Dinomite v2 (1st, Auckland Vagabond Store Championship)

This is an updated version of my Chronos Protocol winning decklist Dinomite. This was a smaller tournament (10 players) but there was quality competition and the deck performed well, dropping only one game. For a more detailed analysis of the deck check the original list. Here I’ll just cover the changes to the deck and how they performed on the day.

Honor and Profit

• +1 Planned Assault
• +1 Legwork
• -1 Account Siphon
• -1 The Personal Touch

These are the updates I recommend with the new Honor and Profit cards. Even going down to one copy of Account Siphon the deck will be able to play it just about as frequently thanks to three Same Old Thing and Planned Assault. It turned out that Legwork was my most frequent Planned Assault and Same Old Thing target. I ended up playing it in every game of the tournament.

In my first game against Cerebral Imaging I put on some early pressure to force him to rez ice and then landed an Account Siphon for the last of his credits. He was forced to click for credits and discard most of his hand, down to three cards. I then followed up with Planned Assault – Legwork to access everything in HQ, grabbing an NAPD Contract and then when I was surprised there weren’t more agendas, another NAPD Contract from the archives to win that turn. Think about how good Legwork was there. I knew there should be multiple agendas and probably would have run HQ four or five times looking for them, not that I could have gotten past his ice that many times before he stabilized.

Second game was another Cerebral Imaging deck. I punished her first turn Blue Level Clearance by grabbing 6 points off R&D with Indexing. I was looking to close it out with another Indexing and saw three agendas but wasn’t able to run again because of some surprisingly costly ice (more on that later). I buried the agendas but she was suspicious and managed to draw them all into hand in one turn. Planned Assault – Legwork, miss, Same Old Thing – Legwork, miss. Legwork was still solid here as each HQ run was costing 13 credits which would have been devastatingly expensive for single access. My opponent played it well and a few more expensive fruitless accesses gave me my only runner loss on the day.

Next up was HB: ETF and an opponent I’d never played before. I had no idea what he might be running and a deluxe expansion full of danger had just been released leaving me quite wary. I landed an early Legwork, partly to get an idea of his gameplan. Once again it accessed the entire HQ, trashing Ash, Melange and Red Herring. Worked out well I think, even this deck can’t afford to check every bluff in a HB remote. Same Old Thing – Legwork a few turns later but he saw it coming and countered me beautifully, Hudson 1.0 on HQ!

The Legwork in my final match against TWIY* was definitely the best of the day. My opponent had won several tournaments with Biotic Labour TWIY* but something was fishy about the Data Raven on HQ. I Modded out a Plascrete and had my suspicions confirmed when Legwork revealed Scorched Earth… and scored 5 points! It’s no surprise that a turn 3 or 4 Legwork works out consistently well. The usual Corp start will be to use say 5 of their first 10 cards to get a bit of economy and ice on their centrals. Remember there is an average of 0.4 agenda points per card they draw so after they play out their initial cards you’d expect 4 points to be in their HQ. It’s a great time to run, the problem is that their HQ will be iced and runners (and corps) know that you can throw the game away by doing repeated mildly taxing fruitless HQ runs instead of setting up a rig. Legwork is worth four or even five HQ runs making cost of breaking the ice negligible and you can immediately get back to rig building instead of wondering what else might be there.

Tuning

• +1 Same Old Thing
• -1 The Personal Touch

Here are a couple tuning changes to the engine I’d also generally recommend. Same Old Thing is a solid card in many decks for recurring Account Siphon, Indexing or Legwork, but when I started consistently using it for Test Run and Scavenge I realized you can’t have too many copies in the deck. The Personal Touch are now all gone, the Dinosaurus is enough. If 7 strength isn’t sufficient for your Morning Star then 8 probably won’t be either. The Personal Touch on Femme Fatale is great but now that she’s almost completely taken over the Dinosaurus you shouldn’t miss them too much. If your meta is very heavy HB consider keeping The Personal Touch.

Corroder Variant

• -1 Morning Star
• +1 Corroder
• +2 Self-modifying Code
• -2 Quality Time
• -1 Modded

These adjustments added consistency to the deck but at the cost of raw power. I’d consider this a variant rather than a strict improvement. It changes the deck’s strengths and weaknesses quite a bit. Your NBN and Jinteki matchups improve slightly with more speed and consistency. Taxing HB is certainly more difficult with a weaker rig. Against Weyland the deck is now much more vulnerable to Power Shutdown but can help Femme with giant barriers.

I knew two competitive players in our meta were experimenting with Weyland decks that had Hadrian’s Wall, one even had Curtain Wall with Oversight AI. You simply can’t get Morning Star over those, even if you bring it to 9 strength they can simply advance the ice. I was already keen to switch to Corroder for other reasons. Corroder brings Self-modifying code with it which also happens to be a great way to get Magnum Opus early, one of the deck’s major challenges. If SMC could take care of my barrier breaker it would leave Test Run/Scavenge for Femme and Torch. To make room I cut two Quality Time which were put in originally to dig hard for Magnum Opus. Modded is great with Morning Star and Quality Time, less so with SMC, so a copy of that was cut.

Overall I don’t think the switch to Corroder paid off for me in this tournament due to the amount of HB I faced. In the game I lost, after scoring 6 points with the turn 1 Indexing I sat back and prepared. I knew taxing myself for single accesses could let her back in the game and had seen a Rototurret with the Indexing. I needed to be able to deal with that and probably one of the four Ichi in her deck. I had Femme on a Dinosaurus, SMC, Indexing and ~23 credits prepared a few turns later. Ichi 1.0 (3 credits with Femme), Rototurret (2 credits with Femme) and a full strength Hive (4 to SMC Corroder, 6 to break). Unfortunately I had Femmed one of the Sentries so it didn’t save me any credits. A bit of a miscalculation on my part and I couldn’t afford to run it again that turn. After she got the three agendas in hand without giving me an opening my two Legwork runs had to get through Eli 1.0, Eli 1.0 (Femmed), Eli 1.0, Viktor 2.0. Morning Star would have dropped the cost of running HQ from 13 to 6 and of running R&D from 11 to 6. It was a bit of a worst case scenario but Eli 1.0 is currently one of the most popular pieces of ice in the game so it wouldn’t be uncommon. If it were just Morning Star vs Corroder I’d certainly take Morning Star but SMC is a great card and I think I’ll stick with these changes.

Safety

• +1 Deus Ex
• -1 Stimhack

There are many ways to die in Honour and Profit and Jinteki is on the rise. With the addition of SMC I also brought in a single Deus Ex for a little safety. Note it can also break Heimdalls to soften the switch to Corroder. I didn’t end up drawing it or fetching with SMC in any of my games. I also ran out of MU for the first time. In the final match I had to give up Femme to get my SMC down and grab Corroder for the game winning run. With Magnum Opus it might be a little tight on MU keeping a Deus Ex out, particularly since Inazuma makes it dangerous not to have your Codegate breaker ready. Feedback Filter is a better call if my meta turns hostile.

Stimhack also came out of the deck, brain damage didn’t seem like the best idea going into murky waters.

Spare Influence

• +1 Inside Job

That left me three influence for a final card. I think I made a mistake writing off several potential cards at two influence: Vamp, Grappling Hook, Nerve Agent, Parasite, perhaps a second Legwork or Planned Assault. Nordrunner’s Chaos Theory tech was Imp, a card I’m also fond of but there are a few reasons it doesn’t work as well in this deck: Indexing instead of Maker’s Eye, no Clone Chip, Magnum Opus means less spare MU and is itself already a great answer to high trash costs. Then I saw Circadia’s 1st place London Regional report where he mentions his CT opponent surprised him with an out of faction Inside Job. It’s certainly a solid card but Femme Fatale is similar which diminishes the surprise factor. Still, it’s very easy to think of situations where Inside Job is great. I think the problem is in reality I would very rarely grab it with Planned Assault or Same Old Thing which makes it hard to justify at 3 influence. Inside Job did snag me an agenda early on in one game when I didn’t have Test Run or SMC in hand but it never felt required. I suspect future testing might see this slot go to Legwork which has performed so well.

Great games at the tournament. My corp loss came to another Chaos Theory with Test Run/Scavenge that made some very clever adjustments to run 3 Oracle May, blind, with over 30 events. Less consistent (no Same Old Thing, event economy instead of Magnum Opus) and a bit dangerous (no Plascrete Carapace) but, when it works, as it did against me, the gain in speed is incredible.

I'll check in to answer any questions anyone might have, thanks for reading.