Sunny with a chance of dominance

With the Astro train a thing of the past, Controlling the Message on the rise and the new cycle foreshadowing more trace wars, I thought now might be the time to give Sunny a shot.

Here's the list I've been working with. There are lots of ways to build Sunny decks, and I gave serious thoughts to shenanigans like turning wheel/datasucker/Jak Sinclair/Massanori. But her 50-card minimum makes setting up the way I envision inconsistent, and I've found the best decks I build in this game are usually the simplest.

So here goes. Sunny's problem is that she's slow. Even without yellow scoring out with the astro train before you can blink, a lot of decks are still fast like Palana rush and Argus. The best way to speed her up was 3x career fair, modded and street peddler. There are a couple of anti-synergies here with events and peddler, but the speed they provide is so important.

The good: Scrubbers/Rabbit Holes provide huge problems for CTM. Tracer ice is sad against this deck. Decks without a lot of ice often struggle when you get the rabbit hole/nexus threat going. Even some glacier like Blue Sun hates it. For example, rezzing a 14-credit curtain wall for the privilege of having to consider whether to pay more to prevent the runner from bypassing it for free is no fun. Mid to late game, the extra link with all the drip econ can make it tough to land hard-hitting news, sea source, midseasons, whatever. If the game goes slowly enough, you've got some major inevitability on your side. The scrubbers with the drip economy can create an oppressive climate for asset decks.

The bad: The Palana matchup can be rough. Once Nisei MK2 gets scored, it can put you in a deep hole fast, so you have to contest the early remotes if at all possible. The breakers are extremely efficient against some things like tour guide and Komainu, but horribly inefficient against a lot of common little ice like enigma and Himitsu Bako. I couldn't fit a councilman as of right now, which makes the matchup against CI pretty dependent on you finding vamp at the right time. Not enough influence for R&D multi-access, so it relies on globalsec security clearance. Heavy resource concentration means early midseason replacements is devastating. All-Seeing-I is horrific. Many games, you need a little time for the drip economy to snowball, and some factions like HB (with up to 12 points worth of 3/2s in their deck) are good at dumping stuff into remotes constantly to never let you build the kind of board state you need to take over mid game. No room in the current build for SOT, so street peddlers dumping events you don't want to lose can be disappointing (I tried HQ interface over legwork, but it's too slow).

The ugly: the IG matchup is almost unwinnable if you don't get pretty much the perfect start. By the time you're in position to do anything most games, the noose is already pretty tight.

So feel free to give it a shot. I don't think it's tier 1, but my win rate has been solid, it has some good matchups, and there haven't been many losses I felt were blowouts. Things feel reasonably wide open after the last MWL update, at least for now.