Skull FA (4-0-1 / 4th in swiss @ Summer Showdown)

Ah, the irony of not expecting anything out of a big tournament, making plans conflicting with the top cut and then proceeding to finish 4th in swiss and having to drop. C'est la vie.

This is the corp I took to the absolutely amazing Summer Showdown. It's a friendly neigbourhood fast-advance corp that will send someone to check your flat for gas leaks if you decide to be rude and interfere.

This deck is honestly probably just OK in the meta. I play it mostly because it is a lot of fun and really did not expect the showdown to go so well for it.

Game plan:

The game plan is fairly straightforward - wheel agendas out of HQ either with the help of our good friend Mortimer or some rainforest relocation. In general, apart from the first Eminent or two, the agendas should never stay on the game board for any amount of time.

This deck can play both quite fast against slower decks like shapers, creating an early remote to push out Eminent, followed by early Plutus and closing the game out fast with slashes, or more glacier-y with heavily icing centrals with very strong or cost-effective ice and then FAing from hand through slashes against something like crim. That said, this deck folds hard against good-stuff crim with Hermes. With 13 agendas and the general FA plan, our ice all gets bounced and we are in a world of pain. I was very lucky to not meet any during the showdown.

Card explanations:

• Plutus - The flashies and most fun card in the deck with a hefty rez cost. Generally, it is better to pay for the rez with cards out of hand, because even a single point agenda can be crucial, be it for the point or a clutch dragon rez and having cards is bin is better for plutus anyway. There are three operations in the deck that allow us to FA with Plutus via a free install or click. It's generaly not great to rez plutus too early, because then it just falls to pinholes or not enough ice on it's server. The ideal time to rez is when we have enough FA tools in the bin and trashing it would be very expensive due to ice on the server and ideally a Mahkota. When rezzed, the game should be on a clock - spend every turn scoring an agenda or digging for more if there are none in hand. While it also provides a good way to constantly make money, scoring is first priority, as the deck's late game is not that great against effective breaker suites.
• Slash and Burn Agriculture/Spin Doctor - Absolutely key cards in the deck, even more so than the Plutus. There are quite a few games when keeping plutus on board is not simple and that's where these babies come in. We are able to score every single agenda from hand with these (except another slash and burn ... that said, double slashing a slash is the proper way to close out a game) and we absolutely should. Playing them generaly requires either sufficiently iced archives or having a Spin Doctor available for a rescue. The obvious way is to have one stick on board for a turn, but double slashing an Off the Books allows us to summon one immediately. Other than that, we can also Red Level Clearance a spin on board clicklessly and then slash an agenda or have one in the bin with the archives iced by an Ablative Barrier. We should absolutely be liberal with the slashing - it is often much safer to stick a spin into the remote and then just slash from hand the next turn. Also, sometimes it is worth it to slash out an Above the Law to get rid of an important resource like Bankhar, Noodle Man or Twinning, even if it means giving the runner 2 points.
• Measured Response - A plan B for when the runner is way too aggressive. We are able to play quite fast and our ice can be pretty taxing, which can both lead to runner being low on money and/or cards. Sometimes, it is completely fine to play for tempo if we have Plutus ticking, just to slow the runner down while we score. This card dows not provide a win very often, but always requires some amout of playing around from the runner which is valuable in and of itself.
• Red Level Clearance - Low-key the best card in the deck. The most versatile tool we have. The games generally get to the point that remote is dead and HQ/RND are fully locked and we are in 5 point hell. RLC is the card that allows us to recover. Clicklessly drawing 2 (up to 3 with Plutus up and Zwicky trigger) is the way we find our last needed agendas or slash and burns. Apart from the draw, it also enables clickless install of spin/ice when scoring, which is wonderful.
• Peer Review - Mostly for Plutus scoring. Nice little bit of click compression - credits, Zwicky draw and install. The funny thing with this in Zwicky is that you get to draw after revealing and before installing, sometimes allowing for an unexpected install into the remote. The slot used to be Greasing the Palm, but the extra credit and one less influence made me end on Peer. Also, the reveal is fun.
• Petty Cash - Extremely useful in Zwicky due to the clickless draw. Petty + RLC allows for a clickless draw 3, which can be very clutch end game.
• Key Performance Indicators - Nice and versatile little modal. Most often used for the advance + install ice as a help against Hermes.
• Anthill Excavation Contract - Nice bit of early money and draw that also makes us very happy if it gets pinholed. Every Anthill pinholed is a Plutus saved.
• Mahkota Langit Grid - A bit of a weird include that I landed on when looking for an upgrade for Logjam or Armed Asset Protection(when I still played it here). The increase in trash cost messes with the runner math just enough to be annoying. It sometimes allows unrezzed T1 spins to survive uniced on the table in order to safely T2 slash an Emminent for a fast Biawak which is cute.
• Biawak - The best ice in the deck and the prime target for Eminents. We should generally aim to have one on RND and HQ as our centrals tend to leak quite a lot.
• Ablative Barrier - Only here to be put on archives to insta-deliver a trashed spin for Slash and Burn rescues.
• Syailendra - The goal of this ice is to tax the runner of both money and cards, making our Plan B more dangerous. Most runners will allow this to fire as it's very annoying to break with anything. It also provides a bit of chip damage to help against Deep Dive decks.

Potential Changes:

• An alternative agenda suite to mitigate the very high density of 13 agendas could be +2 Azefs -4 1-pointers or adding 3-pointers, which would decrease the density, but I feel would make the scoring much harder as we generaly dont have a good enough remote for scoring 5/3s. The Azef approach would open up slots, but would make running 3 Biawaks harder.
• Removal of Measured Reponse and pure focus on FA. This would probably mean removing Syailendras as well. The replacements would probably be 2KPIs and Afshars/Flyswatters/Hammer

The tourney was amazing as always. The Showdowns are always such a hoot! Thanks everyone for organization!