Jack's Renaissance - 1st Place TWA Team Tournament

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JohnnyMilton 1052

This list and slight variations have won exactly 75% of their 32 games in the Melbourne meta over the last two months, including the TWA Team Tournament where The Wotan Clan (it's still funny, okay) placed 1st.

My current list is:

+1 SEA Source, Restructure, Wormhole

-1 Cerebral Overwriter, Aggressive Negotiation, Checkpoint

WHY THIS DECK HAPPENED

After reading this article by The Winning Agenda's Jesse Marshall, I wanted to prove that Weyland was fine. I wasn't sure why, but I had a gut feeling that, if the game was as perfectly balanced as I had always assumed it was, the fault was not with the faction, but what people wanted to do with it (usually to make it play like other factions).

So I went back to the core set and asked: what does Weyland do, that no-one else can?

(Almost) UNDISRUPTABLE INCOME

OG Weyland makes money and you can't trash that money because it's operations based. It's difficult to keep denied with Beanstalk Royalties and those operations cycle back through with Jackson Howard and Archived Memories. This deck is pretty cheap to run too.

ARCHER, F@#KING ARCHER

You'll always want an early Hostile Takeover, or a Fast Track. The profit from a Hostile Takeover is enough to pay for your Archer rez. In my mind, this is why the card exists.

The bad publicity from the agenda scored doesn't matter as much because you get a high strength sentry out of the deal. High strength sentries matter; they're the most difficult type of ice to deal with, and the most punishing if hit unprepared.

FLATLINE THREAT

Snare!, Posted Bounty, Scorched Earth and Checkpoint (and SEA Source, I recommend the above edits). Often taxing the runner through trying to score out will put you in a better position to flatline or vice versa.

Learning when to rez a Checkpoint is important. As is when to boost the trace. You will also need to learn how to console your friend after they decide to take the damage on a multi-access run, and then access a Snare!

Checkpoint (which forces Faust players to pay money, hooray!) and Hunter want to live on R&D. Hunter likes Archives too, in Criminal matchups.

RESIDUAL TAX

You're gonna wear some bad publicity. Hunter helps with the tax, as does multiplying the number of Checkpoints on R&D and advancing your Ice Walls. Archer should stay a problem for a while.

Remember that you're the corporation - the runner's job is to react to you, to try to disrupt you - not the other way around. Play as responsively as you need to, to tax and stay capable of winning, but remember that this deck is a meat grinder, a money grinder and if your opponent's deck is not working the way it needs to, you will win. Make the problem, force the solution.

5 comments
3 Nov 2015 JohnnyMilton

I also highly recommend checking out some) of Jesse's Weyland lists: he's been building in some different directions.

3 Nov 2015 Bigguyforyou518

This decklist confuses me. Foremost is that you've actually gotten use out of Checkpoint. I haven't tested it extensively, but every time I've tried to use it I've (re)arrived at the conclusion that it's just a terrible card. It obviously doesn't work as a surprise, because they can just not finish the run. It doesn't work very well as a tax either, because on subsequent runs you're looking at a trace-5 with at least one bad pub. If the runner baits you into actually buffing the trace, then they can just jack out, and now they taxed you (for what was probably going to be a random access from R&D). Assuming you've scored out a Hostile Takeover or two, that trace quickly becomes a complete joke.

In my experience, when you're playing with legitimate amounts of bad pub, you have to immediately stop thinking about "taxing" and focus on either scoring (usually through windows created by rig destruction) or flatlining (usually through some gigantic trace).

Your edits are definitely taking the deck in the right direction, though. You need more money, and more ways to leverage that money. Operations and bad pub-based economy means you get a huge early surge and die off faster because of it. Move faster than the runner is comfortable with, and score out the game or force them to make a mistake that gets them slagged.

4 Nov 2015 JohnnyMilton

@Bigguyforyou518 Checkpoint had confused me too, right up until I played it for the first time, a while ago now, and it flat ended the run while I was certain the runner would faceplant through it.

Things I've learned:

  • its effectiveness is sometimes based purely on terror, and what the runner isn't ready to lose from their hand
  • it's 4 cards to break with Faust, so 3 random meat damage might be preferable, but not as preferable as paying through (so they'd better hope they decided to make money this game)
  • it's cheaper to pay the trace than break through with almost every decoder ever
  • that's okay because it's a 7-strength code gate that you rez for a comparably tiny 4 credits
  • because they're never going to break it, you have to start thinking of it as simply opportunity to trace for some meat damage because the runner's always wondering how much you want to spend
  • if you know where your Snare!s are, you can start tracing for some educated shots at an easy flatline (HQ only ever gets scarier)
  • advance your Ice Walls in the same server, if you've got the money and clicks spare
  • ideally, you're never going to take more than 3 bad pub in a game but you've got manage that by taking it in a timely manner, building up some servers and letting others go
4 Nov 2015 cmcadvanced

yeah, checkpoint isn't bad, it's just taking bad publicity can easily become a downfall when playing certain decks, but having a code gate gear check that isn't enigma is a plus for weyland I think. if you have enough checkpoints in a server, it's still a good tax, even if 1 is a trace 3.