Jinja Tower of Flowers v2 (9th swiss, 4-0 US East Nats)

Now with more shenanigans!

This deck was brought to US East Coast Nationals, where it went 4-0 on the day. My runner was a copy of CableCarnage’s Undefeated Slimes Ari list, which is a great list that I went 1-3 with because I (still) don’t know how to play runner. Although this time some of the losses felt a lot closer than last time. Unfortunately the 5-3 result landed me in 9th place and just out of the cut, but all in all that was a significantly better result than I expected entering the event so I can't complain.

I am incredibly proud of this deck and it’s still a ton of fun to play.

This is an updated version of Jinja Tower of Flowers. The inspiration and a lot of the main play lines are very similar and described in that writeup, but the following changes were made after some discussion with rongydoge. Those changes are:

• -3 Offworld Office
• +3 Timely Public Release

The biggest change. The whole agenda suite is now an enabler for shenanigans, and scoring any of the 4/2s helps push you towards scoring the next one. In practice, while the TPR counter can keep the scoring chain alive using the classic 'TPR on end of runner’s turn/install agenda, seamless adv adv', you may find that you don’t actually need it to enable runner-turn installs if you have a flower sermon scored (and active jinja). At that point you get to use TPR for basically whatever you want, which is cool. I have used TPR to install ice innermost on HQ/R&D during a run to just make the server unexpectedly taxing or guarantee +2 credits from a tatu-bola swap. These aren’t necessarily the high points of using a TPR counter, but if you’ve played with TPR A Teia before you might be surprised how little the counter can matter to this deck if the other parts of this deck are firing. But it beats scoring out 2 OffOffs and then getting remote locked and smothered to death.

However, we need more money to replace the OffOffs with.

• +2 Hansei Review
• +1 Regolith Mining License
• -1 Charlotte Caçador

Hansei is really good burst money that helps you threaten to rez ice. Good because it’s not usually interactable by the runner and sometimes you just can’t stick an econ asset.

Regolith is incredible in this deck, the card lets you recover from rezzing big ice surprisingly well and all of the assets in this list are at a baseline great for baiting runs. If you can install this card for free (for instance, off of a mandatory draw-Jinja install on your turn) you get to triple click for net 7 credits, threatening to gain an extra 6 whenever convenient unless the runner runs and pays 3 to trash it. That’s a 10 credit swing at minimum.

Charlotte is not the right kind of money in this deck. As you don’t have La Costa Grid, you have to manually advance her. That means you’re clicking to gain 3 credits and a card, but only paying off very very slowly. In the meantime, you can’t easily push stuff in the other remote because the A Teia free installs are very awkward for that, so things flood up in HQ and you’ll wind up needing to pop or overwrite her in a few turns anyhow. You would so much rather just have a button to click for 3 repeatedly.

• -1 Saisentan
• +1 Anansi

The single Saisentan was a test from earlier builds where the rationale was “when the runner is set up this costs as much to break as anansi” and “how do I lower the cost of cards in this deck.” This rationale was incorrect.

Most of the ice in this deck fits into three categories:

1. cheap gearchecks (tatu-bola, thimblerig, enigma)
2. beefy taxing ice (boto, vampyronassa, anansi)
3. rime (rime)

Saisentan doesn’t do any of these roles well. More specifically for the second category, if you’re playing against the anarch breaker + turbine rig, most of the big ice in this deck demands 2 programs be installed before the runner can break it comfortably (Boto at 4str is breakable ~relatively~ easily with just a cleaver but 4c/run is not nothing and this deck can get to threat 4 surprisingly quickly), which is really good because that often buys you a lot of time, particularly versus Anarch. But versus Shaper in particular saisentan is very unlikely to do anything on rez, because it’s weak to Ika, Physarum Entangler, AirbladeX (JSRF Ed.), and it’s really really easy for Echelon to get to strength to break it reasonably well.

• -1 Genotyping
• -1 Cohort Guidance Program

Cuts needed to add the Hansei Reviews. I am sad to lose the third Cohort, especially as the TPRs were put back into the list, and would love to put it back in but slots are really hard in this list and generally seamless is a better agenda scoring tool. Genotyping didn’t see a ton of use. I liked it in theory for the ability to shuffle seamless launches or spin doctors back into the deck (as it’s very common not to pop a spin, they get overwritten by the jinja trick or you let the runner trash it) but I think in practice you just usually don’t need the extra recursion that much.

One additional note on the philosophy of this deck:

A type of play that’s very live in this deck that I really didn’t give much credence to previously is more aggressive use of jinja, including on the corp’s turn. It’s definitely still the case that you need to measure out how much ice you install on the Jinja remote (because you need to retain them for later combos and to protect centrals), but Jinja installing an ice from your mandatory draw and triggering A Teia is still 2 free clicks worth of value in addition to your normal 3 actions on your turn.

In fact, activating Flower Sermon on the runner turn with a Jinja installed gives you net 1 draw and then the two installs, which means that you get to take three clicks on the runner’s turn immediately before doing your own turn’s 3 clicks + mandatory draw (+ extra actions if you re-fire jinja and/or a teia). And Flower Sermon gives you five counters!

Compare this to what the runner is forced to do if they want to challenge your remotes (and you should regularly install in both remotes to force the issue) - checking both servers leaves them with not a whole lot of time to rig up, draw cards, or gain money to continue to challenge either remotes or centrals.

I didn’t take very good notes, but my corp games were:

R2 vs Robert (Ken Tenma) - won via flatline, off of a TPR’d boto from HQ that the runner couldn’t break on a bravado run. Had that not happened, a double Boto HQ is still extremely rough for curupira and probably buys me some amount of time.

R4 vs Gordie (Lat) - won on time, 6-2. Possibly could have pushed out for a win sooner, but I was worried about yet another overclock coming in. Was able to keep centrals safe with various shenanigan counters and lucky cataloguer whiffs. Flower Sermon messes up Lat draw something fierce.

R6 vs Paillu (Freedom) - scored out, 7-4. Such a cool deck! My centrals got hit hard by Leech + Freedom pressure, but the remote was solid and scoring a BacPro kept R&D really safe. Eir icebreaking ability didn’t come down fast enough and I was able to rush out behind 3 face down ice.

R7 vs Izzy (Deep Dive Sable) - scored out, 8-5. Izzy only found 2pts on a full power deep dive and then missed on a 2/5 chance to steal the winning agenda in hq, but the remote was (overly) secure and was enabling repeated jinja kickflips. Turn two included installing a naked jinja and a naked spin doctor, which was left alone and so turned into a rashida at the end of the runner turn (in turn installing more ice on the jinja server). I went way too hard on the remote and should really have just thrown a couple more pieces of ice on HQ and R&D, but I ultimately managed not to get punished for my hubris.

Thanks to NotAgain and Ysengrin for running the tourney, to rongydoge, funkeyman, Gordie, Jamie, and all of the other local boston folks for deck advice, practice games, and for just regularly beating this deck into the dirt during pubrunner. Also thanks to Monde, Cado, and Izzy for helping a huge amount with setting up the phone recording setup for top cut on day 2.