[SU] SuperBrutalism (Melbourne Startup CO 23H1)

This deck was a simple throw together for the 21 player Startup CO in Melbourne/Naarm. Along with my Zahya list it took me to first place in Swiss (5 wins and 1 ID) and only losing my first place in the final.

This deck is hinged around getting a good start and abusing Startup's lack of instant clot installs. BtL was chosen for the low cost fast advance options and with an expectation of a lot of Matryoshka Esa Hortum is a lot less painful to triple advance when you get part of it refunded. Weirdest include is probably the single Hostile Architecture which can cause some strife for the runner and sometimes lets my uniced SanSan survive. It didn't see a whole lot of play and was probably not much of a useful include but it definitely caused a lot of runners to doubletake when they saw it (And I needed it in the deck to call it Brutalism :P). The two Subliminal messaging were a late addition in expectation of a few solitaire-esque Esas

Results:

Round 2 vs Padma (Scotty)

Scotty was a newer player who I was very happy to play against. Endurance hit the table early and I haemorrhaged 4 points before I could close out servers, needing to forfeit an Azef to Archer on R&D just to slow Padma down. Fortunately a couple of greedy runs from the runner left them with no Endurance counters and opened the window for me to start FAing out. The initial Azef had hit a Turbine and this deck was on Mimic so R&D was only really at risk every 3 turns. Once I was sitting at match point a bait into the remote with a regolith without enough Boat counters hit a stavka, trashing enough breakers to secure every server long enough to draw into the final agenda.

Round 3 vs Esa (TheSlash)

This was the deck I was probably most teched against and I got very unlucky with draws. First Spin fell early to a timebomb sabo. Second was trashed off the top of R&D, and the third never saw the light of day, in the bottom 5 or so cards of my deck, along with both copies of Subliminal. The game played mostly as would be expected with Esa sneaking in Sabo most turns. After mulligan I was left with limited ice and a single agenda in hand but I drew rather fast into an almost full hand and had to start jamming. Thankfully I managed to score a few points out behind a single piece of ice and when I had 4 points of agendas hit archives from the first chastushka I was forced to ice archives (This luckily ended up being a hortum, but I cannot claim having planned that out). Esa was relying almost entirely on Sabotage pressure for the early game and I was flooded, but had a rezzed Hortum on HQ that they weren't making any moves to break through. When Xe pivoted with a matryoshka install into Chastushka on HQ my single advance hortum, I was forced to advance it to 3 and lock out their AI breaker. Shortly afterwards the Hortum on archives (still unknown to Esa) was triple advanced as well. Showing my hand but preventing a 7 point steal from the bin. Eventually I ended up on 6 scored points with an atlas counter, 2 points in hand and 5 points in the bin. The runner chose to botulus the HQ Hortum instead of the Archives one, which is probably the play that lost them the game. A Finality (which scooped 2 more points into the bin through the Sabo) that missed on access, followed by a HQ run that grabbed the Agenda in hand meant I had free reign to Atlas counter out the last Hostile for the win.

Round 5 vs Padma (Keiran)

This would have been a loss for myself except that it was discovered that Keiran was playing an illegal deck (5 too few cards) by accident. I got completely demolished by an early Endurance into a flooded HQ, so taking the win on a technicality that probably wouldnt have mattered (Yeah, the consistency might have played a factor but it would have been an uphill battle to work past the agenda flood) felt bad, but rules are rules.

With Top3 Single Elimination and ending as the top seed I only had a single game to play and ended up taking this deck in

Finals vs Nyusha (Lockie).

I wasn't too worried about 1st vs 2nd (As I don't particularly intend to play during the CBI) so I went into this one with a rather friendly attitude. That was not necessary on my part. Nyusha hit pretty much every mark that would make my life hell. My one hope was a Stavka installed onto HQ slowing them down but the turn after I installed it, Backstitching hit the table and HQ was only ever run on HQ mark turns (of which there were many). Over the course of a couple of turns I bled agendas from HQ leading to a rather quick loss.