It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna SSO)

This is my corp deck for Magnum Opus, it went 7-0 in the games I played (over both days, I had 1 ID and lost my 2 my 241 last round) and was top Weyland of 1a. I won via flatline with Punitive in round 2. In the remaining 6 games, I scored a total of 12 public 5/3's (along with hostile as 7th point), which for this my first and likely last Netrunner tournament felt pretty amazing.

I am not going to do a round by round break down because my post-mortems were all short at best and it is difficult for me to give an accurate analysis of what precisely transpired aside from some games where my opponents were unlucky. On the other hand, this deck was built to capitalize on the misfortune of others and it seemed to do so.

The plan is pretty straight forward: if reasonable (aka DoF threat low) jam a public 5/3 behind ice turn 1, leave it in the remote for 2 turns getting your corp ability twice, score, jam 2nd 5/3, turtling that turn, RPC next turn, and score a hostile somewhere in there. If the runner attempts to steal from what should be a taxing remote, kill them by either bathing them in tags or punitive after hitting a city works project. Generally, on jnet at least, the deck had won or lost by turn 10.

Some thoughts on card choices, particularly : Agendas: City Works and Hostile are great, Hollywood is a pile of garbage but the 3 advancement counters/agenda points are so valuable you play it anyway.

Assets: Rashida is the truth, but you knew that already

Team Sponsorship is good for recurring Rashida, grabbing back ice after overdrawing, or scoring six points in a turn usually by a 5 advanced city works in step 2.2, putting another 5/3 into play and then RPCing, I got to do this once at worlds which was pretty sweet. The high trash cost on this and Jinja also helped set up hhns.

Upgrade: Jinja lets me clicklessly build a tower where I have no intention of rezzing most of the ice, but with a surveyor at the bottom it is super taxing. Generally, I was very happy with it.

Operations: UVC spent a lot of influence but was characteristically fantastic whenever I drew it.

Mass com: Only one and typically as a bail out for games that had gone too long. I never wanted this to be good, but sometimes you cannot score out in 8 turns or what have you.

Scarcity over paywall Mostly as a way to clear opposing current, I preferred this to paywall because it is some swingy bs, as your current ought to be.

HHN: generally SSO does not play this, so as a surprise it was quite nasty.

Ark Lockdown: I expected to see a lot of decks on conspiracy breakers (and possibly levy), this was generally good if not great, locked out one game.

HPT: A precaution so I did not get stone dumpstered by Liza(which was also my runner), and to make the hhn tags do a little more work too

Notable in its absence: Biotic Labor is great for a combo turn, but in my experience was a 4 influence card that did not put in much work outside of play agenda+rpc or fast track + hostile takeover. I felt I could do better with the influence, meh.

I would not have minded a Best Defense.

In general, the deck vastly surpassed my expectations, though there was definitely some luck involved (like when @RotomAppliance whiffed on finding the winning hostile when seeing 3/4 cards in hq round 8). I don't want to make any outlandish claims about the strength of the deck and let survivorship bias and ego cloud my judgement. However, it felt quite effective vs. Anarch and was a fun deck to play.