Uninspired FTT Strike Val (2nd place NZ Nationals; 4-4)

"Oh you're on val? Is it strike or film critic? is it FTT or Indexing? Okay I basically know the list now."

This list is pretty close to bog standard really. It was taken almost entirely from Eric Caoili (@eric_c)'s "The friends we make a long the way" deck-list and modified a few times to personal preference.

This was my weaker deck on the day, although I think overall I let it down more than it let me down. The overall record was:

R1: Argus. Win.

R2: Skorpios. Lose.

R3: Titan. Win.

R4: Wishbone EdTech. Lose.

R5: Wraparound Jua EdTech. Lose.

After R4 and R5 I identified plays that I should've taken if I'd been a bit smarter in my plays that would've lead to winning those matchups, so I feel like it was my fault that I lost. In R2 I literally drew no icebreakers at all in the top 25 cards (and Rebirth as card 23 or so) and just lost to pure hard rush. Although I feel like I should've played these better and was kicking myself about it, I still ended up #1 in Swiss after these games due to my Corp deck going undefeated.

In the cut, I kept wanting to corp and kept going against opponents who had run as much as I had, only for the random dice to make me run. My cut approach was corp, run, run, run. The end results were:

C1: HHN Boom Titan. Lose.

C2: Wraparound Jua EdTech. Win.

C3: Wishbone EdTech. Win.

In C1, I just completely misread what my opponent was doing, thinking it was an "all in fast advance rush" Titan deck as has been popular in Australia recently. Unfortunately on top of my misread they happened to have CV + Boom! in their opener, so going down to 1c turn one was a huge mistake and my attempts to run HQ to hit the boom whiffed. C2 was an even worse repeat of R5 for what could go wrong, and I probably didn't deserve to win this and I only got in on some opponent misplays. C3 was mostly a repeat of R4 but this time I made the right move in the end.

My main modifications to this list were 2x Turntablewhich I think is a huge deal in the meta right now. Keeping the Aumakua over the Gbahali, and even dropping a Employee Strike and Datasucker to keep the Aumakua at 2x (and having a 3rd Hacktivist Meeting for Scarcity). These changes make the Azmari EdTech matchup worse, but EdTech is one of this decks general strengths anyway, and this helps shore up other aspects of the field.

As a last minute change, I also removed the Mad Dash as I found it incredibly hard to actually use with the FTT combo. Many decks these days are some form of Glacier, so RNG Key + FTT lets you get one access where your bad pub + 3 credits gives you a tempo positive access, however you can't be blindly Mad Dashing in these scenarios. That means its mostly only good on Remote Runs where you're also guessing about NGO and would often rather be playing Stimhack, or on big turning wheel splashes (where Omar and/or Stimhack might apply yet again). I'm not sure this cut was the right choice, but in my 17 or so games of testing with it in the deck I was never able to find a time to play it.