Googley Eye Of Sauron ( 4 - 1 at Worlds IceBreaker)

sruman 126

Some how I got it in my head that the Icebreaker traditional was to bring more fun (but still competitive) decks. Judging by the Tier 1 standard decks I ended up playing, I just made that up. But no problem, I'm glad I brought Spark -- the win rate was nice but most importantly it was a blast to play. I made the radical choice of a fast-advance focus ( hard to suppress the try-hard fully ). Nominally the deck's strategy is to stick a san-san in a taxing remote and abuse it as long as possible. Really the strategy is rez every advertisement you possibly can and cackle in as many ways as you can.

This choice along with Spark's ability drove many of the fairly obvious card choices. A few that might look a bit out of place:

Ash -- Nowadays, every fast advance deck needs a solid answer to clot. 1 CVS and Ash are this decks answer. In the 20 or so games I've played with this deck, my experience you'll be richer than the runner. You can leverage that into scoring that crucial agenda when clot is being threatened. Beyond that, this makes trashing a san-san even more daunting. Strangely, Andy didn't want to run my ash, product placement, product placement, san-san remote behind a Tollbooth.

Team Sponsorship -- Everyone knows this is a great card but Spark does not get the card draw benefit that NEH does. You can recur all the regular stuff -- trashed san-sans, cvs for anti-clot -- but I found myself mostly going in for the fun (for me) stuff, special offers and product placements which are even better when the runner knows what they are. Faking a beale as an asset behind a special offer the runner doesn't want to trigger is definitely worth the risk for the story factor alone.

Ichi 1.0 -- NBN Is getting better and better ice -- my love for archangel has only grown after playing it and playing against it -- but Ichi 1.0 is still very taxing on a central and playing "Beale or no Beale" with a runner behind an ichi and a tollbooth is a game heavy tilted towards you.

Wins came against 2 pre-paid Kates, 1 gang-sign Leela, and 1 DDos Andy. Lost to another prepaid Kate in a close one (7-6). It was fun to have Kates so poor they couldn't steal NAPDs on 3 occasions. But maximum schadenfreude was had while constantly micro-siphoning Andy on my and their turn with advertisement rezzes to the point they had to leave the 3 product placements untrashed to conserve money. If you haven't stopped a runner's maker's eye with the help of pop-ups and a surprise launch campaign rez, you really should give Spark a try.

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