NEH- Grail (2nd in UK nationals)

timfast 336

Basically, this is the deck I came up with when it became clear I coudn't use any other corps at all and I'd just have to run my NEH deck face first into a bunch of shaper decks all packing clot at the nationals.

The basic plan is to force shaper decks to use up their SMC or clone chip to avoid getting hit by the Grail ICE, and once they've done so you can go back to fast advancing out your agendas without fear of instant clot. Doing this means bluffing out agendas as one of your many assets, but i also do it by putting out and advancing an NAPD, giving them a choice of using up a key card and spending 4 or letting me score.

The plan certainly didn't work perfectly. I went 6-3 with the deck in the swiss, and all three losses were to Kate decks with clot (By far the most prevalent deck at the tourney). Fortunately, my own Kate clot deck did well enough to drag me into the top 16. In the elim rounds I managed to beat another 3 shaper decks all packing clot, bringing me to 6-3 against that matchup over the tournament as I didn't face any others. I feel like a 66% record is pretty good given the level of the tournament, and against Criminal and Anarch the deck was undefeated. I find the grail is already very strong against these factions, since they usually have to wait a while to run and you can usually score an astro or two while they are doing so. As an added bonus, the deck packs 2 blacklist. I came up against 2 Maxx decks on the day, fortunately not piloted by any world champions, and against mere mortals that card is pretty devastating to Maxx.

3 comments
6 Jun 2015 Glitch29

I'm not the biggest fan of Wraparound in Grail. Merely the threat of Galahad provides tremendous incentive for the runner to find a fracter. If the runner's preemptively getting a fracter before running on unrezzed ICE, you wish that Wraparound was nearly anything else.

That said, Wraparound hits Eater in a way that Galahad doesn't, so it's not all redundant.

6 Jun 2015 timfast

Taxing lady counters then dropping blacklist is a thing, trust me

12 Jun 2015 Dr_Madhatter

Congrats on 2nd place Tim. The list looks really solid. I moved away from Grail because I found parasite was ruining my ice far too often. Did you have the same issue? Was having 15 Ice ever a problem?