NBN Mutate (2nd place at DoK's Winter Tournament II)

This deck screams to be tried out for laughs on jnet. Well done on your tournament placing and on the laughs in the deck and tournament description.

@2sj Thank you!

If you are playing the deck for laughs on jnet, I'd probably keep the Self-Destruct. It's gotta happen eventually, right?

Proof that NBN can just play whatever the fuck cards it wants and still win =P

On a more serious note, awesome job on the tournament placement! Looks like a fun deck.

Also, kinda funny that you completely bombed the first of 3 rounds, and the bye got you in the top 4 cut anyhow. How big was this thing?

@Saan You aren't wrong. Astroscript almost seems better post-MWL because a lot less people are slotting the clot™. Maybe I just got lucky and nobody had it when they needed it, but I feel like the increased influence cost of Clone Chip makes it a lot less of an appealing card for Anarchs.

There were nine players, so we did three rounds of swiss and a cut to top 4. There were so many splits this tournament which that made the cut really weird, and I got ridiculously lucky.

By the way, the MaXx deck was d1en's THE FUN ENDS HERE with an additional Inject instead of Femme. Many regrets, I think, as Turing would have been well enough handled by Force of Nature instead of Yog. My major failing was probably not aiming for a Wanton after the start of the Astro-train, but not having any agenda touches to swap away your token hurt badly.

I tried out the Mutate/Heritage Committee combo for a second before I remembered that Eliza's Toybox was a card. To your mind, is there an advantage to Mutate/Heritage a committee over Eliza's Toybox that goes beyond the fun of the jank? In my albeit limited experience with it, I found that at best, I was able to set up and fire the combo twice per game, and it took so much time that it was just not a viable option for the core competency of a deck. Obviously you had some success with it, though. Congrats.

'I went and got some FroYo.

This was the key to my success. The deck went undefeated after eating FroYo.'

This killed me

@Teveran I thought your line was very reasonable. You saw a lot of cards on R&D. Finding an agenda there would have been a great way to stop the train. There were so many things that went my way Sunday, and that was one of them.

Things worked out so ludicrously favorably for me yesterday. It's not lost on me that in our friendly game it was definitely looking like you would come away with a win.

A Wanton Destruction might have been good. I had a Little Engine on HQ (behind a Pop-up Window) so it would have been hard to get in but of course not impossible. I had two or three agendas in hand.

Thank you for pointing me to the list, and good games! I really liked both of your decks.

Good games to you too. It's interesting that you say that you thought I would have won the casual game, because I felt that I was losing a lot of momentum.

Interestingly, with Eater, Little Engine only costs a net of 2 credits as long as I have at least seven. That would have probably been a much more productive use of the twelve or so I had, rather than blowing it on a single keyhole run through the Archer.

@HuskerDu Thank you! It was strawberry, for what it's worth.

@forktines Thank you for this question! I am in love with rezzing stuff for free and I have given this a lot of thought.

I don't think either Eliza's Toybox or Mutate is strictly better. Toybox is probably the better thing to do, but both have their relative strengths:

In favor of Mutate

The Mutate-Heritage combo is a lot more flexible from a click perspective. Having a spare click the turn you combo can be really nice. By contrast, when I play Toxbox, I find myself starved for clicks. It feels like there's not enough time to put things down, rez them, and protect everything I need to protect.

Since they are operations, Mutate-Heritage is a little harder to disrupt.

You get to play Heritage Committee, which is a fun card whether you are comboing off or not.

This is only a fringe benefit, but with Mutate, even without the combo, you can replace ice that for some reason you don't want anymore. Data Raven after the runner has decided to go tag me? Parasited ice on its last legs. Breath new life into it with Mutate.

In favor of Eliza's Toybox

Toybox lets you play your ice before you've decided whether you want to rez it with credits or rez it with Toybox. If you want to rez an Archer with Mutate, it means you can't place it in a server before hand.

Related to this, in addition to Mutates and Heritage Committees clogging up your hand, the ice you are hopping to rez for free can clog up your hand too. HQ is only so big! (Or is it?????)

Mutate-Heritage committee is a ridiculous influence requirement out of faction.

Toybox is repeated use. I think your estimate that you only Mutate about once or twice a game is not wrong. In the games I won, those Mutates were quite meaningful, though that is a very low sample size.

You need rezzed ice for Mutate.

Toybox can rez non-ice like Corporate Town.

All in all, the flexibility is probably the biggest thing in favor of Mutate. Sometimes I just feel really contrained trying to bet Toybox to work on the table.

At some point, I wouldn't mind jamming them both together in a CI deck. I really love free Janus 1.0s and Wotans.

@Sanjay "Since they are operations, Mutate-Heritage is a little harder to disrupt."

Cyber-racists ruin everybody's fun.