DC Regionals Desperado Smoke

Full credit goes to tstack's "Despy Smoke" Chicago regionals winning deck. This deck made a few minor tweaks: dropping a deuces for an estrike, dropping Dai V, swapping personal touch for NRE, and stupidly adding a Biometric Spoofing.

DC regionals

This deck went 4-1 on the day. I ended up in 19/37 place, largely because my shitty corp play went 1-4.

Round 1 vs. Moons EtF (Ben Hosp). Won something like 7-4.

I won on the back of Interdiction and due to a couple of mistakes by my opponent. Was able to get my econ/rig set up without too much fuss, made a bunch of money off of archives + temu + desperado. Used a surprise interdiction + film critic (to counter lakshmi) to get my first score and trash caprice from remote. Sniped another from the remote a few turns later due to a misplay-- I used a Same Old Thing installed a few turns prior to replay interdiction and get another from the remote. 3rd agenda was stolen off the board (he tried to sneak it out) and the 4th came from running R&D trying to escalate a timed win to a straight-up win.

Round 2 vs. IG Moon Prison (Joshua Venecia). Flatlined on 5.

Was able to get a TFP (critic) and Fetal (the hard way) fairly early on. Basically tried to just keep drawing a lot while I poked R&D, kept him firing moons. Last turn before I was going to get flatlined, I ran HQ (no breakers) and hit a cortex lock to get flatlined. he did have 2 agendas + a shock in hand, so I could have had the win if I had a defense against the CL and had gotten a little luckier. Ah well.

Round 3 vs. Sol (Daniel). Won 7-5.

New Angeles City Hall was such a fucking stud this game-- it shits so hard on IP Block. I was basically just able to keep a lot of money on board and use Temujin + desperado to keep HQ pressured, take out SSCG when he was on 5. Win was indexing to put BN on top and then grab it. feltgoodman. also, employee strike did some serious work here. I think that I had 2xFilm Critic hosting 2x GFI at one point (first score was astro from hand).

Round 4 vs. 1000 cuts PE (Michael Dunnick). Won 7-0.

I got 2x Clone retirement very early, so that plus desperado gave me a huge econ advantage on runs. He went low at one point and I cleared the snares out of his hand. Employee Strike did work keeping up the tempo while I stole shitty 1 pointers. Also I was able to Levy AR Lab Access when my deck was running a little low to recharge.

Round 5 vs. Foodcoats (Patrick McQuay). Won 7-4.

He was running away for a while, but once I got Refractor I was basically all set. Had the money from Temüjin Contract to get Indexing + Mad Dash, an agenda from the remote, and a pick from the top of R&D.

What did we learn?

Biometric Spoofing was not worth adding. I put it in at the last minute due to fear of boom. Blackstone sucks until you get Net-Ready Eyes out, at which point it becomes sweet.

This deck felt strong, but was over-teched for yellow kill and skorpios, lacked HQ pressure, and did not have as much R&D pressure as I wanted.

Would definitely drop spoofing and maybe an NACH for a The Maker's Eye or R&D Interface. I think that one mad dash is the way to go, because you can then typically score out with 3 steals. A second would be unlikely to get you down to 2 steals and you generally have the draw to get down to it.

Worth noting that I normally used Deuces Wild for the draw + credits, which makes it essentially identical to Build Script. I'm not convinced that build script and Process Automation are all that bad, I could see a really tight deck that used deuces, build script, and PA with a very lean rig + econ and no tech being blisteringly fast.