41 is the new 46 v1

The old prepaid stealth kate shell cut down to fit into smoke. Went 4-1 at Bristol November GNK.

Notable choices

Refractor over Houdini. I actually prefer houdini as a decoder, but since we are running Blackstone, houdini would mean that only dagger would be able to trigger the Net Mercur pump trick.

Guru Davinder over Plascrete Carapace (or any other meat protection). I was expecting more shutdown boom / double scorch big kill rather than thousand bruises style damages. I did consider Citadel Sanctuary, but given this deck can end up with quite a chunk of money being able to keep him around seemed better, but this is one of the areas that needs more testing.

Net-Ready Eyes over Atman. This boosts blackstrone to 4, dealing with eli for 2cr without the MU cost of 4tman.

Mirror over Astrolabe. Given we have cloaks and Prepaid VoicePAD, mirror seems a strong choice. I'm currently thinking it is wrong however, as I rarely needed the regeneration power. I think it would be more appropriate in a Temüjin Contract deck that goes all-in on RnD attack (possibly with Top Hat or Medium).

The biggest issue with pre-paid smoke is fitting everything into the reduced deck size, hence 41 cards, the 41st was Artist Colony, mostly to sell GFIs against CTM.

tournament

CI

Most of this game was trying to make Employee Strike fit. Eventually, it did and put me in a position to lock RnD down.

Architects of Tomorrow

My opponent spent most of the match preressing assets to keep himself under 15 credits to avoid triggering Beth, which still gave me the draw I needed to find & setup, avoiding runs until I could employee strike into makers to keep his econ down. Eli ended up being the one pain point after NRE died to Best Defence.

Argus

This was a DRT/Snare build. Guru was actually pretty threatening here because of negating most of Snare's power, to the point he was actually contract killed. Unlike the previous opponent, he let his cash grow so Beth gave me 5 click turns most of the game. Careful drawing and running all the remotes (and just sucking up the damage), kept him in check until RnD was locked.

CTM

My one loss of the day, and where I felt the lack of Astrolabe the most. He got off to an excellent start - turn one was sweep, bankers, sensie, rapidly followed into a sansan behind a tollbooth while I struggled to find breakers or smc.

(Vegan) Blue Sun

A fairly drawn out game where the pads didn't arrive until after all the econ had been and gone, that eventually came down to the psi-game on a batty to prevent his win followed by a SoT makers for the last 2 points.