Protocol Perfection - 10th Place Colorado Regionals 2015

DaniusKang 40

When I sat down to start building for Regionals a few months ago, I tested a lot of different decks. The inspiration of Bloodlock and the release Predictive Algorithms had me itching to use Hostile Infrastructure as a way of taxing the runner in combination with other things. This is a long way from that deck, with, most notably, the card that inspired it gone. ELP is simply a more effective tax for this sort of deck in my opinion, and often once it is out and stays out for a few turns the runner gets locked out of the game. The staying out part is made easier by Daily Business Show, which spends the game tucking away agendas until I want them. The scoring server is classic RP, using Excalibur, Caprice, Ash, and Nisei to lock it up. The spin this deck puts on it is they will almost never trash these things with three Hostiles up, which was a situation that was surprisingly common. The same goes for Sundews and DBS.

The real surprise to me about Hostile was its interaction with Snare. For some reason, I never connected the dots until, in testing, runners were trying desperately trying to get an Agenda out of my hand but hit a Snare they couldn't trash. At that point, they either died on the second run from that Snare or Fetal, or they just stopped completely. When I noticed this, and how thin my deck often got, I went up to three to further discourage any nosy R and D shenanigans.

If there is one weakness of the deck, it is its slow start up time compared to most RP decks. With the right draw its fast enough, and it can survive most early onslaughts, but the lack of burst econ and a bad agenda flood can end a game before it begins. That said, it came back on the day in some surprising ways.

Hacktivist is some real trouble, obviously, but not as much as you might think. That said, it can slow me down long enough to turn a good draw bad, and a bad draw fatal.

My biggest enemy with this deck was old Father Time, which makes sense. It made my runner games shorter than they needed to be and lost me a likely split at one point because of its sluggishness.

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