Teched Out

This was the only Az deck at the Black Lives Matter tournament, and for someone with very little competitive experience, I am pleased that I managed to win half my games with it.

The idea is to have a tech card for many different situations, while applying pressure to HQ and R&D. Paragon and John Masanori give you a credit and a card for the one run you want to be making most turns. With The Class Act installed, that card can be any of the top three cards of your stack, with duplicates and unwanted cards being filtered out of the way. The brakers are fairly efficient, and with the odd Bravado, Falsified Credentials, and Kati Jones boost, your economy should be able to support those runs, and get you in when you need to.

Now, on to the tech cards:

• Direct Access: This can be incredibly valuable in certain matchups, eating CtMs trigger to give you a turn of free trashing, avoiding spiky centrals in RP, or even getting around the Earth Station 6c tax.
• Networking: I have something of a hatred for Hard Hitting News, and while this still takes your turn to remove all those tags, it only costs you 3 or 4c, so won’t destroy your economy. It also helps to mitigate John Masanori’s downside if the corp manages to end a run.
• HQ Interface: This can be very nice if the corp hasn’t protected HQ well, making you much more likely to snipe agendas hiding there, trash key corp assets before they can be protected in a remote, or spot the operations like Punitive Counterstrike that could otherwise be a nasty surprise.
• R&D Interface: Much like the above, this helps when you need to find key cards before the corp does.
• Miss Bones: I saw a fair amount of asset heavy decks in testing for the tournament, but not many during it. Even so, this still saw use against upgrades. This is particularly helpful with Direct Access against decks like CtM, where you can trash 3 or so key assets for only her 1c install cost (thanks to Az).
• Whistleblower: Probably most useful against City Works Project, which might otherwise be near impossible to steal, but Falsified Credentials and Equivocation help you spot other defensive agendas.
• Equivocation: This servers a similar purpose to R&D Interface, and helps out Whistleblower, but makes multiple runs worthwhile, especially the turn you install Euler.
• Sneakdoor Beta: A staple criminal card from the original core set, many corps will still be caught unawares of this, and it let’s you still benefit from HQ Interface. Forcing the corp to spread their ice to Archives will make it more likely a single Boomerang can get you into a server, but will make it less likely you will have an unprotected server for Aumakua counters.

While testing versions of this, for a while I used Zer0, Buffer Drive, and a single Titanium Ribs, which you can set up very cheaply with Az, but this turned out to be rather slow, so I ended up dropping them and using the influence for Euler, Equivocation, and Beth.