Hippo Baby - 4-0, 1st place, King of Swiss @ Seattle SC

Why hippo baby? Because I wanted an excuse to use this gif

I was initially going to play Argus or Titan, which seem really good and have well-established lists that I have a lot of experience piloting. BUT THEN INSPIRATION STRUCK. I made a draft, tested it like twice against randos on Jnet, and this is the result.

The gameplan is to sap clicks with MCA and your ID while making money charging up Prana with Bio-Ethics/HOK. The runner won't have the clicks to deal with everything while also drawing and setting up, so you can threaten a killshot and then fast- or never-advance out a mean agenda and TeamSpo the MCA back. Prana Condenser is a Commercial Bankers Group that’s also a ticking timebomb; most importantly, it's yet another must-trash to tax the runner. MCA serves as an all-in-one fast advance tool, click stealer, Jeeves-enabler, and anti-apoc tech choice (usually...see round 1). Also, Envelope is bad, so I went all-in on stupidly undercosted Jinteki code gates and never regretted it.

A quick summary of rounds:

• Round 1 vs smittyl’s Hayley - On paper, this is the hardest possible matchup: drip econ, Hyperdriver, and apoc?! I got apoc'd three times but always stabilized and managed to score out.
• Round 2 vs risingconcern’s Hoshiko - He facechecked a Saisentan on turn 3 or 4, which did 4 net for the kill.
• Round 3 vs anarchomushroom’s Adam - I was worried about Brain Chip's hand size boost and FTT's clickless R&D pressure, but I went too fast for them to be able to find their decoder. My favorite play: clicking MCA, rezzing and clicking a new MCA, then installing the winning agenda behind ice - they had only 1 click to deal with either a 4 counter Prana, a BioEthics, a possible agenda behind ice, or further MCA click denial + fast advance. They trashed the Prana and I scored out for the win.
• Round 4 vs Boot: ID
• Top cut vs Boot’s 419 - I was really worried about this matchup. I got DoF’d early and he aggressively trashed my stuff while I recovered. Eventually I got all 3 centrals iced and started clicking an MCA with a HOK-fueled Prana charging. He ran archives with 4 cards in hand, where a HOK ping + Saisentan facecheck did the 5 damage to kill.

Overall I had a great time playing! Thank you so much to my opponents, to NISEI for keeping this game alive, to CryptoGraham for organizing, and to my girlfriend for quelling my awful tournament anxiety.

My runner went 3-1 and is here.