Too Fast to Fail (Worlds 2018 top Titan)

internet_potato 961

This is the deck that I played at Magnum Opus. It went 6-3 in swiss, carrying me to 37th place overall and getting the top Titan spot. A fair number of people were on Titan (which warms my heart), and the builds I saw were pretty similar to this. H/T to @Basoon for winning Philly regionals with a similar list, @thebigunit3000 for filling me in on the details, and @kevintame for beating me so hard on my Outfit deck that I switched to this one the night before Day 1. Overall I think this is a really solid list. I would not drop Ark Lockdown, though I might switch an IPO for a 3rd Too Big to Fail or a second Fast Track. As a terminal, it sometimes leaves you out of position, and your FA options/ICE are cheap.

In an ideal game, you'll rush the first Project Atlas behind an ETR ICE and score out with a combination of Hostile Takeover and Atlas. Economic Warfare and Hard-Hitting News punish early runs, either by outright winning the game or by opening a scoring window for you. I like BOOM! because many players will go to two tags with 5 cards in hand, thinking they can avoid a High-Profile Target kill.

In addition to the obvious Atlas FA lines, don't miss options such as:

Mausolus is pretty much just for centrals -- you want to make sure that R&D is expensive enough to get in that they can't win by single-accessing your gendies.

Also at some point in the day, I dedicated an Ice Wall to dunk on Laamb. That was neat!

What Had Happened Was

Round 1: Flatline Val. Was able to land HHN and HPT within the first few turns.

Round 2: Score out vs. Val. First score was install a GFI behind Guard and naked RecoCo. Next turn DC-> AA GFI. Second was HT. Third was install GFI, then biotic + audacity next turn.

Round 3: Score out vs. Val. 2 Atlas + 3 HT. My recollection is that my opponent couldn't find MKUltra and I leaned on a couple of Guard, but I'm not 100% sure.

Round 4: Lose vs. 419. What a bananas game. Guard's "cannot be bypassed" text stopped a Spear Phishing run, but Jesse (of Terminal7 fame) hit me with an Embezzle that knocked out my FA tools and put him in an econ lead for the rest of the game.

Round 5: Lose vs. Val. Got rekt by Turntable on a very cool play by Roberto. Early in the game, he stimhacked R&D to trash a recoco. He followed up an Indexing run with a second stimhack (which was not necessary to break the ICE), so I let him in instead of burning an atlas token, assuming he wanted to trash again. Fell for that one pretty hard -- was an HT (which he swapped for my atlas).

Round 6: Win vs. Val. He rebirthed into Omar and pumped R&D with The Turning Wheel, but I managed to squeak out a win. I missed a winning line early in the game with New Construction, so I'm very fortunate to have made it through this one alive.

Round 7: Win vs. Paragon Smoke. My opponent had a solid economic start, but got a little aggressive checking my remote and ended a turn on 2 tags for a Boom! win.

Round 8: Lose to Adam. They got Employee Strike down very early (turn 2?) and I had to Biotic Labor an Atlas out because I couldn't find an HT. I was able to clear his relevant directives and tax him out of centrals for a while, but ultimately got flooded and couldn't assemble any scoring combos.

Round 9: Win vs. Smoke. Kind of a silly way to end the event -- I miscounted credits and couldn't Biotic out an atlas (after burning a token and playing Biotic). ICEd what was obviously the Atlas and crossed my fingers. My opponent paid me back by clone chipping Atman at strength 0 by accident and bouncing off Ice wall. Went on to eventually get to 3 Atlas + 1 HT. Hitting Clot with an Ark Lockdown made this possible. :shrug:

2 comments
13 Sep 2018 spe1983

I played a similar list, only major change was adding dedication ceremonies and a best defense for some econ. I really liked being able to best defense away a misdirection, and use ark lock down. Biggest problem for me was GFI flood. Titan is so much fun.

13 Sep 2018 internet_potato

Sweet it turns out this was top Titan at worlds