Only Death Is Real - Belgian Nationals 6th

Slowriffs 870

Last year I sleeved an Armed Intimidation based Argus list for belgian nats and I did pretty well with it. I've been playing said list for most of the year with some minor changes, as well as trying out other iterations on Argus builds. But it felt logical to simply play this list again a year later (with some minor changes).

After a year of Argus I still find this agenda suite more powerful than GFI, even though it takes up more slots, and you play more agendas. The fact that every scored agenda grants you massive tempo just solves the Shaper matchup for me. Armed Intimidation almost never leads to a kill but early game the tempo hit the runner takes from this agenda is huge, and it allows me to snowball into a victory.

I picked this deck because I expected a lot of Smoke and Hayley, and I was partly right about there being a lot of smoke, however in swiss instead I had to play against 419 3 times. This deck has some serious trouble vs 419, if I wasn't on Armed Intimidation to inflict early game tempo hits I don't see how I could've won some these games.

Overall the deck performed very well, only losing 1 game the entire tournament vs Peter Cox's excellently piloted 419, beating 419 twice, Az, Jesminder and Smoke in the top cut.

There's quite a few changes that could be made in the deck but one I'd do before anything else is getting rid of DRM. It's a very strong card, but with this suite there's really no need. I discarded it every time I drew it because I always had an agenda I could score already, and they're all giving me tempo.

Thanks to @Clusterfox for organising my favourite tournament again, and everyone else for participating. Good luck at worlds everyone!

4 comments
30 Sep 2019 DarthLuke

Hi, congrats for the top. Did you have enough money to hhn and rez ice?

30 Sep 2019 Saan

I always like pairing Armed Intimidation with Neural EMP. Going -1 DRM, -1 IP Block, +1 Neural +1 Some Kinda ICE might be fun. To each their own, though! Grats on doing well!

1 Oct 2019 Slowriffs

@DarthLukeHey, thanks! Well... yeah? So you don't really fire big HHN traces often, you try to land them when they went low on credits trying to stop you from scoring a lot early, and you land a few Economic Warfares so it's not usually that expensive.

@SaanNot a bad idea! Although I don't think it'll come up all that often since they have to have made a successful run as well.

3 Oct 2019 ayyyliens

No food gang!