SOCR 7 1st in Swiss, 2nd in cut, Just Score It

This deck went 3-2 in Swiss and 2-0 in the cut. I played Azmari for week 1 of SOCR 7 and the switched when we were given the chance to do so under the new MWL.

Unlike my runner, this deck is a pretty straightforward pile of good cards with added synergy. Jinja, Arella, SportsMetal, and Successful Field Test all produce a lot of tempo, and of particular relevance to Surveyor, click-less installs that ignore (or reduce) install costs. This can quickly get out of hand, and the deck performs equally well as a rush deck as it does as a glacier deck.

However, since so much of this deck's power is tied up in scoring agendas, some draws can be awkward. You want to see Jinja as soon as possible so that you can maximize your click-less installs, and Arella is stronger the earlier you see her. One of the main reasons this deck is Purple instead of Yellow is so that you can abuse the absurd tempo of Rashid/UVC + Jinja. Even Green Level Clearance becomes very good when you're getting a free install from it some of the time.

The ice suite is largely just SOCR 7 good stuff: Surveyor is meta defining, Wall of Static costs Laamb 5, Demara 4, Sherman 4, Engolo (with Kit) 3, while only Battering Ram and Yusuf break it for a reasonable rate. Pop-up Window helps you take advantage of all of your free ice installs by being something you can always rez. Najja 1.0 is cheap and consistently taxing. Rototurret and Assassin take advantage of the awkwardness of killers in the format. Gatekeeper arguably underperformed as it's only okay against Engolo and Amina. Nevertheless, it is basically never worse than Enigma and can occasionally help get you click-less draws which means more Jinja installs.

When this deck lost it was usually because cards came out in the wrong order. Being a bit flooded is usually okay since the deck likes scoring for tempo reasons, but seeing all of your ice and agendas before Jinja and Arella is pretty bad. Overall it plays nicely and only struggles against the strongest runners, which is a pretty good place for a deck to be.

SOCR 8:

I chose Data and Destiny as my big box initially so that I could play GFI, but the new MWL made so that essentially I just had an Assassin big box. As a result, the transition of Terminal Directive from the core card pool to the status of big box will not hurt this deck much at all: Creation and Control is an abysmally bad corp box, and Data and Destiny is much less attractive if you can't play GFI and Surveyor. I suspect this will remain a top corp deck going forward, but I know I won't be playing it because I enjoy the challenge of building and tuning something new every season.

Big thanks to FightingWalloon for organizing such an awesome tournament and to all of my opponents for the great games of Netrunner!