Argus in Africa (5th Toronto SC)

This deck brought be to 5th place out of 20 players at the 401 Games Store Championship in Toronto, going 2-2 for the day.

The goal of this deck is to score out as fast as you possibly can while holding the threat of Hard-Hitting News + BOOM! Mother Goddess is there to rush out behind if you're not flooded. Guard can surprise both Sunny and Inside Job. Threat Assessment and Wake Up Call are both useful for when the runner trashes your traps.

Ark Lockdown is necessary to deal with all the Anarchs around, and can be helpful against Clone Chip Shapers.

The agenda suite is designed to always make sure you have money after scoring so you can rush out another one right after.

Game 1 was against Smoke. I rushed behind a Mother Goddess and played Hard-Hitting News to keep their money down. Most people assume you have the BOOM! in hand if you play HHN, so they will spend the turn clearing tags.

Game 2 was against Edward Kim. Again, I managed to score out behind a Mother Goddess without rezzing any other ICE.

Game 3 was against Valencia. I played this one a bit slower. It was 4-2 for me, so played Ark Lockdown on Black Orchestra and tried to rush out the last SSL behind a Hortum. 2 Injects later he found the second Black Orchestra and to get my agenda. I landed the Forced Connection trace, but I was 1 card off from drawing my BOOM! for the kill and after that I didn't have much of a scoring window any more.

Game 4 was against MaxX. Again I played slow, and MaxX played an Aumakua, rebirthing into Omar. I slow advanced a Hortum on my remote and a Mausolus on R&D and played Ark Lockdown on 2 copied of Black Orchestra. Byt my opponent managed to dig for Trope, pulled back his Femme to get into my scoring remote as I tried to finish off the game. A sad and lonely Ice Wall on HQ gave up my last agendas for the loss.

Overall I'm super happy to be able to bring Argus to a store championship and just barely miss the top cut, which ended up being my best tournament results so far. I've been playing this shell for a while and tweaking a little here and it does very well against slow runners, or anyone that doesn't have too much money. But it does struggle a bit against rich Anarchs.