In-A-Rush Teia (8th @ Belgian Nats)

Girometics 3536

...and I took that personally I had made and enjoyed an A Teia list previously that uses Keeling to put more pressure on the runner and thus opens a scoring window for Fujii or a consequent BitW, but with her banned that idea falls apart, of course. Taking inspiration from a certain brand of vegetarianism, I set out to see if the above claim really holds true.

The first question to ask would be "What defines a glacier deck?", and from my (frankly limited) understanding that means relying mostly on ICE to protect your servers, particularly a scoring remote. In a world where the kids are running around with jet engines, throwable items and, worst of all, knifes, this seems like a sketchy proposition, so taxing the runner out on credits doesn't seem like a viable option, which is the entire reason why SkunkVoid out of Asa/PD is so popular right now. But I am a Jinteki at heart, so why not try to tax them out on both clicks and cards?

The basic premise of this deck is to have La Costa Grid tick up an agenda or Bio Vault every turn and thus put the runner on a tight scoring clock, which is where they are most prone to make mistakes. I believe that A Teia has considerable benefits over AgInfusion for this gameplan in that, similar to how Asa plays, the extra install and credit discount you get every turn allows you to generate the necessary tempo to really put the squeeze on. Another argument for Ag would be that it is relatively resistant to Pinhole Threading, but I think this also applies here if one looks at the potential targets: If they pinhole Bio Vault or Adrian Seis, then those cards have already done their job, which is to rob the runner of a card and a click. Tranquility Home Grid should sit in your other remote which you mainly use to abuse your ID ability, so if the runner wanted to trash it, they could have already just run that server to begin with. Getting La Costa trashed hurts, but the 4c trash cost is usually enough of a tempo hit that you still have the chance to either find a new one or push agendas through manually. The worst card to get sniped then is Vovo if your current board state relies on it, so that is mostly what has to be played around. Try to get two advancements on a Bio Vault to cover that possibility.

Notable non-inclusions:

Anoetic Void/Daniela - I have found that you usually don't have the incentive to install non-advancables in your La Costa-server, so more often than not these ended up as dead cards in my hand. But this list is still fairly unrefined I'd say and I can be convinced otherwise.

NGO Front - As the plan is to rush out agendas as fast as possible, I'd usually rather choose an agenda that I can feed to runner with the possibility of scoring it rather than put NGO in my remote as a bait, but I can definitely see circumstances where it can be useful. I would still probably max out on Bio Vault first for the aforementioned reasons before I include one of these though.

@ayyyliens: I found Attini to be a 🎲/10 here, would kill again. Tithe is still the best ICE though.

Thanks in particular to @Mirilu, @awildturtok and @Watzlav for helping me test this, and especially to @Cluster Fox for organizing the tournament and making my time in Antwerp as pleasant as it was!

3 comments
25 Sep 2023 ayyyliens

This write up is ugh/10

25 Sep 2023 Girometics

@ayyyliens Someone couldn't handle the spice 🔥

27 Sep 2023 forsanelmadina

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