Reading Rainbow - 5th at Polish Nats

Saan 3111

When deciding what deck to bring to the nationals in Poland, I new I was bringing Shaper, because I just didn't have any time to practice anything else between Worlds and this event. I played Hayley at Worlds, but I've played a lot of Smoke in the past and thought it would be an okay meta call. It's only okay vs Asa, but is generally good vs Glacier, and I've found it's usually fine vs Weyland decks.

There's a lot of versions of Smoke floating around, but I always liked Timmy Wong's The Reader, which he played at US Nationals in 2018, mainly because of the Falsified Credentials allowing you to run after you've already checked to see if it's an agenda or just an NGO in the remote. Palana was the deck to beat at US Nats 2018, so I figured this is probably a safe place to start, seeing as Palana and AgInfusion are some of the better decks right now.

When playing Smoke in general right now, especially vs Palana, I felt like Peace in Our Time might be hurting me more than helping me set up, as the games I lost I always felt like the Corp would be nowhere near as far ahead if they didn't have 15 free credits to help them along. Also, looking at the Smoke decks that did well at Worlds this year, I saw that the one that did the best was @ryanbantwins' deck. He purported that it was because his deck ran Dorm Computer over Film Critic, but the real big difference that I saw with bis deck vs the other Smoke decks was that he wasn't running Peace in Our Time, he was running 3 Deuces instead. Instead of trying to accelerate the deck through economy, like Peace does, he chose to accelerate by making the deck draw more cards, which I think is a great idea, seeing as people see Smoke as kind of a slower deck.

So I kinda took Timmy's deck, took Ryan's deck, and threw them in a blender. This is where I ended up! I added a Ghost Runner over Net Mercur #3 to give it more potential aggression, since Net Mercur is kinda slow, and I decided rather than the Build Script that Ryan was running, I'd do a Stimhack, since sometimes you actually want real money for a run. I also really did want to play Film Critic rather than Dorm Computer because this deck really can't economically contest Punitive Counterstrike, and can get hung up trying to steal Obakata behind Data Loops or a Kakugo that they make you run multiple times through on the remote.

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