Smoke and Silver Bullets (1st Place, Wasteland Games SC, Atl

Hi all!

This was the runner deck I took to the wasteland store champs on 1/29/2017. It went 5-1 on the day, only losing to a Palana Foods in the first round when i could not set up my rig and could not find Sac Con to deal with Batty + Grail. Quorum was legal for this tournament but I chose not to use any cards from that pack.

You can watch me pilot the deck against HB and Palana in the finals at:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/118266803 (at around the 6 hour and 15 minute mark)

Card Choices:

I felt going to 41 cards was fine, especially if there were some net damage decks. (I didn't encounter any.)

1 Astrolabe & 1 Akamatsu: I wanted more MU because sometimes my rig is almost assembled and I'm just missing 1 piece but that would put me over limit to throw out an SMC to tutor for the missing breaker. Also, overwriting a Cloak for a Clot doesn't ever feel that great.

I chose not to run Sifr because the stealth rig breaks everything so efficiently. The only ice that would be problematic are big barriers, and with most people running Sifr, I didn't expect many big barriers. And luckily, i didn't see any!

The Plascrete Carapace is in because #Boom is still a threat. A single RDI is included because I have no other multiaccess other than #Indexing.

Many smoke decks I see run 2 Net Mercur, and I think you need 3. The card is one you want out in every game. I've found that the games that I don't see Net Mercur, I have a much harder time and can't put pressure on.

Sac con is included for 2 reasons: 1) clot threat for FA decks, and 2) I expected some people to run the Palana Grail deck that focuses on trashing programs with Batty.

Atman was included to get past a scoring remote hidden behind a Mother Goddess. That never happened on the day, and I actually never installed Atman. I am glad I included it though.

The rest of the card list is pretty standard for smoke. I'll be happy to answer any questions!

Matchups:

R1: vs Palana Grail (Loss). Could not get set up fast enough, and could not find Sac Con. I could only run on servers that had no upgrades for fear of program trash. My opponent figured this out and scored in a remote almost with no contest. It was real fast.

R2: vs NBN Making News (Win). My opponent could not find ice to protect her servers, so I indexed and found 4 points off RnD in the first turn. It was a great jank deck that included Aryabhata Tech and Macrophage, so my opponent made money while I face planted macrophage. I was hit with a hard hitting news, but I believe my opponent forgot I could spend money off Net Mercur for anything, so I matched strength and took no tags. I money'd up and ran RnD until I got 7 points.

R3: vs HB ETF FA with NEXT ice (Win). Sac Con and Clot saved the day here. NEXT can be pretty taxing for smoke, but my opponnent made too many servers with sexy bot campaigns that I had free temujin runs on. Again, ran RnD until I hit 7 points.

R4: vs HB ETF FA (Win). Basically the same as round 3.

These next two games are on the stream I linked above, so I won't go into too much detail.

Winner's Finals: vs HB ETF FA. Ran Rnd each turn, found agendas. Top decked 3 of four agendas.

Winner's Grand Finals: vs Palana Food Grail (my round 1 opponent). Having sac con really saved me here, as my opponent did not want to do the marcus batty play. I contested a caprice remote with a TFP in it bidding zero for an entire turn to make him go broke and eventually stealing. Ran Rnd for the last agenda.

Thanks for reading!