3rd place Santa Clara Regionals - Blue Sun Glacier

With Blacklist being the MVP, what are your thoughts on Chronos Project vs. Hostile as both serve a similar purpose and blacklist can delay things until the chronos is scored.

Congrats on 3rd! I am really looking forward to seeing that video of our match in the finals!

That was probably one of my favorite games all day.

Great deck and congrats!

@sruman Personally I prefer Blacklist over Chronos. Blacklist is same-turn, and you also have EBC to search for it. Chronos you can only search for with an Atlas, and if you do then you can't score it until next turn. Blacklist to setup for a Chronos seems odd, if Blacklist is only giving you a temporary lockout then I feel like you have more important things to do there than score one point. Also too many moving parts.

The hostile to win immediately on 6 points + atlas counter has done a lot of work for me (although admittedly not much during this regional, but generally because I didn't see Atlas much). Also 3 clicks for 5 credits is sometimes worth a bad pub in the mid/late-game if you are in a bad spot economically. Not often, but it has won me a few games when it wasn't my 7th point.

@Myriad Thanks. I also really look forward to that video going up, that was one of my favorite games in general. Really glad that happened on camera.

Thanks for the response, makes sense. During my testing I arrived at a similar build (only difference being High Risk for Pri Req, Chronos for HT, 18th ice for Interns). Over time I've consistently dropped code-gates due to the resurgence of Yog. Now with it's new super-eyes in tow, I'm thinking of reducing them even further to only Wormhole and Tollbooth as gear checks. What are your thoughts on the lotus in a post-NRE world? Is Yog why you swapped out the "standard" data pike ?

Also, how did you find Taurus' performance? Taking out consoles is great in theory, but rarely do I rez it when they can't break it and then want to spend the extra 3 credits to guarantee trash h/w.

Pre-tournament I was thinking I was in a pretty good spot code gate-wise with Yog and Net-Ready Eyes now being a thing. On playing, I ended up not seeing much of either. It made me want to switch a Caduceus to a Datapike. You want Cad to gear-check for Mimic, I think something to gear-check for low strength code gates would be good too. 2 checks for Mimic and 1 for Yog seems better than just 3 for Mimic, and it feels like 1-link is still pretty popular around here which makes Cad pretty bad all on its own.

I had moved away from Datapike before NRE, I just always thought it was the worst ICE in the deck. Lotus and Tollbooth cause a lot of problems for a lot of runners (especially with BS to naturally stop Knight / Femme), and they felt like enough for code gates. I still think Lotus is a good include (forcing the runner to find a piece of hardware and take 2 meat damage to break it isn't nothing), especially if you add 5 credits for Yogg on top of that in a deck where that will only break 1-2 ICE without Datasucker support.

On Taurus, I think it did its job. It isn't for consoles (its a nice bonus, but as you say it basically never happens), it is for R&D Interfaces and Prepaid Voice Pads. It almost certainly won me a game from trashing an early PPVP, and forced an awkward Clone Chip in a second. It is getting a little higher on my list of things to cut each time I look at it again (non-ETR ICE is hard to justify), but it still seems worth the include. I kept it in for now because it is out of Mimic range with NRE, but that ended up not being relevant.