smol birb palace (4th, Common Room Games SC)

stoppableforce 576

This deck is like 90% @rojazu's, along with the other UK players who've been testing and refining it; I just picked it off the decklist page, did some reading about other breaker options, and started practicing. Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of practice, and I'm not all that great, so here we are.

I had a lot of games in practice where Medium was in the lower portion of my deck, so I really wanted two. This meant dropping either Paperclip or Gordian, and of the two birbs that could replace it, Saker (with sucker support) is the better birb, so I made these changes:

  • -1 Legwork (which is what the non-connection version of the Takeshi's Castle deck was at anyway)
  • -1 Paperclip
  • -1 Film Critic
  • +1 Saker
  • +1 Medium
  • +1 Datasucker

When I ran into CTM, the deck did exactly what it was supposed to - got money from easy-to-Temujin servers, set up the Citadel/Power Tap combo that made running traces very unwise, and more. I honestly didn't even dig their R&D or install a Medium at all - just camped all the remotes.

Against HB, the deck struggled. I suspect a lot of it is unfamiliarity with the matchup, as well as dumb play mistakes - in fighting remotes, for instance, I often found myself without a click to load Kati. (I also got greedy in one game and mulliganed a hand that was middling only to get one that was practically unusable and set me back 10+ turns. That's the Andromeda temptation at work.)

The deck's actual record on the day was 2-3 counting the top cut, but I really think that is entirely play mistakes on my part and unfamiliarity with the matchups (I played very little HB when practicing, too.) It beat CTM and a homebrew jammy-style ETF, and lost to Spags ETF, Argus (I facechecked a snek :( ), and Spags ETF again. This deck was paired with an NEH Shutdown Boom deck.

2 comments
9 Jan 2017 rojazu

Medium is your finisher and with all the draw in the deck I usually do find it, with your mem squeeze having a redundant 3 influence card is not something criminals can really entertain imo. If you want to play 2 mediums I would downgrade clip to corroder, drop the strikes and play same old things to recur siphons/legworks. I tried that but missed the strikes too much. This deck is likely to change a lot in a post-Marrone world where you will need to tech far more for glacier/rigshooter matchups.

9 Jan 2017 stoppableforce

@rojazu I tried that change as well when I first started playing around with the deck but you're absolutely right that Strike is just so good in so many matchups.

I'll be interested to see how your Andy builds evolve post-Aaron Marron. They're a lot of fun to play. :)