Just Business (4-1 and 4th at US East Nats)

This is the deck I took to 4th at US East Coast Nationals. It's based on Jai's Midnight Mission from last year's ICC, and while it doesn't have any cards from RWR, the changes made to it were intended to adapt to the current landscape.

My runner was a Swift Lat that I'm not going to comment too much on because I don't think it's particularly different from what's out there, and also because I wasn't super proud of my Runner play on the day of. Just use Wenjong's list and follow his advice; he's better at it than I am

Goals

I had three ideas behind bringing this deck.

1. I figured people were largely going to be out of practice playing against yellow assets given NBN's general decline since the Bellona ban.

2. I wanted something that would be good at punishing Crim/Shaper aggression, notably WT Ari.

3. I wanted something relatively easy to play to minimize my decision-making and fatigue over the course of the tournament (this was also why I brought Swift Lat).

All of these things ended up being relevant over the course of the tournament.

Like a few of the other players who brought R+ decks to good finishes this weekend, I don't think this indicates a resurgence in the faction as a whole -- this was just a speculative meta call for a particular weekend. You will absolutely destroy people on JNet casual playing this deck if that's your thing, though.

The deck

The deck's goal is to slow the entire game down and score behind a relatively frail server. Between Oppo, Public Trail/SGP, Behold!, and Amani Senai, you have a lot of tools to bait the runner into bad runs and punish them in ways that set them back several turns. Once you've bounced their breakers enough times and established a clear tempo lead, you can assemble a remote that's some combination of Ping/Enigma/Surveyor and get 7 points.

The deck is 49 as a holdover from the older deck; this was probably a mistake. The logic about scoring every non-Bellona agenda no longer applies, and you can probably get this down to 44 by cutting some combination of ARES/Funhouse/Behold/Mavirus/another asset. For me, I just didn't want to make any more significant last minute structural changes before the tournament.

One very important decision I made early on was to not put 3-pointers in the deck. Without Bellona, all of the available candidates are horrible, and making the runner steal 4 agendas to win is decent for your game plan anyway.

Some card choices

Amani Senai: A pretty natural inclusion when playing an agenda suite that looks like this. I learned (during the cut no less) that Amani doesn't play nice with Freedom of Information, but if you're fast-advancing FoI you're winning the game anyway.

Daily Business Show: This was originally Federal Fundraising, but I eventually ended up replacing that entirely. Since we've removed all of the 3-pointers from our deck, DBS is way more important for controlling agenda flow, which Federal Fundraising doesn't really do. Also, pretty much all of the political assets from the new cycle have become trash-on-sight, so we likely won't get much value out of our Federals if we aren't holding Public Trail/Oppo. DBS having a higher trash cost makes the opponent really think about whether they can afford to spend 4 credits on the DBS and 4 more credits clearing tags after the inevitable Oppo. It also makes drawing off of R+ triggers on the Runner's turn a stronger consideration, which is kind of neat.

Public Trail: It's just so good here. Half of my games had a turn that was just Public Trail/SGP your breakers/install. Turns like that are extremely demoralizing to the Runner and push you forward a lot.

Behold!: This is a very important and surprisingly flexible card in the deck. You can use it kind of like the Snares in SnaRH!. It protects R&D from Trick Shot. If the runner is aggressively running your remote, you can put it in the remote. If the runner is aggressively checking your facedowns, you can put it on the table. It did enough for me that I played it at 2 and really liked it that way.

Surveyor: Was originally Starlit Knight like the original list. Unfortunately, Starlit Knight doesn't do anything if the Runner is diligently shaking tags, whereas Surveyor has real text. It gets beaten by a lot of things (Boomerang, Botulus, Physarum, Hush, etc.), but a lot of those things also beat Starlit Knight, so I found it more reliable on the whole to score behind.

Agendas: We have lots of ways to punish aggressive running, so we're not all-in on ARES here. It good if we can score it early, but it's just as useful later on as a thing to jam in the remote or feed to the runner to enable your stuff. Going to 3 ARES makes the suite and deckslots as a whole super awkward if we're not on 3-pointers, so it's fine, you can live with it at 2.

Artificial Cryptocrash was a mistake. Every time I drew this stupid card I wished it had just been Offworld Office.

Tag Punishment: It's important in these kinds of decks to have a combination of single-tag and tag-me punishment. The single-tag punishment is SGP and the tag-me is FoI and Shipment from Vladisibirsk. I used to slot a Market Forces, but I found it excessive in most of my games -- if they're floating tags, you have a million other ways to win. I think you can potentially go to 3 SGP as well, but I found that I was drawing them pretty much whenever I needed them at just 2.

In closing

Just wanted to close this out by thanking Dhairya for running an amazing event, and to all of the people who helped support it by TOing/judging/lending me cards when I forgot them in my room (thanks Dhairya and Jamie!).

I also wanted to thank the TAI Breakers for being an awesome group of players -- this is my highest finish since I started playing last year, and it belongs to the gang as a whole just as much as it is my own.