Startup Seb: Bern Connection / 1st at Bern CO (2/1)

Went 2/1 on Bern CO, while the loss was unnecessary and should have been a draw (more later).

The deck felt surprisingly good and in some matchups almost oppressive.

Core idea is of cours the really strong engine we can assemble. Friend of a Friend, Hannah Wheels and Juli Morreira open up the potential for some mad value turns.

Our win-con is central pressures, with regular RnD multiaccesses ( Manuell Lattes and Pretty Silva make a great duo, while Eru enables us to also do it via archives, even seeing 4 cards!)

To see 2 cards from hq with Manuell multiple times a turn (!) also is quite strong, considering we do often times have more than 4 clicks.

Privileged Acces is a great way to recover our econ pieces and can make up for some disgusting turns with hannah wheels. Archives pretty clearly seems to be the most important central server to protect, imposing quite the tax on the corp.

We play botulus over leech - mu seems even tighter than slots already do. We trade of the late game engine and big ice-destruction leech would provide together with arruaceiras crew (please let us just call it the a-team) with the early contest options botulus provides us.

I valued the early capabilities more and it felt right playing the deck. Our breakers are good and quite often the -2 strength from a-team seemed enough. Be aware that you could also have several on the table and use them on the same ice. With this in mind, our breaker suite seems good enough. The "trash something"-condition with boi tata seems not the hardest, as we should trash something almost every turn anyway.

Sometimes corp like to trash their ice with the botulus - which usually doesn't seem to bad for us. It costs them tempo and the less ice the better. We could maybe bring botulus back with privileged access. Also face-checking early can net great results, providing information on where to put the botulus. In doubt, I keep them to contest the remote or to force my way into archives early - altough I feel this is mainly worth it, when at least part of our multiaccess package is online.

The console provided me quite some headache during deckbuilding. After accepting i couldn't leave the house without one, I expected to use it solely as a 2cost-mu.

While playing, it became pretty clear that floating a single tag can often be the right choice, depending heavily on the board state. Draw is what lacks most in this deck, so we just love the clickless two cards.

Our other card draw comes from our influence and seemed imporant in every game. Bahia bands is just great for the draw, but every other option also had it's moment to shine.

Burner seems debatable - it still feels like it could win you some games due to the disruptive potential. I doubt the third diesel would make up for this overall.

For matchups, I lost the first runner game of the day vs. Nuvem (few agenda with punitive). As time was called, we were both at 3 points, while his safe remote had a double advanced agenda in it. I managed to steal another 3 points with the multiacces by Eru.

I should've clearly agreed to a draw at this point, but tried to get the last agenda somehow - not respecting the double punitive, which I could and should have done. If we hadn't got to time, I think I would have had great chances to win this one, regarding the quite effective RnD-lock i had.

The second game against a BTL (Glacier) went quite good, I managed to keep him down economically and thus sneaked in some free accesses.

The last corp game was at table one, where my undefeated opponent had to be beaten to keep him from winning the tournament on the spot

Maybe draw luck helped, but the deck felt very good against his asset spam/holoman/oppo epiphany. A starting hand containing Friend of a Friend, Hannah Wheels and Juli Moreira meant that I could contest from the get go and hold him down quite hard. Ofc the Bahia Bands did their work as well.

I stole 6 points pretty quickly by pressuring centrals with Manuel Latte, before taking an Oppo to the face. To even land it full strength, he was though forced to play two Mindscapes - meaning the killing blow seemed pretty out of reach.

As he was also out of money afterwards, I decided to close it out - running RnD, HQ, Archives to force a spin-shuffle (he pretty obviously had something in there) and RnD afterwards again got me the last agenda. Even without tha, I felt like I was already to much ahead.

Overall, I had a blast playing this deck and it was way less clunky than I feared. I guess there is still much room to improve my piloting, as there often seem to be many possible lines. Leaning more into connections than other "good cards" like earthrise, liberated accounts or leech seemed janky while deckbuilding, but (in this very small samplesize) proved to be surprisingly smooth. I think I will keep exploring on this and I'm interested to hear, what you people think.

Again shoutout to ataraxis for bringing us all together and thanks for all the interesting games!