Worlds 2020 Results

4 - 2

Round 1 - TIMED WIN vs Sunny Lebeau: Security Specialist, where I rushed out 4 points (purging Aumakua for free as I went), only to have White Hat reveal a further 8 points in HQ. Anyway, I won.

Round 2 - WIN vs a run-based 419: Amoral Scammer, where I triple ICEd centrals turn 1, and rezzed a Týr on archives turn 2. Much booping ensued.

Round 3 - LOSS vs Apocalypse Hayley Kaplan: Universal Scholar, where I made a few small misplays by failing to see the telegraphed Apocalypse (not that I could have stopped it).

Round 4 - WIN vs Freedom Khumalo: Crypto-Anarchist, against a super nice Australian player that I later played in a Core Experience side event - @SpaceIce. Not a lot to say here, I don't think, this matchup is heavily favoured for AgInfusion.

Round 5 - LOSS vs Armand "Geist" Walker: Tech Lord, where I tried to rush out to 7 points behind a double Anansi remote - and failed.

Round 6 - WIN vs Armand "Geist" Walker: Tech Lord, where I tried to rush out to 7 points behind a Thimblerig remote and succeeded (but it was super close, if it had taken one more turn I was done for).

Round 7 - ID for prizes

New Miracles for a new Banlist

I've been a long time fan of AgInfusion: New Miracles for a New World (both my SC wins have been with Val / AgInfusion). I never felt that you needed Excalibur to win most games, but losing it post-rotation definitely meant that it lost some teeth.

I also thought that Jinteki Glacier was just too slow, as an archetype, to compete in the current meta. Turns out I was quite wrong.

Turns out you can rush out an agenda early using just Gold Farmer and an AgInfusion: New Miracles for a New World boop. Also turns out that Cyberdex Sandbox gives you the econ you need to keep on pushing. Also turns out that La Costa Grid is just good drip econ in upgrade form (useful when you only want to build one server, and want to keep pushing agendas).

I didn't realise any of those things, but qvm did, taking Intercontinentals with this incredible list. The most exciting thing about that list, to me, being that it's (pretty clearly) not optimised.

So I went away, created my own "optimised" build, and started grinding Jinteki.net games with it - and getting incredible results. Then the 20.09 ban came down on SSL Endorsement, and the 8 agenda + Fast Track suite was dead...

... but so was PAD Tap.

Long live Corporate Sales Team.

Other 20.09 Changes

Losing Gold Farmer also meant changing up the ICE suite pretty drastically. I started off by testing Endless EULA, which was okay - but spending 6 credits for an ICE that the runner could just bounce off of without any hit to their own tempo made recovering from rezzing it tough.

A more straightforward thing to do is to spend the extra 9 inf on known good cards: an extra Border Control, and a set of IP Block. While those cards are good, though, they don't provide enough oompf to really tax the runner, and 3 x Anansi just isn't quite enough Anansi. Enter Týr, the 10 credit sentry that is mostly worse than Anansi, but is a fun piece of ICE to boop the runner into early.

49th Card

We tried a few different things as the 49th Card, including Snare! (which was underwhelming), Enforcing Loyalty (which was actually pretty good when it didn't get trashed), and Psychokinesis. I settled on Sadaka, in the end, as a 20th piece of ICE - after determining that the best opening against Criminal was to triple ICE centrals (just like in the good old days of Temüjin Contract).