Siphon Whiz - 1st Place CT Regionals Undefeated

A pretty standard Whizzard build these days. This deck went undefeated on the day of tournament, earning me a first place finish. My corp deck can be found here.

Round 1 vs. Replicating Perfection
Your deck is built to kill asset spam decks. Keep them poor with siphon, trash exactly one asset per turn using whiz bucks, and once they're dirt poor and can't afford to spam assets, the corp will get to the point where they start clicking for credits. At this point, keyhole for agendas and recur siphons when they start accruing more than 5 credits. My victory was very quick due to the HQ ice being Miraju, which you don't need any icebreakers to get through. I never installed an eater all game since they never had the money to rez the R&D ice. (Edit: On second thought, I think it was a cortex lock on R&D that they managed to rez long after my keyhole onslaught was underway, and I ended up installing the Eater to take one less damage, but I don't think I ever actually used it.)

Round 2 vs. Chronos Protocol
This was a deck designed to snatch your breakers from hand and ark lockdown them away for good. However, the identity's ability never once fired. Early on I played conservatively and siphoned them into oblivion once I found an Eater. Keyhole secured me the victory. Stealing Obokata Protocols with exactly four cards in hand and an I've Had Worse really makes the cost to steal not that bad. For good measure I also played an Employee Strike when I drew it, but the game was all but won when I did.

Round 3 vs. Sync
This was a Sync Boom! deck and was one of the most fun matches of the day. You can absolutely not afford to get tagged early from their HHN. I kept a hand with two siphons, but it was maybe between turns 5 and 7 before I played one. My early turns were played very conservatively, drawing cards to find Eater, and gaining money as I drew into economy, making sure to not run unless I had a money advantage and at least 12 credits. Once I found Eater, the Siphon assault was on. I quickly put them to 0 credits and made sure to keep them there. I Keyholed quite a few times before getting all the agendas I needed in Archives, but luckily I trashed 2 of 3 jacksons, 1 Boom!, and some ICE with a rez cost of 0. There is a very fine line you walk in this matchup. Once you go tag me, you cannot let them start a turn with 3 credits, or even 1 credit if you have 4+ cards in hand (due to sweeps week, Boom!). I found my plascrete eventually, but by then the game was pretty much over. Hold onto your Mars for Martians unless you absolutely need it. It is insurance against Closed Accounts. It never happened to me, but I still held onto this all game, even when I was at 15+ tags and it was so tempting (I ended the game with 21 tags). I never stole agendas until it was game to prevent EoI. My winning turn was keyholing the 6th agenda point into archives, account siphoning them down to 0 credits, and deja vu a mad dash and using it on archives. They were able to rez both ICE protecting the server (resistor into pop-up window) but I just paid for the trace and the one credit for pop-up so I could still access. This must be the one case where vanilla would have been better than a 21 strength resistor.

Round 4 ID into top 8.

My first round in top 8 was against someone who actually brought the same decks as me (IG and siphon whiz). They were higher seed than I, but I was Shocked! when they decided to corp against me since whiz has a favorable IG matchup. (Their whiz deck was actually pretty unique and cool; the main breaker was God of War and they used dean lister and obelus for value.) This match I won very quickly. Their turn one was draw, install asset, ICE archives. I click one ran the asset and trashed it (hostile infrastructure). Not rezzing it when I ran easily lost them the game because I had siphon in my opening hand (I don't think they knew I was on siphon). After that closing out the game was elementary. It also helped that the top card of R&D was The Future Perfect and they couldn't pay for the psi game. For this matchup some things to keep in mind are that if you use eater to break a subroutine while running archives, you don't access any cards but you still flip them all over. Great for when you want to trash assets and not hit Shock!. Second, never play your Hacktivist Meeting, it actually helps them a lot. I single-handedly beat a Frantic Coding Whizzard in top 8 with IG because I was able to rez my assets to put the one they were running out of trash range due to the hacktivist.

My next two rounds in top 8 I played corp and won both.

In grand finals, I had a rematch against a siphon whiz player I beat with IG second round of top 8 because they were too aggressive and proceeded to hit Snare! into Fetal AI. They were much more conservative this time and ended up decking me, forcing the game two.

They played HB moon, which is a pretty great matchup. They played an ELP and a naked moon in a remote their second or third turn. I used my dirty laundry to run the server, trash the moon, and make some money. Save your dirty laundries for when they have many assets and/or ELP. It is such positive tempo and is wasted early in the game netting a measly 3 credits for running archives. Once I got an MKUltra in the bin, I was pretty free to click one siphon without the fear of architect. They rezzed a fairchild 3 over HQ which I clicked through and put them to one or two credits after taking their five. ELP actually does next to nothing against this deck as is evidenced by the fact that the next turn, I proceeded to click one spooned their fairchild 3, and then accessed a GFI, trashing their ELP. Within a few turns I had keyhole out, and their R&D ICE was just an architect, which MKUltra got right through. They meanwhile had to setup more protection for HQ after their only ICE had been destroyed, and lost a lot of tempo that otherwise could have been spent spamming assets. They had to use their Friends to bring back the fairchild 3 over HQ (and also their trashed moon) which is not ideally what you use Friends for. I ended up getting pretty lucky and saw two agendas off of 3 or 4 keyhole runs and had the mad dash in hand for the win.

For housekeeping, the tournament had 30 people, and with the ID my record was 6-2 before top 8 (only losses I experienced today were with my corp, once in round 1 and once in the grand finals). I still highly recommend IG for the current meta, and for as long as glacier doesn't become a huge part of the meta, account siphon spam is a great call. I think 4 or 5 of the top 8 was on siphon whizzard, and another 1 or 2 were on Sifr whizzard with Bloo Moose. There was one Leela in top 8 and most surprisingly to me was a Nasir player! Corps were all over the place: a Titan Transnational, 2 IG spam decks (including mine), Hasty CI, HB moon, and I'm not entirely sure what else.

One mistake I see my opponents making is that if I let a trace fire during an account siphon run, you can boost it using all your credits (assuming you have 5 or less) so I gain zero money. One time I allowed a trace on IP block to fire because I didn't care about getting tagged and they only had 3 credits so I cared more about getting them to zero than I did about the 6 credit gain. Once I saw them forget to boost the trace, I abused this the rest of the match, essentially saving one credit every siphon run.