Oh, Lady Be Good - 3rd Place, Red Castle Store Championship,

This is the latest experimental iteration of my Oh, Lady Be Good deck, the last significant version of which I piloted to win the Portland Regional Championship last August (Here's that deck's list.)

With all the Most Wanted changes and losing [Levy[(https://netrunnerdb.com/en/card/03035) and Same Old Thing, MaxX's options have changed pretty drastically. Buffer Drive helps a lot, but that's about it; losing the freedom Same Old Thing/Levy gives you is a pretty big game changer, and I'm not convinced Buffer Drive is, in and of itself enough, enough to offset the loss, at least with the Apocalypse/heavy operation play style.

MaxX did her best for me today at the Red Castle (Portland) Store Championship, but we definitely struggled. At the end of the day she performed 2-2, which considering the aggressiveness of the corp decks I was running against, I wasn't too disappointed with.

Played against a Gagarin (who ended up taking second place in the tournament), and was able to squeak through for a win. Then turned right around and lost, after putting up a pretty plucky fight if I do say so myself, to two Argus tag-punishment decks in a row. Finished out the day against a CTM... Floated a ridiculous amount of tags, Apocalypsed and Wanton Destructioned his HQ a few times, and was lucky enough to trash a large glut of agendas, enough to take a win by hitting his archives.

At the end of the day, I'd say the Apocalypse/MaxX archetype makes a lot of intuitive sense (clearly it was a very strong archetype last season, having lots of ability for dynamic and devastating play), but that with the current cards.... It's just a bit too fragile to really run to the max. I'm definitely going to do a heavy retooling of this for upcoming tournaments.

Had a great time at the tournament. Everyone was nice, and all my opponents were great fun!

A few notes on this build:

Buffer Drive is indispensable to this concept of MaxX. Truly a must-have, unless/until someone comes up with a less recursion sensitive MaxX build.

Making and Entrance is a much better version of [Gachapon}(https://netrunnerdb.com/find/?q=gachapon&sort=set&view=list&_locale=en). You can trash whatever you like. You can rearrange. You don't burn your deck, knowing you are already running full speed, destroying your deck without much recourse for failure or bad draws. You can stack your upcoming cards to meet your needs, setting up draws into econ, operations, breakers, whatever. And it doesn't telegraph exactly what's coming up, and risk giving the corp hints as to your play direction. All in all, 100-percent superior.

Kati Jones shouldn't be as important for this deck as it is.... Econ consistently becomes a problem if you can't shred the corp in the first handful of turns, which often you can't if you're going against a good player or a good deck. This at least gives you a last-ditch out.

Bailey, aka CowboyTintin