Pincer Movement 3.1 (11th & 5-1 at Gaming vs. Cancer '18)

swabl 388

This is just a slightly tweaked version of Pincer Movement 3 to make it more reliable in the unpredictable, random ID meta of Gaming vs. Cancer.

-1 Battlement +1 Border Control is obvious, but choosing what to cut to fit both Crisium Grid and Cyberdex Virus Suite was difficult - and I wanted both because not knowing what to expect I needed all potential answers. Ultimately it came down to either Best Defense or Fast Track - the former was a candidate because of the inevitable lack of Lizas, and the latter because it's always a bit '46th card', especially with the Atlases. In the end, as you can see, I chose to keep Best Defense primarily for Self-Modifying Code and a few other key 0-cost runner cards.

Somewhat ironically I never played a Shaper, but did play a Liza! Compounding this irony though was that the Liza was tagless, so Best Defense never got much of a chance to shine. C'est la vie.

In order I played Fisk, Iain, Silhouette, Quetzal, Nero and Liza, losing only to Quetzal, which played a damn good game but would have lost had I not lost a key Marcus Batty psi-game. And that's how most of the games were won - Batty-ing and Trojan Horse-ing key breakers not to achieve lockout necessarily, but to open windows long enough to score out.

So in the end this deck went 5-1, which when combined with my runner deck (bloody Nasir) going 2-4 meant I ended the day on 7-5, finishing 11th (tied with 5th on points). Not a bad result at all!

Major shoutouts to @paulyg for not only creating the original version of this deck, but for also providing me with advice and letting me bounce ideas off him. @steffmonkey also deserves credit for contributing to and playing the original list at Magnum Opus, but he was also going to GvC so I couldn't exactly approach him for advice (although in an amusing twist of fate we did play each other round 1!)

1 comments
12 Nov 2018 paulyg

Awesome result! Particularly impressed that you bested to many criminals as I think that's the deck's toughest match-up at the moment.

Always Be Skorping.