Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? (3rd Place 2018 NZ Nationals)

Tired of corps having all of your personal information? Surveil back in a big way with a disgruntled, conspiratorial octogenarian!

This deck took third place at the event, despite only going 2-5 on the day, riding in on the coattails of my undefeated Titan deck. It's been very strong in testing in the past month, but had some bad beats on the day. I'd been playing a very similar archetype with my Kid Sister MaxX deck, published a couple of months ago (https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/48154/see-trash-all-the-things-2nd-in-swiss-victoria-bc-sc-), which uses God(s) of War, Obelus, Mars for Martians, Dean Lister, and Counter Surveillance to land some bonkers deep digs in R&D to usually close out games, and By Any Means and Legwork to bin important cards from the corp's hand.

In testing with MaxX in the two months leading to this event, I found that all copies of Obelus were too often going into the bin due to her cavalier attitude, and needed something that was potentially more consistent in getting them down early. My friend Chris Hay and I figured that Omar's early pressure might be a better choice, and to just put more draw in to get the essential early combo pieces down as fast as possible, which are Obelus and at least one God of War to get the engine going.

I tested back and forth between E-Strike and Levy for the restricted card, E-Strike being especially important against AgInfusion, as it can get tough to land a CS dig without it, but ended up choosing Levy, as it was crucial in some situations if you took damage throughout the game by being agro and lost too many key cards (see my game against Michael Walsh in the semifinals for empirical evidence of this, haha).

Games this won were against Argus (thank you for more tags) and Titan (Stimhack through Archer on the remote for the final agenda). The most memorable loss was to Palana in round one of Swiss, against which I went tag-me on turn one without Obelus, got to six points very quickly with Omar's early aggression, went into HQ with three cards in hand, hitting an Obokata, not being able to steal it, and getting Boomed a turn or two later...out of Palana. I high-fived that guy.

I got to play Corp in the first two rounds of the cut, but then had to run against Robin Candy's tournament-winning Skorp deck (in which Omar got to five points, but couldn't get anything to break Code Gates fast enough, as he closed out with Atlas counters and Audacity), and then against Michael's truly glacial Palana, which more or less ground me into paste with three rezzed DNA Trackers and two Nisei scores that made CS digs nearly impossible.

This was a great tournament event, and everyone there was fantastic to play and hang out with. Special thanks to the Dunedin and Victoria metas for their inputs and support throughout the lead-up to this tournament, particularly to Peter Harris for stream-of-consciousness level, instant-speed feedback on card choices and ideas, and Chris Hay for encouraging me to take Titan a few days before the tournament (which, incidentally, Peter had also suggested as a strong choice quite a while before that, but I was tunnel-visioned on Skorpios at the time).