Punk Rock Lat (3-1 in NYC Jan CO)

Peel me off this Velcro seat / And get me moving / I sure as hell can't do it by myself
— Longview, Green Day

The inspiration for this deck started with maninthemoon's Inevitability Engine and the goal of finding a faster Lat. I'm not confident in my ability to read the early board well enough to know when to play Legwork or The Maker's Eye, and I didn't want them clogging up my hand waiting for me to find my breakers.

Dropping Legworks and Ghosttongue opened up the influence for 2x Moshing — the inspiration for the deck's title: Punk Rock Lat. Moshing solves two problems I have playing Lat. In the early game, it fixes a clunky hand while pitching mid/late-game programs into the bin as Simulchip targets. In the late game, it gives tempo from my dead/duplicate cards.

Boomerang is an experiment teching for surprise pressure — great if I draw it T1 and still a surprise break the corp isn't expecting it later. Along with 2x Pinhole, the deck runs three cards I might draw early to disrupt a Rashida or econ asset. (But depending on the meta, Boomerang might be better as a Miss Bones or a Clot.)

Dropping a Dirty Laundry, Rigging Up, and Harmony from the Inevitability list made space for 3x Daily Casts, for economy not conditioned on having a card in hand to install or having to make a run. It lowers the event density, which is unfortunate, but Casts have such an efficient credit return that I think it's worth it.

Double Turbine could instead be Turbine+Takobi like in Inevitability, but I wanted to increase my consistency finding Turbine early to rig it up or mosh it away and chip it back. Without multi-access events, Conduit is the win-con — another card that can be rigged up or chipped back when the time is right.

Since I don't take core damage from Ghosttongue, I decided DZMZ did more work than T400. Playing T400 and losing the ability to discard to match (non-PD) corp hand size felt terrible whenever I played it. Whereas DZMZ combos nicely with Rigging Up and Simulchip for zero-cost installs of the big 4 programs.

I've been pretty happy with how this deck runs. It's really trying to smooth out the early turns and minimize the number of dead cards in hand as we rush for the mid-game. It went 3-1 in the NYC Jan CO, which — combined with 3-1 from RH in a Cheap Suit (aka Ag) — was enough to take 2nd place.

Many thanks to my TAI Breaker fam, for all the advice and testing games and moral(e) support! I couldn't do it without you! ♥