Surveyor Argus - 1st at Derby Regional: 6-1

AndytheLovell 470

This deck went 6-1 at the Derby regional beating 6 CV Val and losing to 1 CV Val (Yes I only played against CV Val all day...) taking me to 1st place.

This is very similar to the Lobster builds that were doing pretty well pre-R+R and relies on scoring early agendas, building up a threatening credit total and playing HHN to enable kills, scoring windows and Stinson fires. It is pretty fun to play and the main skill is knowing when to jam (always) and how to convincingly say "Actions? after every click when you have nothing good in hand to hit with CV. It's important to put something in the remote every turn if you can as taking your foot off the peddle allows Anarch to build up CV/TTW and all sorts of game winning nonsense. Also don't put Archer on the remote as it will definitely get Maxwell'd. Most importantly, always play as if you have HHN in hand and believe in the heart of the cards if you don't and you will (no guarantee) draw it first click.

Slightly interesting card choices

Data Raven is a 3 of and meant I had to drop the 3rd HHN. This turned out to be an inspired decision on the day as lots of hard hittings hard hit the bin from CV and lots of people took lots of tags running my remote

Prisec is a must for me as it doubles down on the ID ability, is another bluff to put in the remote and is a card that lots of players genuinely forget exists and so can cause unlikely swings from losing positions

Surveyor is a monster and if you're not playing 3 in your Weyland deck you need to look at yourself really hard. My 3rd game in the cut involved a remote of Raven>Surveyor>Raven>Surveyor which is almost impossible to run without ending tagged, within HHN range and open to a Stinson fire

3 GFI is right for a jammy deck. I've seen people looking at more Oaktowns or CSTs which is fine but knowing Anarch late game dominance and not wanting to hold too many agendas made me go for 3 Food. Jamming one of these early vs Anarch is really strong as good players will almost never contest it for fear of HHN and Food plus hostile makes any single advanced card in the remote possibly game winning through Atlas into hostile.

Standoff was a late cut from the deck as it is a completely liability late game when Anarch install TurnTable. This meant cutting the 3rd Archer which was OK as it is extremely rare that you will want to rez it in the early game anyway.

Closing Thoughts

Corp is in a weird place at the moment with CV/Zer0 being so strong and although this is very beatable it is still probably one of the best answers to Anarch dominance as it can put a lot of pressure on in the early game, make horrible remotes without too much effort and gets cheap wins against people in swiss who live and die not respecting hard hitting news.

2 comments
23 Jul 2018 presheaf

This is probably my favorite agenda composition in the game, glad to see it doing well. Did you often find yourself sitting on enough points + atlas counters that you normally would win, but couldn't due to CV? If so, what was your play in that situation?

24 Jul 2018 AndytheLovell

The one game I lost on the day had me sitting on 6pts with 2 atlas counters and a hostile in the deck, but two fully loaded CVs on the other side of the table. In hindsight I maybe could have burned the atlas counters earlier for value to try and force the CV pop. Something like atlas for audacity even with no agenda. My opponent was also on 6 but if he weren't then atlas for gfi/Oaktown would also have been a viable play to try and fork him but by no means 100%