Sisyphus Burns (9th at Americas)

(re)Genesis

A screenshot was shared in the TAI breaker discord of DeeR playing a deck with Holo-Man, Regenesis, and Sisyphus. The idea was to triple ice archives, install holo-man in its root, and then when a regenesis window presents itself move the holoman over to the remote at the start of the turn and fast advance the Regenesis and add Sisyphus to the score area. I got lost in the sauce pretty quickly, and shared the idea with MulganDragon and we started cooking. For a while, I tried to make it a grinder deck using Brasilia Grid to derez Anemones, but that didn't work with any consistency. DeeR's core idea did work consistently though, so we decided to hone in on that and play 3x holo.

Hosh??

Scoring a Sisyphus puts you on easy street against runners with off-meta breaker suites. However, against the turbine rigs that reg hoshikos have, the Sisyphus tax is usually only 3 credits. That's not enough to tax 'em out. So, we looked for a solution, and the card that came up was Helheim Servers. If the runner runs a server with Helheim and you pitch your hand, your Saisentan just got +10 strength and the runner has to deal with it twice. Don't have the credits? Welp, guess you die.

Other less important slots

Snare: Good when we're sometimes forcing net damage, makes the runner want to jack out, is generally annoying.

Sadaka: Kills Twinning or the twinning-charger, as well as DJ Steve.

Mlinzi: The more I play this deck, the more I realize that it wants to be Loki Ag. This was an astute suggestion by MulganDragon. Perhaps, in a more optimized Sisyphus/Helheim Deck, this is a 2x or 3x.

Boto: Feeble attempt at a tech card for Arissana. Is an okay ice though.

Rashida: Feeble attempt at a tech card for Arissana. Is an okay asset though. (reason there is only 1 rashida was because most of the time I'm just using the remote as somewhere to move holo to FA regenesis, and I'm only heavily protecting centrals, moving holo away from the central on the turn I want to FA the regenesis. clot shapers demand a change in play pattern towards using the remote so having a one-of good remote card seemed good).

Bringing deck to ACC

Good corps were scarce, so even though this deck's matchup spread and general goofiness were unappealing, it was probably the best deck I could bring that I had built. Okay that was a bit of a lie, the goofiness was appealing.

I was happy to play it into Reg Hosh and aggressive runners preying on the corps trying to rush Hosh out, but I knew that I had to dodge control and lobi/orca shapers in order to get far. The lobisomem and orca breaker suite is incredibly hard to tax out as jinteki and can get set up with spark of inspiration really quickly: usually they can run archives to deny the regenesis scores w/o breaking a sweat. Likewise, control shapers with clot force a remote pivot, a pivot that the deck, with no defensive upgrades aside from Helheim, really doesn't want to make.

Overall at ACC I went 3-2, beating 2 Esa's and a Deep Dive Sable in Swiss and losing to Hoshiko in Swiss and WT Ari in the cut. I was able to score Regenesis/Sisyphus in all my wins, but none of my losses, and it was always enough to carry me across the finish line.

Sisyphus in action: https://www.jinteki.net/replay/eac07c7c-4b8f-440e-8b28-8e10494be9ea

The loss against Hosh was a really good game, and the final turn was especially gnarly and was winnable by me if I had realized the line that analyzechris was going for. I put the replay below. Will not spoil further.

https://www.jinteki.net/replay/50dbc1ea-e3c7-4aa6-8e77-865567a3d72b

The loss against my teammate Augustus was not as interesting: I just got controlled to death by World Tree after being unable to defend my centrals despite icing all them on turn one. We had practiced this matchup, and knew pretty much how it would go.

Closing

Helheim/Sisyphus is a filthy combo, and I look forward to building more with it in the future. If there is a Jinteki deck that is happy to score sisyphus early in the remote without any tricks, that would be the best home for it. Based on my testing, I don't think you can just stuff this into the Ag glacier shell. If that seems hype to you though, try it out, I do have a track record for trying to be too fancy in my deckbuilding.

Anyways, was pretty neato top-cutting another continental. I feel like I'm somehow becoming a consistent player which is cool. Shoutouts to the TAI breakers for all the practice and memes. And shoutout to MulganDragon as always for building this kind of nonsense with me.