Punitive Glacier (1st Place Richmond, VA Store Championship)

(The runner counterpart to this deck is here)

This deck was undefeated on the day (5-0 in Swiss, 2-0 in double elim) in a field of 21 players, mostly winning by flatline, but it did score out twice. The basic gameplan is to turtle up in centrals until assembling 2x Punitive Counterstrike or Punitive + Archived Memories, then allow the runner to start getting accesses for a modest fee. Eventually they find an agenda, and you splat them.

Sometimes the Punitive plan doesn't work: the runner scores too much before your Punitives are ready, they have Plascrete Carapace, Punitive #1 hits I've Had Worse (though not if the score was Government Takeover, haha), or the runner hits Punitive #2 from your hand with Utopia Shard (this happened during double elim). In this case, you have to go to plan B: scoring in a remote server. That's the main purpose for Adonis Campaign, Aggressive Secretary, and the upgrades. It's tough to keep a determined runner out, and it's dead obvious when you're moving to score a 5/3 or 9/6, so you really have to build up a powerful server. Off the Grid is either a poor man's Caprice Nisei or a deterministic Caprice Nisei, depending on your point of view. Since there are two Crisium Grids in here anyway as Eater hate, Off the Grid is actually pretty reasonable: forcing the runner to crack your Curtain Wall on HQ twice and trash Crisium before they can even start on your remote tower is a pretty tall order!

Archived Memories is an all-star in this deck. It helps you assemble double Punitive very early in the game, it can function as an economy operation (Archived -> Oversight AI -> Curtain Wall is still a very efficient clicks to credits conversion), and it recurs Caprice and Off the Grid when it's time to score out. This deck actually started life as a Blueshin No Grid deck (3x Mushin No Shin and 3x Archived Memories) but I didn't like how dependent that deck was on drawing Mushin at the right time. I was very impressed by how well Archived Memories held the deck together though, which is why pieces of that deck are still present.

Sometimes things don't come together as you'd like, but you can still pull things out. In the grand finals of the tournament, I got a very weird draw: I had to start with Wormholes on R&D and HQ and use Oversight on one of those because they were the only ice I could find other than Ice Wall (Oversight -> Wormhole is still a better double than Celebrity Gift!). The enemy MaxX was being very conservative and stockpiled money with burst econ backed by Kati Jones since I had flatlined that player during the Swiss. I installed Jackson Howard behind an Ice Wall and started drawing, quickly finding Government Takeover and all three Punitives. I left GT in Archives, but the runner didn't bite. After he got his Corroder out, he went for Jackson, and I let him pay to trash because I had drawn a second. I played the second Jackson and kept drawing, and when he ran this one I activated it to shuffle in the first Jackson and the GT. I still hadn't found much in the way of ice, but I did draw into Executive Boot Camp and another Jackson, so I let the runner pay to trash those from the remote as well. I found another Oversight AI, so in the interest of continuing to money up while I had nothing better to do, I oversighted the Wormhole on R&D again, when the runner made his move. He dropped a Clone Chip to pick up a D4v1d that had been trashed by MaxX's identity, as well as an Imp from the grip. He ran R&D, using a single D4v1d counter to trash my Wormhole, and proceeded to access...Government Takeover? RUH ROH. He had already seen that I had a Punitive Counterstrike in HQ, and with one click remaining he couldn't get ahead of me on money. After much deliberation he decided to run HQ and hope to hit either the Punitive or perhaps an agenda. He let out a huge sigh of relief when he did manage to Imp a Punitive...unfortunately for him, the rest of my hand contained two more Punitives (and no agendas). FOOMP.

Flex spots: the assets (other than Jackson, obviously) and the upgrades can all be rearranged to taste, and I didn't find Errand Boy to work out as well as I had hoped. That should probably change back to Caduceus, but you can rearrange the rest of those slots as you like to suit your tastes/metagame. If Valencia Estevez is a problem, put in Elizabeth Mills and another Executive Boot Camp or two to disable the bad publicity. I played some versions with 1x Komainu which no one expects and can really ruin a runner's plans if they facecheck it early, or sometimes you can outright flatline the runner with a well-timed Shinobi. I wouldn't fault you for leaning on The Root to money up for the glacier plan, though it always felt clunky to me (fun trick: if the runner doesn't let you use your Root credits in a turn, use them to rez Crisium Grid then reinstall the Crisium).