Cache Refresh Tournament Reg Kim - First Place!

mbzrl 144

I ended up taking first in the Cache Refresh Stimhack tournament hosted by @fightingwalloon, and this Kim deck, as well as Kim himself, were the main reasons for my success, going a nice 7-2. This tournament featured heavy sideboarding, but this decklist is what I would take to prepare for a field of varying decks. Once you've decided to play Reg Kim, your cards are going to look mostly like this, so I'll write a bit about how I settled on Kim.

Going into the tournament, while I was thinking of strong corp deck options, I noticed that most key pieces to Fiery SYNC were available, and knew that deck would be prevalent and important to beat. While building sample decks I also noticed how many draw cards I usually rely on are unavailable (no Earthrise, Inject, Street Peddler, Quality Time, even Patron); whatever I was building needed room for Aaron, a broken card that helps with both of these problems. He's in faction for Criminal (and extra Boom! tech in On the Lam), so I started trying to make a deck there first, but ultimately their lack of additional card draw options, only 1-of Desperado, only 2-of Account Siphon, were troubling enough that I looked for alternatives.

Obelus is a great card; like Aaron, it helps with card draw and keeps you from being killed after HHN, though not 24/7. It's a lot better card than On the Lam in other matchups as well. For identity I looked at Omar first; he offers great pressure from the start of the game, and can roll with any deluxe box, which gives you more options. I don't think he's a bad option, but with my focus on beating SYNC, Kim's ability to trash operations and 1 link are worth being locked into O&C. I kinda want I've Had Worse anyway, as another broken card that helps draw more broken cards. I think I made the right choice - I trashed Hedge Fund, IPO, 24/7, Hard-Hitting News, Friends in High Places, Biotic Labor, and Archived Memories with his ID ability in the tournament, often through single accesses with Temüjin Contract and/or Datasucker. Unlike every other ID, you actually want to access operations, so every access is more valuable.

After a few rounds bending over backwards to fit in two Aarons, I decided on this influence spread with Citadel Sanctuary as backup. It works nicely with Kim's link, and was critical in the semi-finals to give me TJC money through a Data Raven each turn.

The matches I lost were to Boom SYNC and glacier HB with Biotic back-up (this came down to the last card in R&D!). Both were close, and I had a chance to win, so I credit fully the skills of my opponents in those results, and I know that had I played better I could have made it happen. My wins were against a lot of varying types of NBN, so I'm very happy with my deck choice (though none of them were certain wins - game one of the semis, again, came down to the last card in R&D!); in the finals, I (in another extremely close match) beat the same glacier HB in a unique situation that may have been a true stalemate. Due to a jinteki crash, we weren't able to play it out, but @internet_potato kindly conceded as he couldn't keep me out of his scoring remote and needed to IA to win.

I don't think there's anything else to add; I barely scraped into the top 4, so coming out in first is a really great feeling. I had a great time in the tournament with a lot of intense matches, so thanks to everyone I've played and fightingwalloon for hosting. I had a lot of fun deckbuilding for this, and think there's still a lot of viable deck builds to explore.

2 comments
27 Jul 2017 Megasquidd

I'm curious why you only ran Spooned as opposed to Forked or Knifed? I have been out of the game for a while, but when I played Ed Kim was my favorite runner.

28 Jul 2017 mbzrl

@Megasquidd The high-strength code gates in CR (FC3, Tollbooth, Archangel, DNA Tracker, Macrophage) were really prevalent. Yog is great, but you only have a limited number of times you can break them with Yog. If you have to use Black Orchestra, you really don't want to do it more than once. Sentries and barriers are a lot more manageable, especially with how crazy Paperclip is you don't care about breaking barriers multiple times. Also no SoT, so 1-of on cutlery isn't very good.