1st Place Bochum Regionals: Moriarty

ryanbantwins 2439

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This is the corp deck that I played at the Bochum Regionals (30 players). As my runner I played exactly the same deck as in Antwerp Regionals, Valencia with Zero. Both decks only dropped a single game in Swiss and went undefeated in the cut.

Before R&R Gagarin was in really bad place after the MWL updates. But there are 2 cards in R&R that could fix those weaknesses and make Gagarin Great Again, SIU and Drudge Work. The only problem is that you can’t really test such a deck. I don’t want play this at our casual meetups. And you can’t test this online, because everybody will just concede or just go full YOLO. Trust me I tried this in the past. Luckily there are still tournaments where your opponents are forced to play against this … Ooh so much fun.

Agendas: So it took me a while to decide what suite would be best for the deck. Playing the absolute minimum of agendas was a must, and so was playing 22 points because I love Museum. This means that you will have to play Government Takeover and at least 1 Vanity. After that there are a few possibilities. Playing both Vanity and 2 pointers made it a couple of percentages more likely, that the runner would have to steal 3 agendas compared to a suite of 3 pointers. Also I don’t care about the influence, or about the additional credits of SSL.

SIU + Judge: The standard combo in the deck. Contrary to other win conditions out of Gagarin, this works even against a runner who doesn’t run. So you don’t have to include awkward cards, just to bait a run.

Drudge Work: One of the biggest problems of asset spam is keeping your HQ clean of agendas. With Jackson, Sensie and the Heritage interaction gone, Whampoa became a decent replacement until it got restricted. Drudge Work functions similarly. Yes it consumes clicks, but the credits are a nice bonus. Also it doesn’t cost influence.

Museum: It's not a card to prolong the game until eternity. It’s there to recur specific cards, depending on the game state. Most importantly HHN.

High Profile Target: This is an upgrade for Boom in this deck. It’s cheaper and it doesn’t have a trash cost. Yes Boom is lethal with 2 tags and HPT isn’t, but you can use the click you save with HPT to give the runner an extra tag with judge in order to make it lethal.

ICE: Hive and Tour Guide are amazing. In combination with Surveyor, you should just throw almost all of it on R&D. Mausoleus is an annoying ICE mostly there to protect an asset.

Tournament

R1 - Smoke: Made 1 run. It was Unsuccesful. And died next turn. Pretty obnoxious when you can use SIU to kill a random resources without losing tempo.

R2 - Valencia: So you wanna play rough, you wanna trash my stuff. I got some news for you. But it might hit hard.

R3 - Hayley: Turn 1 Vanity in hand, meh what are the chances that he will check HQ. Let's place that ICE on R&D. Oh so you legwork turn 1. A bit later ... I could tech startup for Drudge to be safe for a top deck agenda. Nah what is the chance that I will topdeck an (important) agenda '3/35' AND that he will check HQ AND that he will access it '1/5'. Bah!

R4 - Liza: Thanks for the free tags. Oh and yeah I will kill you after that 4 card dig with Counter Surveillance.

R5 - ID: Pizza time

First Round Top 8 - Liza: Yay free tags again!

Finals - Fisk Investment CV Maxx: So two decks that want to play their own game. This is going to be fun to watch for the bystanders. So what can you do against my recursion and the two Tour guides on Archives? ... Oh nothing.

Why do you play a deck like this?

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13 comments
24 Jul 2018 Rahrhino

You're totally right about not being able to practice these decks. I built a fairly bad Gargarin deck a couple of months ago and people would either leave, try to win/lose as quickly as possible or tell me to "go play this crap in competitive" (even though it wasn't good enough).

SIU seems cool. I've always had to bait runs with Urban Renewal in the past. Cool deck :)

24 Jul 2018 lostgeek

Best moment in the finals: Rez EBC. -- "Phew, no Judge!" -- "What? No..." Uses EBC to search for Judge, install, tag, tag

Great deck, which I'm happy not to have played against, and congrats on the win!

24 Jul 2018 Slowriffs

This is one of the rare moments where I miss a dislike button... Congrats on the win!

24 Jul 2018 ayyyliens

I don't see what the fuzz is all about, just run HQ for the win. Ez Pz

24 Jul 2018 Severijn

Oh man, this would have been a great time for my Omar deck with Shrike, maw and bhagat to shine had I been there. Nice deck. Was the Surveyor still good with only 10 pieces of ice?

24 Jul 2018 JamesWinters

Surveyor is bad with Sandburg.

25 Jul 2018 ryanbantwins

Surveyor is decent in a 2 ICE server, and good for anything above. Against a normal runner, you should throw all of your ICE (except for Mausoleus) on R&D. It's not uncommon for this deck to have 4 ICE on R&D. It's the only place you need to defend against a shaper for example.

Of course you might wanna imporvise sometimes depending on the gamestate/matchup: Omar, D&C, Val trashing everything, ...

25 Jul 2018 Angedelo

1inf on Malia is fun, how useful was it? I'd be looking at blacklist as a 1inf utility asset personally, wondered if you'd considered it and decided against it?

25 Jul 2018 ryanbantwins

I looked at a couple of assets for that spot, other contenders were Marylin and DBS.

I'm not so fond of Blacklist tbh. There is not a lot a lot of recursion in the current meta (except for bin breakers) that I'm worried about. Blacklist is a nice card, but it's not a threat that they need to disassemble asap because getting your breakers is not a priority against Gagarin.

There are basically 3 reasons why I chose Malia:

  1. It's a great tempo hit against cards like Daily Casts and Liberated Account if you can find it early.

  2. It deals with a lot of annoying cards for your kill-combo: Clan Vengeance, Citadel, Paparazzi?, Councillman?, Polop? ...

  3. A couple of weeks ago I played asset spam out of Red Tree, and the singleton Malia single handedly won me the finals. So it deserved the spot :)

27 Jul 2018 lopert

Would you cut something for a Closed Accounts?

The idea being that you could dump everything into a SIU trace, to then closed + judge them.

28 Jul 2018 ryanbantwins

Not sure, I can see some edge case scenarios where it would be great. But most of the time you can just win at that point. So I would rather make my combo more consistent, if I had the slots.

31 Jul 2018 LSK

Is there something you would cut for a third High-Profile Target? In my testing I've had some games where I couldn't combo off because the runner had a Misdirection and I just needed an HPT instead of a Consulting Visit.

17 Aug 2018 tzeentchling

Now that Museum of History is banned, thoughts on including Clone Suffrage Movement instead as a restricted card and replacing the Surveyor?