[1st Place Startup CO] Wham bam thank you SAM

I went 4-0 in a startup CO this weekend with my runner going 3-1 for a clean 1st place. Check out my runner deck here.

I was pretty set on bringing PD. It's always solid and can be fast enough to outpace and tax out early boat aggression. You can of course get blown out by a T1 boat, but if you stick a skunkvoid then you can cheese it out or at least make it close. I went back and forth on agenda suite but I'm now pretty convinced that this is the best option for PD in startup.

The game plan is to score a SAM. You need to in order to win. But this gameplan is much faster than the lists that expect to score out 4 agendas. You don't have time to score over 4 turns which is why I think this strategy is optimal in startup. If you're looking at 19 agendas and want to swap the Project Vitruvius for an Élivágar Bifurcation, dont! If you score a SAM then it's likely a dead agenda and a liability. SAM is actually a sick agenda when you're rocking 6 thicc boi agendas. Few games the tides swung in my favor when I got a SAM stolen and rezzed an Ansel 1.0 on RND allowing me to push the remote safely while not bleeding out on RND.

Round 1 vs Rielle "Kit" Peddler: Transhuman

This was a super tight game. Runner got to 6 points pretty quickly from early aggression but wasn't able to close. I was able to stabilize, ice all centrals with defensive upgrades locked in remote, but I couldn't draw agendas! One of the downsides of only running 8 agendas. I had to stick an Anoetic Void on R&D and ETR every turn for a few turns while the runner poked HQ and R&D a bunch. Eventually I was able to draw an agenda and have enough cards in hand to not lose on a stacked R&D. Thankfully no pinhole showed up that game!

Round 2 vs Rielle "Kit" Peddler: Transhuman

I had no business winning this game. Neal was able to snipe both Voids from my hand and R&D and also hit an early 1/5 agenda. This was one of those games where I had to plan a few turns ahead in order to successfully score out but managed to eventually stablize a bit, get lucky on some Conduit digs and eventually after Spinning back Skunkworks and Void was able to see them again which allowed me to secure the remote play. This was a crazy tight game where I felt quite lucky to not lose on R&D. Again, 8 agendas coming in clutch here!

Round 3 vs Zahya Sadeghi: Versatile Smuggler

I took a questionable mulligan on this one with only one piece of ice and flooded up super hard. The reason why I took it is because it had skunkvoid in the opener. I even sprinted on turn 3 and drew 3 agendas making it even worse. I managed to ice all centrals and pitched an agenda in archives. The benefits of being flooded as PD though is you can score very quickly. I managed to get juuust enough ice to keep Kevin out while being able to score out pretty quickly. They clicked through a Braan one turn to see 3 and only stole a SAM which locked up R&D. This was super lucky as I had 2 more agendas in hand. After that was able to just score out before they were able to get breakers and contest.

Round 4 vs Captain Padma Isbister: Intrepid Explorer

This game was pretty textbook PD shenanigans. The agendas came when I needed them and fortunately it took Drew half of their deck to find their boat so I was in the lead from the get-go and managed to control the game pretty well. He saw a Nico in my hand and was able to never advance an offworld to score out even after he Pinholed the manegarm from the remote.

The only change I would make to the deck is to make room for another Manegarm as I would have loved to always have one in the remote. Plano's were great as you can recover from early rezzes so I loved having 3. Surely you'll think of a better way to use the last inf but I dgaf, the deck is solid and I really liked having the ability to either draw 3 or ez mark. Clear 3x for me. I also don't think you should go down on Spin since that's your best card vs Esa. /shrug leave it for god.