[Startup] Sinking of the Endurance (1-3 @ Berlin Startup CO)

Great title, I know, but I simply could not not name this list after the wikipedia article this write up is inspired by. With that out of the way...

I highly, highly recommend playing this deck in person, as seeing the reaction on your opponents face when they access one particular card is absolutely priceless, especially if they didn't know this particular list before and were expecting to play against the usual glacier-style AoT.

09:00 - Early warnings

"West-bound steamers report bergs, growlers." - SS Caronia

We start out like a typical glacier; try to mulligan for a good mix of economy and ice, and start by icing up HQ and your econ asset. Since you want to trigger your ID ability as often as possible, you want to ice up every server rather sooner than later, especially given how reliant a lot of runner tools are on making a successful run currently. It is prudent that you get at least two pieces on both HQ and R&D quickly, as those are the servers that this deck loses from most often. Finally, you will naturally want to spend a lot of time drawing (which is one of the bigger shortcomings of this deck), so that at some point you or the runner find your key cards...

19:30 - What's this?

"Three large bergs 5 miles to southward of us. Regards." - SS Californian

-Insert manic cackle here- Yes, that is the plan. This is what is happening. The three bergs in question are MAD, EotL and Archived Memories, and the plan is to kill the runner by tagging them and then blowing them up the next turn using End of the Line + some recursion.

With how porous ice feels at the moment, why not lean into it? Your success as the one playing this deck is almost entirely measured by how quickly you can rez a sufficient amount of ice that you can throw at the runner in the form of tags.

21:40 - "Saw much heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs. Also field ice."

"Shut up! Shut up! I'm working Cape Race." - Jack Phillips

Now with your game plan revealed, the game is suddenly flipped on its head, as every run becomes a calculation of how many cards the runner lets you rez. At this point, you should try to score agendas for the main purpose of forcing the runners hand, so be prepared to lose some of them. The tough choice here lies in which agenda to lose and which to score, and the choice in agenda suite reflects that: For money, we have our usual Offworld Office, and since we want to draw many cards both to install them and find our combo pieces, we are also running Midnight-3 Arcology. Project Vitruvius gets a special shout out here; by never-advancing it with a Seamless Launch, you can chain multiple Vitruviuses after another, but more importantly, it removes the need to find Archived Memories in order to get your kill combo going.

Remember that your kill combo costs 10 credits to fire in total. Since you probably want to use your strongest remote to score, it is advisable to open a second remote with at least one ice protecting it for your economy. This server will also be handy for getting your Gaslight to fire, as at some point runners will usually just let you have your money.

One more note on Hákarl 1.0: In the early to mid game, if the runner doesn't have a fracter (or a boat) yet, it might be worth it trying to land the core damage here, but I have yet to have it be meaningfully impactful.

23:39 - Collision imminent

"Is there anyone there? Iceberg, right ahead!" - Fredrick Fleet

The real challenge in playing this deck is finding the perfect moment to press the big red button. While waiting to rez 6 + number of NFLs on the table many cards guarantees that you opponent has enough tags for you to kill them with, you should remember that you are blowing up your board and are giving the runner one more turn where they can try to win. As such, you are running against the clock that is the number of agendas the runner steals before you are ready to fire; ideally, you want to go for the kill before they steal their third agenda.

One thing that can help here is to notice that aside from No Free Lunch, there is no way to remove a number of tags without spending an equal amount of clicks in Startup, and I have never seen anyone run Networking, so you can expect runners to remove them using basic actions. For that reason, try to look out for when the runner ends their turn with less than 8 credits: for every two credits they are under 8 credits, you have to give them one less tag to land for a double EotL.

02:05 - Aftermath

"Now it's every man for himself." - Captain Edward Smith

At this point, you have either won or lost the game, so I'll talk about notable cards here.

Djupstad Grid: This may be a good one-off to try and fork the runner with, as it gives the runner all the more reasons to run your servers and not just sit back and money up. The biggest problem is that I usually find myself very constrained economically anyways, so I really doubt that this deck can support this card.

Spin Doctor vs Gaslight: As you can hopefully see, one of the bigger problems holding this deck back is inconsistency, and having only 12 influence doesn't help, as it means that we can only include 4 of Spin Doctor and/or Gaslight in total. Because I value the agenda control that Spin Doctor very highly, I chose to include the maximum amount of those. If this deck had just one more influence, I would definitely exchange Sprint for another Gaslight, and with two more I would include a third in exchange for one Seamless Launch. At 15 influence I would think about including a Mavirus, as Imp is a real threat to this deck.

By far the worst match up is Esâ Afontov. If xe hits either Mutually Assured Destruction or End of the Line, you are forced to use your recursion to get those back, which slows down your game plan enough for xer to completely dismantle you.

Against Captain Padma Isbister, you have a decent chance to win as long as she doesn't get Hippocampic Mechanocytes on the table. One thing to exploit with her is that she takes a little longer to set up, so your best bet is to rush agendas behind two bioroids while building up centrals to try and drain her out of resources quickly, slowing her down even further.

Criminals such as Nyusha "Sable" Sintashta: Symphonic Prodigy and Zahya Sadeghi: Versatile Smuggler usually have a really bad time against this deck. Without fancy tricks, bioroids are excruciatingly expensive to break, and since you already want lock up centrals, you can grind crims to a halt very quickly. Once that happens, they usually become sitting ducks, as Criminals rely very heavily on their momentum to keep their incessant running going.

With that, I hope you have as much fun as I had playing this deck, and I'll let Captain Smith have the final words:

"Well boys, do your best for the women and children, and look out for yourselves."