What does that agenda do?? | 1st place, VPC Identity Crisis

This is an identity crisis deck — it's a standard-legal Built to Last deck, but it's played with Jinteki: Personal Evolution as the ID!

See my undefeated runner here.

This deck capitalizes on Weyland's tempo-positive 1-pointer agendas, and the access to 3x End of the Line to make Personal Evolution more effective than it is out of Jinteki. The plan:

• The runner interacts: hit 'em with Public Trail + EotL
• The runner doesn't interact: make 'em read your agendas

Key cards

Hostile Takeover: Take the best 2/1 in the game, and add a net damage to it. Plus, it makes Broad Daylight better.

Eminent Domain: Way better than I originally gave it credit for. Rezzing an Archer or Pharos from deck is a massive tempo swing.

Armed Intimidation: The strongest threat in the deck once the remote is secure. Install-advance-advance allows you to score the following turn and kill (potentially with help)

Broad Daylight: Lets you beat Stoneship/Steelskin on the kill turn.

Public Trail: Most runners can't block the tag after paying through Archer.

Predictive Planogram: Excellent glue for a deck like this that wants to go fast and draw into agendas.

The games

The deck beat Chronologist on Anarch Az and Tyrell on Criminal Padma. I lost a game I should have won against tzeentchling's Criminal Padma because of a misplay, but the deck felt broadly in control for all games and I'd probably take some variant of this if somehow there was another identity crisis tournament.

Every single opponent audibly sighed at some point while playing against this deck.

The closed decklist format definitely helps this deck considerably. Running against this isn't dangerous early-game, but because it's PE, runners are scared to run for singles. I left HQ un-iced pretty liberally, and with open decklists that probably wouldn't be an option.

Thoughts on Identity Crisis

I was expecting the format to have lots of broken combos. But, it turns out most decks prefer to have identities of their own faction, because of inbuilt synergies. Other than damaging corps being clearly the best option (top 5 of 9 in our tournament, should be better once PE rotates), there's a lot of fun stuff that can be done.

This is probably the most fun I've had deckbuilding for a tournament, ever — I'd love to play in more events like this, and I'd encourage other TOs to try out more non-standard formats. It sparks a lot of enjoyable creativity in the deckbuilding process and lets you pull some fun cards out of the binder.

Shoutout to Tak for all the help theorycrafting and deckbuilding, this deck would have been way worse without it.

And shoutout to tzeentchling for being an awesome TO and running this sick tournament!