2014 Haunted Store Championship - 1st Place Runner

How does this deck work? So many 1-off cards it looks impossible to find consistency. I'd love to hear the strategy behind it and how it played. Was it just a meta-killer deck?

A bit of econ and a virus or two in opening hand was my goal. The early virus play puts a bit of pressure on, esp. Imps and Hemorrage. Datasucker was good too as I typically pumped it in anticipation of getting Darwin. I rarely played Djinn as clicks were valuable and really considered inserting a Gorman Drip v1 at the last minute but didn't. The Kraken, when I got to play it, really hurt the corp.

In the dozen or so games I've played with it I didn't play the deck so much as I played the deck against my opponent. I have played v. GRNDL, Jinteki, and HB. All of those require a slightly different approach. I had a game where I was spending only 2c to use Darwin to access R&D on each run. BP was prevalent in the tourney and I ended up only ever having to get Darwin to 2 str thanks to a 'Sucker.

I also tend to play to my opponent more than others and Hemorrhage allows for that flexibility. Draw, run, run, please discard sir. I didn't let Hem have more than 3 ctrs during the corp turn - they're like unused vacation time - use it or lose it. :)

I know that probably doesn't help much I really did play to my opponents, only one of whom was a member of my regular play group. The one loss was because I didn't play to my opponent (Jin I), got excited about first turn Medium and him with no ICE or much money, and ended up being flatlined in about turn 10.

-tpl

Looking at this list, I feel like it has a lot of stuff people don't expect to see (Account Siphon in Noise, Noise, Levy AR Lab Access in Noise, Darwin, Kraken). That means it will take people off guard, and that almost always helps a deck win. Otherwise, I'd agree with the other comment; it looks like it would be hard to get reliable play.

Reliable is a tricky concept in a card game. I try to build decks which I can change strategy based on the game. Do you want a deck that plays similarly each time? A deck that reliably put pressure on the Corp in different ways? You're correct in that I included many cards that I saw in Whizzard decks and simply used Noise with a more viruses. In two of the four matches in the tourney my opponent said something like "Noise huh?" probably wondering what the catch was. I felt a bit of sick pleasure by pressuring GRNDL with Noise's ability without actually running - and therefore avoiding the Sea-Scorched Combo once he had the money. :)