Stop Hitting Yourself (25th, 6-1 at Worlds)

Tournament results:

My metamate and co-deck constructor AnOddRadish brought this to worlds along with the Pittsburgh classic Inversificator Kit (writeup coming).

Crown of Servers: Went 4-1, winning on stream vs Whiteblade and losing to a mulch-ish deck on Audrey and no run events, so not much purchase for BCP.

Worlds: Went 6-1 coming 25th overall, barely missing the cut because of losses on the runner side. Two wins vs crim, two vs shaper (Lat and Kit) and two vs Esa. Loss was vs crew hosh where the draw was an unholy flood, some 14 points in top 12ish cards followed by more points after spinning back. So it goes sometimes. This deck was definitely a swiss killer given everyone would expect kill R+, but it also has teeth in open decklists from our testing.

Zig when they Zag:

This was the other R+ deck at worlds. Many people noticed the meta’s seeming weakness to tags, and kill R+ did well, but the meta has a lot of built-in kill prevention: Aniccam, stoneship, class act, steelskin. As a result, the meta did not shift too much to respect tagging decks. NSG hasn’t printed particularly cruel tag punishment, but Dawn’s not out yet and an FFG-shaped specter is haunting San Francisco. Sure you can’t turn your opponent into a smoldering pile of ash, but who cares? Installing the same card twice feels worse than dying to damage. At least BOOM!! had the decency to end the game. Self-Growth Program propped up Drago prison and it’s still here. Of course, NSG pre-rotated honest vegan NBN with the Bellona ban, right? RIGHT???

How to bully runners with cards that haven’t rotated somehow:

This deck began with a wild proposition: rebuild tempo scoring NBN with Better Citizen Program, an agenda that has never received much love. This agenda hasn’t been worth it historically, but this meta is absolutely rife with high-impact run events. Trick shot, overclock, burner, laundry, carpe diem, bravado, DoF, chastushka, raindrops, pinhole, hot pursuit. Never have BCP stocks been higher. Oh, not to mention all the swift lats running around. Make the runner struggle between over-relying on the basic action card and playing their deck. “Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself”. And if they ever float a tag you SGP their breakers, triggering BCP (and R+) again when they reinstall them: “Two for flinching”.

But how good is BCP to score compared to the vanilla offworld office?

Assuming BCP triggers R+ ~half the time (ignoring turns where another tag is given), a tag is a ~5 credit tempo swing (counting a click as 2), meaning you need 1.5 BCP triggers or so to break even. Certainly by 2 triggers BCP has surpassed OffOff, and let me tell you, it is not hard at all to get 2 BCP triggers if you score one early. Between CoS and Worlds it only fired fewer than three times in exactly two games. Early BCP scoring makes the deck make sense - both because a hypothetical 5 crypto/offoff version wouldn’t be good enough and because you need to make up for scoring one late, when it will get fewer triggers. “But what about the second score? Surely a second BCP is really bad”. Maybe. It’s possible. But try installing a Cleaver for a 9 credit swing, three clicks, perhaps for the second time this game. It’s untenable. It’s miserable. There’s a finite amount of fun at this table and I’m going to have all of it.

Why not Artificial Cryptocrash instead? Cypto can be played around easier than BCP (you can go low on credits but you can’t not install your breakers). Runners can bounce back credit-wise very easily so creating a drought of credits long-term is more viable than draining to zero once. BCP opens multiple jam windows over the course of the game while Crypto often opens one for exactly one turn. Rush decks generally struggle with the last score not the first two, therefore BCP fixes the archetype’s weaknesses better than crypto does. Offoff beats out crypto because it lets you score with holo man without breaking the bank.

The goal then is to push for a turn 2-4 BCP score so you can get maximal value. This is antithetical to asset decks (eg: crypto amani R+) that need to spend time jamming onto the board before they have a critical mass of assets to generate econ, scoring value (amani, powers), and a sufficient amount of ice to protect a 4/2 score. Additionally, BCP highly incentivizes SGP for tag punishment, which works best to gear check runners, and asset decks don’t run enough ICE to make full use of this gearchecking. Instead, we should look to bird brawler decks of old. These lists featured a mix of tempo/gearcheck and taxing ICE, seamless launch to help score, and punishment for the runner daring to interact. More recently we have holo ops as a template, which uses the holo man to help score, propped up by the now-banned Bellona.

This deck merges these archetypes, incorporating both holo man and seamless launch to maximize the capability to never-advance score early as well as the flexibility to score off low credit totals. If the runner chooses to contest they’ll have to contend with Public Trail. PT SGP is a gross tempo hit that presents a massive scoring window. There are also a number of matchups where this can create game-winning blowouts, from lobisomem to begemot/laamb to aumakua. With a BCP scored, this is often the gateway tag that gets the runner addicted. Some runners can contest an early BCP push behind ping+gatekeeper. Almost none can beat the PT SGP followup. Both players being poor is ideal for you. Force scrappy fights over your remote where you can keep them poor and vulnerable to PT. Prevent the runner from accumulating value from installed cards by forcing the issue early and often.

The playstyle is a bit like yellow PD (hence all the influence spends) with a few notable differences. The ICE is cheaper to rez with better tempo exchanges on rez, meaning it is tougher for runners to facecheck early. We like that, since facechecking is a good way to keep PD honest. It also trades the lategame power of bran and skunkvoid for the straight jacket of BCP and the deterrence of PT SGP (regardless of whether it is in hand), which makes it easier to push agendas in the early/midgame. However, the reliance on keeping the runner poor means that this deck has to go fast early, at least until a BCP is scored. As long as you can keep things scrappy, the ICE in this deck can be quite taxing for the runner.

Mulligan strategy:

The deck actually mulligans quite well given it is on only 12 ICE. You have 44-card consistency, you are only really looking to ICE a remote early (usually), you don’t have many bad ICE rezzes early, the econ bounceback is really good, and degree mill is unstealable t1. The relatively low floor in hand quality combined with the very high ceiling means you actually end up mulliganing a lot of the time. Your bad hands are largely playable while your nuts hands are nearly unbeatable. You’re basically looking for rashida+ICE, tranq grid, or BCP+seamless+ICE, and throw back essentially anything else.

ICE:

Because tag punishment is SGP the ICE suite is pushed towards gearchecks. For this reason non-gearcheck ICE are largely ignored (otherwise authenticator and tsarevna would be good). At the same time, it’s important to sometimes be taxing to enable the public trail gameplan if the runner sets up fast and contests, so it’s important to have some taxing ICE in the mix. In hindsight we think 2x f2p may be too much - with only 12 ICE you sometimes can’t be picky about placement and f2p is not fully a gearcheck nor an end the run. Perhaps enigma can replace it, or possibly wraparound in a different meta.

Mestnichestvo – Taxing codegate etr with good all-around performance vs unity, buzzsaw, aumakua, crew, etc. Advancing it is a real play and works well with the PT SGP gameplan. Could be replaced with enigma to save cost but I really do value the advance ability.

Starlit knight – Great early with a facecheck that rivals saisentan, and late for gearchecking desperate runners and locking out some who went tagme. However, it has a number of weaknesses that prevent it from being 3x. It is expensive to rez, too cheap to break, and many ICE solutions are highly resilent to the numerous ETRs it gains: laamb/begemot, orca, revolver, ika, physarum, crew.

F2p – The taxing counterpart to knight. It basically costs everyone 4c to get past it, which is top rate. It also pseudo-ETRs if the runner is tagged (BCP helps enable this), so long as it is not innermost. However it usually doesn’t force a breaker install, which is counter to the gearcheck+SGP strategy of the deck.

Enigma – Cheap gearcheck, still expensive for unity. By the end of both days of worlds AnOddRadish wishes it had been in the deck over the second F2P.

Other ICE – Wraparound is good vs crim/anarch but bad vs shaper. Tatu bola struggles to get swaps in a 12 ICE deck and we would rather make both sides poor than rich. Rototurret is too easy to break at 0 str. Surveyor is interesting but Lat abuses it a bit, still worth trying 1x. Hydra is too expensive and abusable. Authenticator is great early but not a gearcheck at critical moments.

Other Card choices:

First of all, this deck was made by AnOddRadish and myself without the resources of a testing group, and all in the last 3 weeks. We tested a single-digit number of games against each other with it, as well as a healthy dose of low-testing-value jnet random games. Suffice to say, this deck was largely built on intuition. Most of my thoughts here are not backed up by testing data, so I could be wrong on some points.

Crisium grid – Tag punishment (especially before threat 4) has to wait until your turn, meaning the runner can ignore the tags, dive you, and win the game before you get to respond. It may feel antithetical to play defense in a tempo-based deck. Still, you need to respect runner wincons, and crisium is just enough of a speedbump. Also, it’s quite useful vs most runners so it’s rarely a dead card – deep dive, diversion of funds, chastushka, burner, stargate, cataloguer.

Tranquility home grid – This deck is trying to rush like PD so tranquility home grid makes sense for fueling the economy. This deck has fewer installables, however this may be offset by the fact that BCP naturally leads to longer games so more tranq opportunities. Tranq helps you jam starting turn 1-2 to get tempo going. Alternatively the possibility of tranq can dissuade runs against early rashida/BCP pushes.

2x Seamless and 2x holo man – These cards don’t play well together for most of our agendas, but they both serve an important purpose. Seamless is powerful for sneaking through an early BCP and for scoring from a modest credit total. However without the PD ability it cannot be relied on alone, so holo man is needed. Holo Man also allows a jam after scoring a 4/2 or an SGP and jam after scoring a Tomorrow’s Headline..

Oppo research – Oppo is not live much of the time, meaning sometimes the card sits in hand doing nothing. As such, 3x oppo would be a mistake, and 2x is a luxury that got cut for more public trail, which has a much simpler play requirement and a harder punish when paired with SGP.

Considerations:

Market forces – It can be great for closing the game once the runner has given up fighting tags. However, I think those are games you are winning anyway so it’s better to have a real slot for the first 3/4 of the game.

Economic warfare – This pairs well with public trail, making it tougher for runners to safely play around your threats. Swapping a tranq grid for 1x economic warfare could be quite potent. I was worried about failing to make proactive plays early and having too many combo operations clog up HQ (also Ewar+PT+SGP is a full turn meaning you sadly can’t jam), but the blowout power of this card may be worth the slot.

Brasilia Government Grid: This suggestion comes from Kikai. It does some nasty things with ping and gatekeeper. However I think it has a few things holding it back. Three influence is a bit tough, the deck really wants the tempo-forward plays with tranq grid, and many runners aren’t hit too hard by the strength boosting (especially since most ICE are glorified ETRs). Still, maybe someone can find a way to slot it in and make running the remote gross.

Final thoughts:

I want to highlight AnOddRadish’s stellar piloting of the deck. When I make a deck I often start out feeling like I know how to play it best. After sharing the idea with him early on, it quickly became clear that he understood how to play it well - when to pay 419 tax / mining accident, when to ICE centrals vs remote, etc. He called out bad slots in earlier versions and suggested new inclusions that I initially dismissed but later came to strongly consider. By the time of worlds I think he is probably the better pilot, and the performance on all three days backs that up. Congrats to top Pittsburgh performance and narrowly missing the cut!

With that I will leave you all with a dubious question: was better citizen program good all along?