I have no idea what I'm doing with reg Val

In summary

I took this extremely fun list by mo0man and changed two cards. But I wanted to write about my regionals journey (yes, yes) and they didn't get a chance to write up much about the deck so I thought I would. But, to be very clear, they deserve all credit for this deck. I just played with it.

My regionals journey

I’m not a great player, but I had the chance to go to quite a few regionals this year and I wanted to try to do as well as I could. Whilst my corp deck clicked into place quickly, I had a lot of trouble with the runner as I’ve never been particularly competent at playing Val and she seemed to be clearly the best deck available. I took a principled stand in Manchester and played Zer0 Val with no Clan Vengeance. It went 1-4. Preston was the next day and I made a quick switch to a CV MaxX. It went 2-3.

At Derby regional R&R was legal and I built a Patchwork Val (again with no CV). It felt good, and I was looking forward to naming it Val-ue Town, but it went 1-4. I was frustrated! Skorp corp was pulling in the results for me so I went 5-5 at each of these regionals. If I could only find a runner to play!

With Stockport regional on the way I spotted mo0man's list and thought I’d take it for a spin. I’d been playing a bit of cerberus' apoc 419 list and was finding apocalypse pretty good against the corps who were trying to build towers of Surveyors for an unaffordable remote. My Jnet results with apocalypse Val were mixed but I decided to go with it. I wasn’t particularly sold on the 1x Mining Accident, nor on the real need for 2x Shadow Net (I wasn’t seeing Sports or Skorp as that much of a thing at regionals). So I dropped the accident and went down to 1 Shadow Net, making room for 2x Eater.

At Stockport the deck went 2-0 in the Swiss then lost an incredibly close game (down to the last card of R&D) against Nemo’s Argus in the cut. At Sheffield the deck was 3-0 in Swiss and I lost two games as corp in the cut. At Aldershot it was 4-1 in Swiss and 1-1 in the cut. So that's 10-3 overall. Somewhat better than what I'd been achieving with regular Val!

Notable cards

Again, not my list, but here are some interesting things that I noticed. I should also say that I feel like I'm only playing this list at about 60% of its potential. Particularly at Aldershot, I felt I was making quite a few mistakes when choosing lines. There's definitely room for me to improve!

• Clan Vengeance: If this gets loaded up before you Apocalypse then you get to unload it on the Archives run to leave the corp with nothing installed and no cards in hand. Delicious!

• DDoS: Also allows for an early steal if the corp is rushing, although be pretty sure it's actually an agenda. I will "happily" pay 5 to install this if Scarcity is down.

• The Shadow Net: I left one in and I think it was only relevant in one game. I played against Craig’s Argus at Stockport and he had used HHN to get my money right down. After I cleared tags I was on 1 credit and it looked like a nice scoring window for him. But I installed Shadow Net, sacrificed a Hostile to play Gamble and was straight back in the game. I'd probably swap this out for something else (eXer, more econ, or another Eater most likely).

• Eater: This gives the game away when you inject on turn 1, but most of the time the corp has no real answer to stop you apocing them anyway. This serves a dual purpose: filling a gap if you’ve not got all your normal breakers in the bin yet and sometimes saving you money if they’ve got a high-strength sentry on centrals.

Summary & the future

I think I'm going to keep playing this style of deck! Obviously the new MWL is going to make CV/Zer0 a thing of the past but I think that's ok. There are options...