We Are The Spark That Will Light The Fire That Finishes 68th

Cobalt 382

My corpside deck for UK nats! The basic plan was to defeat the usual Boat / Botulus / Boomerang shenanigans by putting Tollbooth in front of the runner while they have no money, then score out normally using Vlad City Grid.

Many thanks to Crowphie for not only being fun to hang out with but also helping me refine this into something playable before the event. It was great to meet KingSolomon, l0velace, Finnbar, Fern, Tim and Franziska and I'm looking forward to seeing you all at a later event!

Some reflections:

  • The advert package was generally pretty good, with runners surprisingly unwilling to trash Nico Campaign - giving some big money when it could tick down. Tiered Subscription continues to be the best card in the deck, providing a 5 credit swing if the Runner immediately runs click 1 and trashes it, and being a 0-rez drip card otherwise.
  • The Divert Power plan seems to have potential, but lining it up properly proved hard. It costing 2 credits itself is not insignificant and you need to have things live that you want to derez - which means if the runner does immediately go in and trash all your campaigns you have a threefold problem of no money, no way to get more money and no way to cheat your scary Hydra's rez cost.
  • Given the money trouble, the cute "Spark doesn't play Hedge Fund" idea is probably going in the bin. Predictive Planogram is also up for consideration given it's Beanstalk with upside.
  • Vlad City Grid was very disappointing. In theory it's to turbo out Artificial Cryptocrash, but in reality IAA - pay 3 - IAA score was very clunky. It can't even be left on the table early, as the Runner won't trash it unless you've already committed advancements to it. May be worth pivoting to SanSan as this at least screams "must trash!" and can be left on the table until needed or Diverted...or just play Seamless like everyone else.
  • Boom! got me a random kill against a Tag-me deck round 1 but was very inconsistent otherwise. People are paranoid of tags at the moment and with good reason. Tags as tax is a solid idea for an econ war deck like this but there's a lot of commitment to not paying for removing them, and the threat needs to be backed up or the Runner just never has to bother clearing them. Room for improvement.
  • Best Defense was intended to snipe Misdirections but I never drew it, so I can't comment on it.

Overall, a really fun event and I'm looking forward to the next one!

1 comments
30 Nov 2022 rotage

That random kill was vs me, even though I'd seen the proxy boom you had left out of your deck :)

Was great fun to meet and play you