TrivialICE (5-0 Gamer's Armory tournament)

yithian 188

This deck went undefeated and carried me to 4th place in a 12-person tournament (Gamer's Armory in Cary, NC). It took down Near Earth Hub, Titan Transnational, Stronger Together and Engineering the Future during official play. There wasn't a cut but after the tournament was over we played a few games as if there was and this deck went on to beat the first-place winner's Engineering the Future deck built around IT Department.

Gameplan

When in doubt, dig through R&D. It's where most of the agendas are Medium makes it hard for the corp to get to them before you do.

The corp is obviously going to protect R&D to stop this, but you have a few ways of tearing down (or otherwise ignoring) their defenses:

  • Let's start with the identity: Quetzal will either get you a lot of free accesses or just convince them not to install barriers in the first place.

  • Knifed on its own will let you keep flying into servers with a single barrier. Combining it with Tinkering will let you trash virtually any piece of ICE. Unless you're absolutely sure that there's an agenda in a remote server, it's probably best to use this combo to erode the defenses of R&D. Yog.0 is fantastic for using Knifed on weak, multi-subroutine ICE such as Tsurugi, Komainu or NEXT Silver.

  • Parasite. It's a classic for a reason. Use it to burn down multi-subroutine ICE while you look for Knifed and Tinkering.

Card choices

  • Card draw: I've Had Worse, Inject and Vigil. You're looking for combo pieces so you need a lot of card draw. You don't have a whole lot of programs, so using[Inject to look for your events is pretty safe. Plus, you have Déjà Vu to get back a vital program. Vigil is fnatastic: either HQ is weak or the corp helps you draw.

  • Economy: Day Job, Sure Gamble, Daily Casts and Kati Jones. Daily Casts is in here because it's click-free economy. You'll be drawing heavily so getting paid along the way is critical. Day Job is kind of weird -- it's great to get from Vigil but you have to be careful about the timing. I'm not sure what else it could be replaced with though.

2 comments
21 May 2015 Kharack

Hey, I was the ETF player from the event (not the IT one). This was a great deck to see. Maybe liberated accounts over day job? Not as fast and you lose tempo when you play it but you wouldn't give up an entire turn at once.

Regardless, glad you posted this it was a lot of fun to play against and I definitely want to take it for a spin.

21 May 2015 yithian

Liberated Account is definitely worth considering if for no other reason than you can install it for use later to get it out of your grip. This deck has a lot of events that you want to keep in your grip until the right moment. Having one fewer card to hold onto until the right moment wouldn't be bad...

I was getting a little punchy toward the end there, especially after your Valencia deck stressed me out so much haha. If I'm remembering right, I got some lucky early digs on R&D that pretty much sealed the game. But that's what this deck is designed to do: keep things in the early game all game long :D

Good playing you again and I hope you have fun testing this thing out!