Oppression (Argus 24/7 Rush/Kill)

A little over a month ago, I took this deck to a Store Championship and got 8th place with it. It was a risky, weird Argus with no Jackson Howard and the 24/7 News Cycle/Posted Bounty kill combo in it. It did pretty well overall, but now that I've had time to think it over there were a lot of duds and the deck needed a few more weeks of fine tuning. This is what I came up with, and I think it's about as far as I can currently take the concept.

Turns out Housekeeping is what the deck really needed. It is an absolutely demoralizing card. Argus' big strength is that it forces the runner to slow down and lose tempo drawing/removing tags. Housekeeping pushes that to the next level, sometimes costing the runner an entire turn just to set up for a run, by which time you have either a window to score or time to set up more defenses. There are very few runners out there that don't suffer from this card.

Which leads me to News Hound, an incredible piece of ICE for Weyland. It's cheap, it's taxing, it tags, and with Housekeeping out, it has stopping power. All great for a rush/flatline deck. I think it's fair enough without a current that I don't really miss Data Raven. Data Raven is really easy to play around and is probably the safest ice in the game to face check, which never makes me feel good about spending 4 creds to rez it. 2 creds for a card that is as efficient as Hunter normally, and turns into a super ICE with a current is a great deal.

24/7 News Cycle/Posted Bounty isn't nearly as janky as it sounds. I've landed it quite a few times. The great thing is that it doesn't require any extra money and let's you focus on doing what you want to do early on anyway: scoring agendas. Posted isn't nearly as much of a liability when it's taxing to steal and you don't have to worry about faking the runner into thinking it's a Junebug dud. Just score it for later.

There is absolutely no recursion in this deck. If that makes you feel uncomfortable, feel free to make room for Jackson's. It shouldn't be too hard. Personally, I never felt like he was very useful here. He usually caused more floods than he solved and I can find my combo pieces without him. Besides, flooding in Argus is a lot easier to play around than any other ID.

There are some flex slots. Contract Killer and Shattered Remains could be switched out for meta specific pieces. The agenda suite can be adjusted, but I really think it sings the way it is. False Lead is really good in Argus, but I like Future is Now for being able to assemble the Scorch combo or grab a Housekeeping. I thought about adding a Paywall Implementation as a way of turning News Hounds on more easily. Zealous Judge is going to be great for this deck once it drops.

The rest is usual Weyland rush/flatline. It's best to primarily focus on scoring out, while slowly assembling your flatline pieces. If it's not coming together, you lose pieces or the runner has multiple plascretes, just let it go and focus on scoring. This deck scores out fairly well. But 24/7 has landed me more than a few surprise wins.

Always happy to hear feedback!