on access (agendas count as the ID is PE), and a bunch of ice which will also reliably cause sadness. Force the runner to make the choice to run and die, or not run so you can FA out your 1/2 point agendas.

Tricks and win cons

Slow advance an Obokata behind a Data Loop when they are low on cards.
Fast advance your Philotic when they have a score area full of agendas, news teams and Shi.Kyus.
Shi.Kyu is great even if you don't put in enough to kill them. If you think they have something they need in hand just bid half of their hand size and they'll generally take the -1 point.
Generally you'll win through grinding the runner out. Don't be afraid to go slow and use preemptive to get those ambushes back into R&D.

Choices

Kakugo and Data Loop make accesses much more scary for the runner. Komainu because it is a win con pared with a House of Knives or Project Kusanagi counter. Anansi for Femme/Nexus/Logic Bomb.

News Team because runners generally take the -1 agenda point which makes your Philotic better.
Mwanaza... The inspiration for the deck. Force them to access all the spiky stuff!

Weaknesses

Shadow Net - They can forfeiting their -1 and 0 point agendas which hurts
Film critic - Bad for Obokata but is too slow to manage the sheer number of agendas you are packing. Also makes them more scared to float Snare/News Team tags so use that to your advantage.
Indexing - Always rough. Try to stack Data Loops and Kakugos on R&D to make the Obokata steal harder.
Levy - A lot of wins are though grinding the runner out which you're unlikely to pull of against Levy. Choose early to play either very fast or very slow and stick to that plan.
I've Had Worse - Actually not terrible to hit one of this to have them end on more than 5 cards. Makes them discard which is as good as a mill.

4 comments
27 May 2018 naesseth

Great playing against you! (I was on Hayley and Titan)

Cheers, Christian

28 May 2018 Rahrhino

Hey Christian! Yeah, thanks for the tight games! Those Indexings hurt, for sure XD

28 May 2018 Saintis

Fun and very stressful to play against! (I was on MaxX and Titan). Could slot 1-2 Miraju to deal with Indexing. You could also slot a 1-of Chronos Project to deal with Levy and general recursion.

28 May 2018 Rahrhino

Hey @Saintis! Our match definitely led to some unusual decision making for both of us XD
After testing a little bit today I think simply stacking ICE (Data Loops and Kakugo on R&D to be a pretty reasonable counter. Miraju would be nice but I think I would struggle to find space for them considering they would be too much of a silver bullet. If I find everyone suddenly playing indexing I'd definitely reconsider.
Chronos is a solid shout though. I could probably take out the CVS for one and deal with clot locks by baiting with Project Kusanagi.
One thing about our game is that you had 6 agendas in your score are and I had Philotic in hand. You did very well to run every turn to turn off Shipment from Tennin and unfortunately I couldn't find my Biotic Labour quick enough before the Maw sniped it :P That was a really great game, very well played :D