RP - Bratislava Style (Vienna SC winner 7/2/2016)

Gespenst 273

A variant of my 2015 SC winning corp deck (called Bratislava style, because it was a 30+ tournament in this very city). I made some adjustments considering the popularity of Faust (most notably Ashigaru, but in general ICE with lots of subs) and also included Caprices in case I can't flatline the runner and need to score those agendas. Last year I also ran 2 NAPD contracts, but there's not enough influence left after the MWL and I found to be Fetals + Chronos to be more effective anyway.

What's the game plan? First you want to establish a solid board position, ice up the three centrals as soon as possible and also have a remote for your Sundew economy. Maybe you also start building a nice remote server, ideally using Ashigaru as your big ICE. Then you try to gain an economic advantage. After that you have two options:

Option 1: Your opponent doesn't see the SEA Source / Scorched Earth combo coming, has 3 or less cards in hand and you win. This also applies if they hit a Snare! and have to decide on whether to shake the tag or draw back up. Sometimes also a lucky double Scorch can happen.

Option 2: You can use your Scorch threat as a way to score out Nisei MK II with the help of Caprice in your scoring server. This is really interesting, because the runner has to either stay ahead with their economy or find their Plascrete first. It also makes using Faust very risky...

We were 15 players total and I placed 4th after Swiss. In my last match my opponent had an Utopia shard out. He had just hit a Fetal AI and was down to two cards. I had SEA Source and 2 Scorches in HQ. After my mandatory draw I had 6 cards in hand, so I used my Jackson to draw 2 more. After playing the SEA Source he fired the shard, but didn't hit both Scorches out of the 7 cards left. GG

1 comments
12 Feb 2016 shykoreangirl

So I just brought a slight variation of this deck to my Local League swapping out the Lotus Fields for Neural Katana's (mostly because Upstalk is one of the last data packs I'm missing). In hindsight I probably should have swapped out Lotus Field for Bastion as a better, though still significantly inferior, decent ETR ice. However a surprise Neural Katana rez when there was no mimic did cause the runner to immediately jack out and spend their clicks drawing.

I won all my games corp side(scoring out) and found that Ashigaru was definitely the MVP of this deck. Once the runner sees SEA Source or Scorched they usually do their best to play around it giving me breathing room to strength my board state and allowing me to play greedy and dig for nisei mk2's to score before going for a TFP for the win.

My issue was Cortex Lock rarely mattered and was often installed over. Where do you usually put your Cortex Locks early game? I was installing them either over a central i thought the Runner might run first or over my sundew in case they ran archives and tried to trash sundew early on. Either way i rarely lost sundews after they were installed. (one game i was able to have 3 sundews out and my scoring remote was a Tsurugi and two ashigarus. It was pretty disgusting.

Without an accidental Snare! access or a Fetal AI steal at a bad time for the runner I found I either would need both scorches to even attempt to flatline a runner on my turn.

Regardless prior to seeing SEA Source or Scorched Earth runners were often ending turns with 2-3 cards in hand and once they did see either one they played much more passively. Thanks for the list and I'll definitely be playing and tuning this deck.