Haas Bioroid: Practically Dead (3rd @ OTG)

I did not want to do a long ass writeup for reasons but I'm going to bite the bullet and do it anyway.

How did we get here in a kill meta?

Say no more.

Like every single one of you, I was also jamming AU Co. & Measured Response in every deck ever because jnet casual has never been more toxic than it is now. The Boston meta got a lot of new players from PAX East and after elevation and I did not want to play miserable decks against them. So I decided to build a PD I can jam and maybe hand out to someone who wants to dive into standard.

I came to realize that the deck was actually pretty good, doubly so when you make a meta call for upcoming events. Everyone is on kill decks, and so every runner is on kill tech. This makes them lose a significant amount of equity against rush and honest decks. Enter PD. Surely, the most honest deck ever, right? However, PD did lose a lot to rotation. There's still enough tools to do it and have some tempo crimes, however, some big changes are needed.

I am a big fan of making meta calls and picking my decks based on that. If people are playing kill, I'll play rush, and so on. Going in I knew I could get away with a rush deck because everyone was dooming about kill nebula, kill nuvem (Sorry Jai, it's not a scoring deck) and PD could still go fast enough as pre elevation.

Card Choices

We lost Ikawah Project as the big one. That left us with Send a Message and Salvo Testing which, let's face it, are both terrible in PD. People continue sleeping on Vulnerability Audit for some reason which (shoutout Andrej for hating it for what it is) is very very good for this deck. Having a never advance threat with just 1 seamless that gets you 3 points is huge. Scoring windows are tight and getting slimmer by the day, so you want to be able to leverage those as well as jam when they show up as well as score as less amount of agendas as possible.

This brings us to another problem, that I feel is a problem across all corps and not just PD: draw. Rashida was huge because of the draw and the tools that replaced it are severely lacking in the draw department. This is one of the reasons why AU Co. is good, not because of the supporting assets but because the ID itself is amazing value. Top-Down Solutions is an amazing card for it, especially when you can play it off Humanoid Resources.

Some people asked if the amount of operations playable from HR is enough to justify 3x HR, and sadly that is a concession you need to make because HR is basically what we have as a rashida replacement and it still does a solid job for it. Justifying putting in more operations (which might not be that good by themselves) just to make a good card slightly better does not seem ideal.

Initially, I went to Pulse because there are no good cheap HB code gates. Incidentally, it was fine into all the Deep Dive going around as well as very good on the remote. When a game goes on for a total of 30-40 clicks, making the runner lose some of them has a huge impact.

Skunkvoid is solid as ever, and with Project Ingatan and Corporate Hospitality to reset pinholed upgrades is also very good. So, that is draw, ice and upgrades settled. Digital Rights Management is a very good card because you want to find and score those Vulnerability Audit ASAP. This is a good pressure tool and you can always recur it. Your ID does not say recur seamless (more on that later).

And it kept feeling good as I played and jammed it more. It was also very fun to play. One of the key things for big tournaments is to pick decks that you are comfortable playing. This being PD with some minor playstyle variations, felt like it to me, especially since it is also the same ID I played last OTG.

How to Play

First things first, and this is a general statement: Stop playing like an AI. You don't need to play optimally, you don't need to play the deck or matchup every game, sometimes, especially in person, you need to play your opponent. There have been so many times where I've scored agendas naked off the board. Be suboptimal, just a little bit.

I also like to play super aggressively and keep jamming. See a bran and ice? Jam behind it with 5c, I don't care. People just want to set up for 5 turns, that's a free win.

Ice placement is very important. You want to make sure you jam behind the remote every turn. Make the runner run through it every turn, it adds up a lot and opens up scoring windows for you. Ideally, we win before the runner can even get in, but for those few games where we cannot, this is a crucial way to draw out the game and open up some scoring windows. You want to draw and jam every turn, barring the turns where you are scoring agendas. Heck, you can even hide agendas in archives and install them off ingatan that you'll score next turn. No one has the time to go check archives because we ensure that the game is too short.

Sometimes you can ignore centrals and jam out from the remote. If you have a DRM early on, this is what you want to push towards. Icing HQ against crim is good, but against everyone else, it's always jam remote (Seb isn't real despite data). You're not as reliant on seamless, often you want a DRM or a TDS back from the trigger, because drawing is very good. Take some risks, jam a tranq behind ice and an agenda naked, I assure you they will run the tranq but not the naked agenda, this has happened soooo many times.

Why I play the game?

This weekend made me rethink if I want to continue playing the game, and I think I definitely do. I don't care about winning, the best games that make all these tournaments and games worth it is the banter during these games. In the top cut against Wenjong, I installed 3 cards while on 4 points in different remotes. Why? Because it is fun. Because it is not a line you'd take. It was the reaction from him knowing full well I would install an agenda out in the open that made it worth it. I could have taken it slow and made him grind out on the remote and win from there but no, the win was the game we had for me and that's that. It was the same thing playing Josh twice in the cut, the banter and table talk is what makes it more fun for me, winning the game itself is secondary. So if we've bantered in our games, know that I'll always remember those games and it's among the most fun I've had (and hope you had fun too).

Shoutouts

I am glad the community (for the most part) is as amazing and I can never be grateful enough for it. Shoutouts to (in no particular order): Boston meta, SCRUBS, TPR, gg,gg, slumvengers, ctz, evie, stwyde, orbs, cranked tang and everyone who shared some bants during the day of, y'all know who you are.