"Freedom Through Virality" - 2nd Euros Cache Refresh 2018

This is nowhere near the optimal Freedom deck, I'll be the first to admit. Rufus, who won the tournament, had Consume in his version. That may be a way to shore up the economy, which was constantly a problem with this.

I played this deck in all of the swiss rounds, and all but two games in the cut. People saw that my other ID was AgInfusion and turned out to be very prone to bidding to avoid it. I managed to exploit this a couple of times by bidding for AgInfusion, causing them to start with a credit and a card less, with me playing my preferred deck anyway. It went 4-1 in swiss, and lost two games in the cut, both to Rufus' PE, curse him! :)

The idea is to get out 1-2 virus sources as early as possible and start trashing things. The point is not to get all three breeding grounds and friday chips installed, but to get at least one of them early. Knocking a couple of cards out of their hand early on is a great tempo gain, and improves the agenda density for you. This deck actually runs 6 barrier breakers, which may be some kind of record, but you really want to get Laamb up and running pronto, since that can get you in anywhere as long as they haven't double iced. And if they do, Knifed is here to help. One game was won with only Laamb and Friday Chip installed. Go figure.

Yusuf is basically a super-powered datasucker as far as virus generation is concerned, and has some neat interactions with Laamb, giving you the flexibility to break ice with either money or virus counters, depending on which is more convenient at the moment.

The rest of the deck is just support, and can probably be optimized a lot. Trypano has a neat interaction with Virus Breeding Ground, but is very slow on its own. It does generate virus tokens for Freedom though. Indexing is very nice when you can destroy R&D ice.

Most importantly, I had a lot of fun with the deck (which I had not tested once before round 1 of the tournament), and it makes me feel like there is real promise for Freedom going forward, once we figure out the proper support suite for his ability. The main problem is setup speed, which I knew going in, which is why I elected for an aggressive approach with the aim of disrupting the corp as early as possible. The other problem is you can get locked out, and then you feel like a sectesting criminal who lost the keys to their hopper. Knifed and Laamb are really important to get out of such situations, but the deck really loses steam if it doesn't get to use the Freedom ability for extended periods.