The Magical Equivalent of Zero (1st Place @ Petrie's S1)

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CrimsonWraith 3638

1st place Runner deck for the much belated 2014 Season One Tournament at Petrie's Family Games on August 23rd, 2014. Technically a true tie for first place with matching prestige and strength of schedule. Cards were legal up to Upstalk.

I hit a wall on the Runner side of things with Upstalk's release and have been exploring a lot of new archetypes. Nasir is my particular favorite right now, but I have been having a really hard time keeping games short with him and didn't feel comfortable bringing my build into the tournament setting. So I playtested several decks this week and particularly enjoyed GreedyGuts' Rincewind Whizzard build, and sleeved it up for play today with two slight adjustments. My inexperience with the deck showed, but I still stumbled to a 3-1 record with it, beating NBN Making News and Near-Earth Hub decks while dropping a game to a Replicating Perfection glacier build.

My biggest issue with the deck is consistency. The centerpieces of the deck are Desperado and Security Testing, and I rarely found either in my opening hand despite aggressively mulliganing for it. That said, it was a ton of fun to play when it worked, and it was nigh unstoppable once things were clicking.

5 comments
24 Aug 2014 wswan

The thought of gaining a credit right before accessing an Asset with a trash cost of 4 or 5 to trash for 0 or 1 cred is pretty brilliant. And funny.

26 Aug 2014 GreatGreedyGuts

Ah! I'm so glad to hear this deck did well for you at a tournament, and even just that you gave it a whirl!

Consistency is definitely the biggest issue -- I'm tempted to yank the Express Deliveries for a third Desperado, but they smooth out the draw so often. I'd do it when Inject comes out, but... there are some other issues there, of course, like having to burn Deja Vu on non-virus cards.

One thing that I've found helps, and I don't know how much this matches your experience with it, is not worrying too much about getting Desperado or Security Testing. Certainly you want them, and if a hand is otherwise mediocre but has either of those I'd be inclined to keep it, but having a solid economy for the opening turns is more valuable, to me. I don't mind having Desperado or Security Testing as a mid-game draw particularly, even if that's not as nice as both of them from turn one.

That said, yeah, consistency is a real big issue for the deck, even though I feel like most of the cards are very solid. I've definitely found, as I play it more, that I'm becoming more comfortable with a wider variety of openings than I first assumed I needed. Glacier decks are definitely the hardest ones to deal with well, once they get set up, I probably mulligan most heavily against RP and ETF because of that.

Well, that's probably more than enough rambling from me. I'm glad this worked out for you, I'd love to hear more about your experiences with it and what changes you'd make. I'm really curious what the adjustments you made were, if they were just the Ice Carver/Djinn changes or if there's something else in the list that I'm missing?

26 Aug 2014 CrimsonWraith

Thanks for your input! It was a really fun deck to play. The only changes from your original deck I made were Ice Carver and Djinn for a Datasucker and a Dirty Laundry. I did try dropping the Cyberfeeders for 2 Demolition Runs and a Vamp, but I missed the Cyberfeeders and put them back in. In my current build, I dropped a Knight and an Imp for 2 D4v1ds.

27 Aug 2014 GreatGreedyGuts

Same changes as me, then, yeah, excepting the D4V1Ds. The cyberfeeders are so useful, I'm not surprised you kept them. I've wanted a swap for Demo Run for a while, it's just so powerful with Medium and Nerve Agent, but it's never quite worth it, it seems. The Big Box is going to make this sooo much harder, too.

27 Aug 2014 GreatGreedyGuts

Same changes as me, then, yeah, excepting the D4V1Ds. The cyberfeeders are so useful, I'm not surprised you kept them. I've wanted a swap for Demo Run for a while, it's just so powerful with Medium and Nerve Agent, but it's never quite worth it, it seems. The Big Box is going to make this sooo much harder, too.