babe it's 3 am, time for your daily quest[2nd at Ysengrin's]

jan tuno 3863

Runners are quite slow in Startup. Unless they rely a lot on Botulus and Boomerang, it takes them a lot of time for them to gear up. This makes it trivial to get a Daily Quest down very early and then add more ICE to it to make it unreachable. Then the Runner keeps being behind, and you can install a second one...

Punitive Counterstrike is the obvious way to go with a deck that can keep such a big credit differential and uses a 40-card ID. You have lots of draw and filtering, so it's easy to get two Punitives in hand, and Aniccam decks are slow enough that you can get three. Money is generally not the issue.

ICE is well balanced between taxing and gear-checky. Bran could have been a consideration, but NBN's ice is already good enough that you don't need influence. That Palisade should have probably been a Whitespace, maybe the only thing I would change with this deck (double Tollbooth is not that fundamental either...)

There is not much tag punishment. There needn't be. Your ID ability is the biggest reason you would want to tag the Runner. The off-turn draw is really useful and works wonders with Daily Business Show, which usually sticks around even without protection since your Daily Quests are much more urgent and taxing.

I feel like this deck is very well positioned in the format and may prove to be A-tier. Things that can kill it are Imp and anything that allows you to challenge remotes early (Botulus, Boomerang, Mayfly, Inside Job). Yesterday's runners were mostly Zahya, which are not fast enough to compete.

4 comments
15 Apr 2021 Mella

I understand that it's clunky with this agenda suite and slots are tighter with only 44 cards, but how could you resist the temptation of squeezing in a single Psychographics for when they go full tag me and stop caring about your ravens (and F2Ps somewhat)? I don't think I could have rebuffed the greed.

15 Apr 2021 jan tuno

The main thing is that you don't really care too much about the 3 points you are getting. You score just as a threat to force Runner to steal. In similar decks that score more proactively... psycho yummy

1 May 2021 5N00P1

Nice deck, played it yesterday at our StartUp Event, and Punitived all my 3 opponents to oblivion. Not sure how fun it is on the other side, but I enjoyed it very much. Fun Fact, my ID fired exactly 0 times in all 3 matches, but 2 of them closed in turn 3 ;-)

6 Oct 2021 superheronation

3 Funhouses might be overkill if you're only playing tags to gain $2/turn. Since your deck doesn't care whether they get 1 tag per turn or 100, I think swapping out some of these for Authenticator and/or Thoth would be more cost effective.