Endless Austerity [5-1 NtscapeNavigator SC, 8th in Swiss]

This is the deck I played at the NtscapeNavigator Store Championship. It went 5-1 on the day, winning against Hive MaxX, Apoc Hoshiko twice and Reg Loup twice. It's sole loss came against Sunny. I've discussed how to run this in detail before here, so I'm going to focus primarily on the changes I've made since then.

Agenda Suite

SSL was banned since the last time I've played this, which left a pretty gaping hole in the agenda suite. I tested SAM and VMI, and ended up being quite surprised by how good VMI was. The three power counters align nicely with how long it takes to charge up another MCA, so you can put the runner on two clicks until you score the next one. Conversely, you can also save them to hold off Apocalypse on a turn where MCA is down or for use with Luminal Transubstantiation to enable some ridiculous cheese. The Luminal cheese play looks like this.

1. Use MCA as normal to score luminal. You now have three clicks from Luminal and two leftover from MCA.
2. IAA an Ikawah Project
3. Restore MCA and click it.
4. At the start of the runners turn, use a VMI counter. The runner now has 1 click to steal Ikawah Project.

Even if you can't pull of the impossible Ikawah, its quite common the runner won't be able to pull together a steal directly on two or three clicks. If you score Luminal, you should always stop and think about whether you can chain another score.

Deck Filtering

Spin Doctor and Sprint are what make it possible to play this deck right now. You must find MCA quickly if you want the deck to work, but you also don't want to empty R&D. You'll frequently need to go to turn twenty or so to grind the runner out and you don't want to be in danger of decking out. The filtering on these two lets us see lots of cards without actually reducing the number of cards in R&D. Additionally, Spin doctor gives you as many as 6 more MCA uses, which is more than enough.

Economy

I've spent a lot of influence on Hansei Review and Predictive Algorithm instead of a more normal econ spread for Mirromorph of Rashida Jaheem and Red Level Clearance. Rashida doesn't make the cut because we don't want to actually draw that many cards, as described above. Additionally, after turn three or so, there's no where to put it. Any turn without MCA in the remote is a bad turn, so it becomes a dead card with trash 1. I ended up cutting red level because what I really needed was more credits. Not cards, not installs. Just credits. The deck can find plenty of clicks for other stuff, but you need your operations to produce credits.

Other Thoughts

That's pretty much all I have to say. The deck played very well on the day. It has a pretty good anarch matchup generally, and really demolishes apoc anarch (turns out its hard to play apoc with three clicks). I think the sunny game was winnable if I understood their plan better. Thanks go to NetDad for helping me tune this, and to everyone who helped put on a great tournament.