Space Olympics

OKAY SO FIRST DISCLAIMER: I'm publishing this not because it did well but on request of the person who won the regional it attended. I think the archetype has real merit though, and people -might- benefit from having a mostly-functional shell to work from. Again though, this didn't perform super well the day of.

SO: This is basically a traditional Moons deck, but in Sportsmetal. I brought it as a meta call to Rochester on the theory that:

-People were on Employee Strike almost exclusively over Film Critic. -While Clan Vengeance certainly can render Lakshmi moot, it's not as fast as Moons can go if you just speed ahead, and Moons has a variety of scoring options. -I enjoyed playing Moons and this seemed okay in testing the night before.

The shell is basically in no way my creation, for what it's worth. It's a refinement of the traditional Moons archetype, with Sportsmetal to provide further tempo as agendas are scored/stolen. The list given to me had 4 influence open, so I added Political Dealings over 1x Ash, thinking that with it on the field, you could turn the deck's big draw engines (Estelle Moon and Rashida Jaheem) into pseudo-Fast-Advance tools, and even do so in a way that bypassed the ubiquitous threat of Clan Vengeance.

To be perfectly honest, Political Dealings underperformed the day of. The way the turn timing works, you can't tutor for it with Tech Startup and then rez it to catch Rashida or your mandatory draw, and the runner certainly isn't going to let it stay on the table once they know it's there, which pretty much leaves it as a 1-of, or something only useful if the runner left a charged Moon on the table. I'm not going to completely rule it out, the Mti Moons deck makes good use of it, but it's better at defending assets pre-Employee Strike and also isn't paying 4(!) influence for it.

CARD CHOICES:

Ikawah/Vitruvius/SFT/DBS/Moon/Lakshmi/Rashida/Tech Startup/Turtlebacks/Biotic Labor/Architect/: This is the meat and potatoes of the shell. I wouldn't mess with any of this. Be extra aware of the fact that Sportsmetal lets you draw two cards before SFT's when-scored ability fires, if you so choose.

-Ash lets you rush out an agenda behind minimal ice early/late games sometimes. He's pretty great. -2x Team Sponsorship may very well be wrong. I was originally on 3x TS 2x Jeeves but Jeeves is such a big deal for your power turns. Again, keep in mind that you can order your triggers to Sportsmetal draw first if you don't have anything you particularly want in HQ or Archives. -2x Marilyn Campaign: I'd liked these because the deck fluctuates wildly in terms of money, and these are generally low-enough priority that the runner leaves them alone, which helps you stay in the 6-8 credit range you want to be in to score an agenda when the pieces line up. HOWEVER they're not very high-impact cards, and they may be better off elsewhere.

Restore: It's been long enough that I'm not comparing this to Friends in High Places, so I can say truthfully that it's good, not great. It's solid value, but you can't Restore Estelle Moon and then install three things (although you can install three things and Restore), and basically anything you rez, the runner's going to kill. Probably the best value is restoring a Team Sponsorship with the Jeeves bonus click after triple advancing a Project Vitruvius, or a Moons.

-Gatekeeper: Enigma rez cost, Enigma break cost with Black Orchestra after rez turn, has a great facecheck value. Solid ice, only downside is Aumakua. -IP Block: Actually underperformed a bit for me, frankly. A lot of people are on Val with Max James, and any combination of 2 bad pub/link means this is essentially Pop-Up Window in terms of how much of a gear check it is. I'd consider switching to Vanilla/Wraparound, which at least force the install, despite being overall worse. -Tollbooth: it's taxing. It does suffer from being the ice people get to use their Surveyor tech on, though.

OTHER NOTES:

If I could go back in time to before the tournament began, I think I'd A) tell myself "No, foilflaws isn't rusing you, he really won't show up, it'll be okay." B) tell myself PLAY AROUND MINING ACCIDENT FOR THE LOVE OF JACKSON HOWARD.

Seriously. The way the deck wins is by putting out more stuff than the runner can handle, and using the stuff that slips through to score. At two or more Bad Publicity, the runner can basically handle everything you're putting out, at which point you're slow enough that you'll eventually lose to Clan Vengeance+zer0 or multiaccess. The round one/two losses in the Swiss that kept me out of the cut were to Val landing a T1 Mining Accident and proceeding to just casually trash EVERYTHING.

That's really it in terms of writeup. I should probably have slipped more #emojispam references in here, and if I -win- a regional this season may Gord have mercy on you all because I very much will, but I figured @aunthemod deserved something approaching clarity over maximum meme-ing.

Thanks to: neuropantser and ion_fox for being huge testing partners, my local meta for putting up with my dumb ass, bluebird503 for discussing the finer points of the Sportsmetal Moons concept, and my opponents in Rochester (Sean, Jim, Evan, and Andrew) for good games, even if most of them I corped in were losing ones :p