Cap'n & Boat (1st @ Brighton CO 2022)

The Theory

This is a pretty straightforward Boat deck: get counters on Boat and Turtle, find some agendas, Deep Dive to finish. This version of the deck comes from the Brighton Netrunners Slack channel and I know there were a few variants of it around on the day. This one has 46 cards because I couldn't make up my mind what to cut (I still don't).

The Practice

Let's say the Swiss rounds were a learning experience. Out of five rounds, I won two games with the Cap'n, first against PE and second against Pravdivost. The games that got away were against a Sports and two Azmari (one on a Drago Boom! plan and the other being a Very Civilised and Fair™ game).

In the cut I had a rematch against Drago's Azmurder Funhouse and scored six points on turn one (snatching a three-pointer out of hand and off a Deep Dive) before proceeding into a long and tense game of "Where's that last f***ing agenda hiding?" By the time I found it, Drago had been trashed many times and there were no cards left in R&D for me to Deep Dive. The key to victory was patience. Patience and not floating seven tags against a deck running Boom!. Patience, not floating seven tags and scoring six points on turn one.

The last Cap'n game of the day was against AgInfusion. This game really drove home to me that this deck works best with a slow and steady building up of counters to apply pressure and less about recklessly running about shouting "Facecheck? What facecheck? I have a Boat!", which was my natural inclination. I give a lot of credit to my good friend Anansi "Eat Four Net Damage, Sucker!" Eightlegs for repeatedly convincing me to slow down and think again over the course of this game.

All that said, every game I played was a blast and thanks to all my opponents, with a special shout-out to Swiftie for being such a gentleman in only exploiting the tag he landed with Tomorrow's Headline and not the dozen or so I floated later on.

The Summary

So, turns out, I'm pretty sure this deck is good, although not the best fit for the way I usually play (though I do like big boats, I cannot lie). That said, there's definitely room for refinement here; getting down to 45 cards would be a start and going by games I've played against it, it starts to struggle when the corp can put multiple big ice on its servers.

The Final Thought

It's fun, it's good and I look forward to seeing where it goes.