Party Time - Wargames Emporium SC, Sheffield, 1st Place

Won the Store Championship at Wargames Emporium (Sheffield, UK) with this deck out of a field of 16. A similar version, but with slightly different events finished Top 8 (out of 20+?) at Patriot Games (Sheffield, UK) the day before – unfortunately I made an error in the double elim – that I knew was a mistake at the time but did it anyway (ditching plascrete tokens instead of cards versus Argus to try and save Levy).

After my experience at Patriot – facing all the Weyland, including GRNDL – I decided to tech up and remove Account Siphon and go with two each of Legwork and I’ve Had Worse. This worked out a lot better and in one case got me 8 agenda point in two turns, in another saved me from a Traffic Accident after a Scorched Earth. Another choice was putting Levy back in – seeing a PE and at least one spiky RP on the day meant it was wise – but largely it was in there because I needed to recur my recursion(!) getting through badass Weyland servers.

Due to there being a few currents about too, I’ve taken out a Dirty Laundry for a Net Celebrity – didn’t notice much difference, so the jury is still out on that one.

The deck is not dissimilar to many CT out there, but then a lot of decks have similar cores these days. A key difference is using D4v1d, and no Femme. The former was a life saver against Blue Sun or other Weyland big ICE decks – and allowed me to kill OI Curtain Wall turn one, plus (with the help of Sharpshooter and clone chips) burn through remotes covered in Curtain Wall, Archer, Archer, Orion.

Crisium Grid seems to be a thing now ( along with Caprice in Jinteki), so Maker’s Eye might go for another R&D Interface and bring the card count down to 40.

The main weakness is Strength 4 Sentry. I figured there weren’t that many and Sharpshooter handles Ichi, however there’s this Argus deck going round with Data Raven which proved tricky, so there was a lot of running first click with plenty of money and then clearing tags.

Apply some early pressure if you want, but don’t get hung up on it. Get the Magnum out ASAP and spend a turn or two on your “Day Job” effect, and get drawing. There’s very little in the way of draw, but just about every card you want to see (barring multiples of console or MO) so get digging, playing and making cash. Your answers for dangerous ICE are all fairly cheap so if you’ve got cash and SMC go crazy. Remember you can Clone Chip an SMC and go digging – but be careful of memory. You’ve got 5 +1 for Astrolabe, but MO takes two and so do SMCs. I’m thinking of maybe swapping on console out for an Akamatsu as things can get tight – but the extra card draw is something you’re short of. Don’t forget to keep a SOT hanging around to use Levy if it gets binned.

Arguably you could have more memory added, increase some card counts to 3 from 2 and other things, but ultimately if you’re going for more cards, you may as well go full on Pre-paid Kate. PPK is probably stronger overall, certainly later on, but I like to be different and not play what all the cool kids are doing (hence I’ve had to drop Noise for now, even though all the nice cards have come out!). Plus there’s a promo for Chaos Theory. I think she’s faster in the early – mid game even if she’s not got the staying power of Kate because its past her bed time, but as you can see from this tournament I didn’t drop any games with her all day.

Four rounds, Top 4 cut. Split as runner (Titan / Kit), double win (Noise / PE), split as runner (Titan / Kit), split as runner (MaxX / RP), double elim corp loss (Blue Sun), runner win (Titan player from early dropped), runner win (Blue Sun), corp & runner win (RP / Quetzal).