The Sanjay Alt-Art Showcase (But I Only Have Two Of Them)

Mainly publishing these for ABR purposes - this is the Runner that I took to the Warwick Circuit Opener and UK Nationals. I think this went 1-3 at Warwick and 0-7 at Nats, so was easily the worse of my two decks. In hindsight, after seeing its performance at Warwick I should have swapped it for a different one, but that's how it goes sometimes!

My Corp was notably better, but not good enough to save my overall record in both tournaments. (Hey you should check out my UK Nats startup decks though, they did very well!)

This deck exists for two reasons. First it exists because I have Sanjay's alt-arts for Creative Commission and Maw, and wanted to play them. I mean, look at them:

:)

This was the main reason that the deck exists. (If you're reading this Sanjay - thank you for creating such fun alt-arts! Admittedly after playing this deck I found out that you had more alt-arts than I own, so I'll have to acquire them and make a Sanjay Alt-Art Showcase 2 at some point.)

The slightly more competitive reason that this deck exists is that I thought Maw was a good choice right now for three reasons:

• Its HQ pressure would be ideal against decks like R+ for trashing the key operations.
• I could swap all of the worst ice onto HQ with Tāo Salonga: Telepresence Magician since Maw will be pressuring it enough, allowing me to have an easy time on R&D with Conduit.
• If I can get into HQ (e.g. against low-ice Sportsmetal: Go Big or Go Home), it's basically multiaccess.

Unfortunately, it has a slightly important set of flaws:

• It is 6c to install, and doesn't actually help you get into servers.
• Each of them cost three influence that could be used on cheaper win conditions, like Stargate.
• Because of the aforementioned Stargate, Corps know that stuff will end up in Archives and will mitigate that.

The rest of the deck is built around making Maw work. Here's some highlights:

• The economy is pretty standard Shaper goodstuff with Creative Commission, Telework Contract, Daily Casts and so on. We also have Rigging Up to make the install cost of Maw less awful.
• We have 3 Overclock and 3 Self-modifying Code in a small deck, which felt amazing and is probably the best part of the deck. This meant we could get out our cheap breakers easily - Unity is just pleasant, Cleaver is wonderful and I was actually happy to run this over Paperclip during both tournaments, and Carmen is nice but could probably be better. And once we have our cheap breakers, we can get into servers and get Maw triggers.
• Cezve helps reduce the cost of access, which is needed for the Maw trigger.
• Conduit accessing a bunch of cards means that you are almost always guaranteed to get Maw to fire at some point during the access. Unfortunately, this also suffers from being expensive to install. Jailbreak can also help get Maw triggers, but it is mainly there as early pressure.

I think the conclusion is pretty simple - the setup cost on Maw, even in a smaller deck, is probably too much right now. The Overclock + Self-modifying Code package is definitely good and allowed me to challenge early remotes, but I was then struggling to keep up after that early game. By the end of UK Nats I wasn't installing Maw unless I really felt able to. It probably doesn't help that Self-Growth Program on a Maw is very effective, and I do not have the economy to keep up with that.

But maybe a better deckbuilder than me will have a cool idea how to make the idea work! For now though, I think this is an idea I'll be shelving - it was fun to tweak, but it is probably slightly too slow. I expect in future if I'm looking for win conditions I'll reach for Maw, smile at him, and then gently put him back in the box and grab a Stargate or similar.

:)