PART 1:

How the deck came to be..

I was pretty set on playing 'Brain Rewiring CI' for worlds, but as the event got closer I realized the extent of the hate that deck would face. Come saturday morning and I was freaking out about it - not that I get particularly nervous about stuff :P

Alex (@ff0x) to the rescue.

Earlier that week Alex, Philipp (@Heinzel) and I had played a handful of games of the Reversed Accounts CI deck against a typical Smoke one and CI was crushing. Philipp played his amazing Geist deck against it and that match-up was in his favor - go the only viable "Criminal". Discussion followed where Philipp and I came to the conclusion that Bryan Stinson fires are inevitable and farming Net Mercur bucks as Smoke and preserving your trash cash as Geist, since you could then still threaten Clot, access remotes and pressure centrals which made the CI deck much less terrifying. However the Reversed Accounts and Bryan interaction was very intriguing. That CI deck is obviously terribly terrifying, but Philipp's deck was just so good against it that I didn't consider just playing that build for the main event.

So saturday morning 3 copies of Reversed Accounts were fit into my already existing Hard-Hitting News BOOM! CI deck and Jakob (@Terrificy) was kind enough to play a test game as Smoke with Clone Chip on J-net against it. Things went well and the deck was ready to go.

PART 2:

Lots of ICE talk..

NEXT ice is best ICE (wow great capital-/small-letter word palindrome):

Only stealth breakers are actually good against NEXT ICE atm. and while Smoke has been the #1 most popular runner leading up to worlds, Hayley had proved to be the stronger of the two. So I was expecting to meet more Hayley and maybe some anarchs.

Silver has the downside that it often costs pretty much the same to break with paperclip regardless of sandburg. Silver also has the upside that it often costs pretty much the same to break with paperclip regardless of sandburg should you not have one rezzed. Inti decks needs processor to not be completely run over by even small str boosts and Lady decks are heavily taxed on counters - in fact I don't believe they can afford to run more than one server due to the nature of NEXT.

Fairchild 3.0 is an amazing piece of ice and doesn't need any further explanation.

Gold is expensive for what it does early game which is usually just 1 net. I still rez if I'm rich enough due to the nature of NEXT though. If it's not the only rezzed piece of NEXT or there is a program out, things are very different. At base str 4 it is already a very taxing piece of ICE that the runner just has to break, and aside from the stealth killers there is no good multi use answer to high str sentries. Na'not'k/(Femme)[/en/card/01026]/MK Ultra are all just horrific at breaking this and it only gets worse once sandburg is live.

Loki!!! if you play Fairchild as your restricted card why not play the 4th copy? If you play NEXT why not play the 7th copy? If you play ICE at all why not play an extra copy of the best rezzed piece of ICE you have on the board for the current situation? This is hands down the craziest piece of ICE in the game to me, and the interaction this has with mythic ICE is laughable and is not really good for the game in my opinion.

MoGo... three datapacks from now this one can be swapped for a copy of NEXT Sapphire, which will be amazing in CI if the ID is not banned by then.

Considerations went into a vanilla/rototurret sort of build, but this would have had less subroutines in general and therefore be much weaker to D4v1d, which this build is very resilient to.

PART 3:

Gameplan..

Like with most CI decks you want to play the big money operations and ICE the two main centrals during the first stage of the game.

Then depending on the match-up and game state you make that first remote for either sandburg or MCA or even RA. More often that not I do the sandburg first, but if you are against an anarch or a criminal just scoring out with elective can be the best line of play and it's also way way faster if you are on the clock.

Once this is done, there are pretty much two lines left one is MCA into score the other is MCA into RA to trigger Bryan. If you do not see an MCA in hand, double check. Then just install the RA and let the runner make the choice between running or not - losing most of their credits either way, poor runners.

The one copy of HHN and BOOM! severely impairs many runners' ability to get multiple access, which forces them to play a slow game like your own or kills them if they overextend. It is also by far the best win-con against the tag me anarch builds which otherwise do well vs CI.

PART 4:

6-1 at Worlds..

I had a first round bye and the runner game of the 7th round took the entire 65 minutes, so no corp game for that round either. In general my runner games were first and slow, so the corp games were often rushed and felt quite stupid. So I actually didn't really play the deck half as much as I would have liked.

The one loss was to @Spags who utterly destroyed me in round 2. He initially thought I was playing BR and, much to my amusement, ditched both his Inti and Gordian. Then he landed an Info Sifting run with Femme through Gold and Fairchild which didn't amuse me as much :D I checked and Crisium was the very last card in the deck - the final score of that game was 18-0, ouch :P

The deck killed people and scored out roughly an equal amount of times.

It is featured in the first round of Top16 which can be found here: https://go.twitch.tv/videos/187967256

• Cheers everyone