The Floating Coffee Shop: 1st Place Aldershot STARTUP Circui

The Big question is - Is this as good as Kit is ever likely to be in the current game... The answer is probably yes!

This is my Kit deck that took me to first place at Aldershot Startup CO - having always been a fan of Kit it was an easy choice to take her to a tournament where she actually had a pretty solid chance of winning me some games and I wasn't disappointed!

Card choices:

Professional Contracts: A last minute include (over 3x casts) as I realised how much I was clicking to draw in a couple of games I played with the deck - Pro CO is terrible in a meta with Drago - but in those matchups I'm not installing the daily casts anyway - so it's no more of a dead card. installed in two games (one of which it was almost immediately dunked by above the law!) It's hard to say if it was the right choice or not.

Atman: With the entire ice breaking suite being Hyperbaric, Endurance and 1x Pelangi I needed an answer to not getting locked out by glacier decks, Atman is great here as you already have plenty of info about the ice strength by the time it comes to need installing.

Cezve: For the first time in history I found myself with a Kit deck full of Green and white cards with only a couple of slots but influence spare! Cezve is great for boosting Hyperbaric for free if you find it early on, and makes your late game stargate plans incredibly efficiant.

Pinhole threading: Kit really hate's aneotic void and I was also a little worried about Drago retribution decks as losing endurance or a boosted hyperbaric is a big tempo hit. Also i'm a "Bad Player" TM

3x rigging up - Synergises excellently with a lot of the deck and no SMC means we are installing from hand. (or the bin with simulchip)

Clot: Expected a fair amount of Fast advance decks with Mavirus being a thing. Even without SMC and with only 2 chips this still felt good

1x Stoneship Chart room - mainly here as P.E. (& Punitive) tech, would have loved this to be x2 but slots were tight, the additional charge can be a useful fall back.

3x Overclock - went from 2 to 3 and I was ALWAYS happy to draw these. They 100% kept me in the game vs Swiftie with the 5 credits not bringing 'losable' to gold farmer tax and allowing me to trash his remote San San's whilst on 1c.

1x Deep Dive - Mainly there for Stargate turns, (Stargate, grab agenda from bin, run HQ, Dive) - Was lost to an early engram flush in round one, to a bladderwort ping round 2, and in true Shaper fashion I won from stealing agendas on the Deep Dive runs round three!

Pelangi: A pet card of mine- The happiest little beetle and great with Hyperbaric!

Games on the Day

Round 1: Loss against Rotage on PD

My only dropped game of the day, Dave drew the absolute PD nuts, with a hedge fund in the opening hand, and the perfect agenda alignment of Sandbox into Luminal into double Seamless Vacheron behind a perfectly iced remote of Drafter into Ansel 1.0 by about turn 6/7.

Round 2: Win vs Swiftie on NBN

Swiftie had bought a corp deck to me, NEH with bladderworts and San San's - but his also had Vlad grid which I loved as an include for may reasons.

Into the depths and Overclocks let me trash his FA options even after losing any any money I had on his Goldfarmers, However I make an absolute critical mistake on an R&D run with a single endurance counter, a 2 strength Hyperbaric and very little cash - forgetting that I'm tagged and that i can't pay 2c if Swiftie rez's an F2P - which is exactly what he does, sending my Endurance back to hand and forcing me to trash a pelangi in the process due to MU. Then realising to my horror that I was about to access with 2c + 2c on Cezve leaving me with 4 credits as I inevitably hit a bellona on the access.

Luckily I have been practicing ripping beales of single accesses on centrals and that training came into it's own as I sniped the win off centrals.

Round 3 Win Vs Aaryn or possible Darren on BtL.

I keep a dream hand of Proco + Creative and rezeki and set up for 2 turns with proco and drip econ. Turn 3 - Trick of light an above the law.... VERY RUDE!

I set up and wait for them to start advancing more ice then start hitting HQ ripping a couple of azef protocols, and then into the depths for a Clot, this holds the game up long enough for me the get a stargate down, pull an Atman 2 down to deal with the multiple 2 strength barriers on R&D and pull the win on the turn I was looking to Deep dive.

Game 4: Win vs Steff on PD

Turn one Pro Co which actually worked out very well for me, even though the game didn't go long. Using overclocks to break through Steffs gold farmer remote, trash his early nicos, keeping him super poor and stealing a Vacheron to put me on a 4 round clock to win with him on 2 points - I continued the pressure for the next couple of turns, pulling a stargate to keep R&D in check.

This game felt quite the opposite of my first game of the day vs Dave and a nice cathartic end to the tournament for me because of this!

Big thanks to all my opponents from the day (especially Steff as due to time issues we couldn't play a cut and he agreed to call it at the end of Swiss), to Rotage for organising, and to NBKelly for playing some last minute games on Friday to test out my Kit Deck!