Money and Power (7-1 GenCon, 2nd)

Wyrm 1092

Shoutouts to @aandries who created the shell of this deck, and @webster who allowed me to borrow the deck day of and play it. Also shoutouts to @josh01 who I promised that I would play prepaid Kate but then this beauty dropped on my lap and I was in love. This deck did everything but win vs the nuts Moons draw, and even then I think it was my own misplay that led to the loss. It is a monster of a deck, and is in my opinion one of the strongest lists against the field right now.

The Deck:

I don't actually think anything here is revolutionary, so I'll talk about the some of the choices made and some of the changes I'd like to make.

The three hactivists exists for the Moons matchup and were crucial to my wins. Overwriting ELP along with slowing their progression is paramount to winning vs Moons. Slums is not enough, and honestly Slums exists more against Jinteki MUs, of which I saw many at GenCon. You'd like to see Bloo Moose early for sure and usually it's a 3of. But slots became an issue and I honestly did have some trouble with Blacklist, so Bloo Moose was the econ I decided to cut.

I think the primary change that I would make to this list is the inclusion of a 3rd MK Ultra. This card is pivotal to defeating Moons due to the strength of Architect. If I were to make a cut for this perhaps it would be datasucker which I never ended up installing.

8 comments
22 Aug 2017 percomis

How's the Aginfusion matchup?

22 Aug 2017 Okkdoko

Interesting build, I'm sure temujin helps a lot with the usual tempo hits other sifr lists suffer from so definitely will give this a try. Few questions: 1) No strikes means you give up the CI matchup completely, or is there some secret winning strategy besides getting lucky accesses? 2) How was black orchestra, did you ever miss yog? I can see sifr helping a lot, but even then you're still paying 6cr for FC3 or tracker. Parasite solves this in the longer run, but I always hate the high up front cost of orchestra to deal with facechecking large codegates.

22 Aug 2017 spags

Sifr melts Aginf.

22 Aug 2017 Wyrm

@percomis: As @spags so eloquently put it, Sifr is great against AgInf. They have other tricks but you basically can take apart any of their servers and all their big ICE become wastes of money. As a reminder, if you actually win an average amount of PSI games that means you should be able to get into servers when you run them 4 times.

@michiel.questier:

1) Yes, I've mostly given up the CI Matchup. Your primary play is Medium. I expected to face many more Asset Spam than CI so it's a choice to ensure I have a good MU in the general case rather than try to have a little better matchupvs CI. I think even if I sacrificed and played 3 EStrikes I'd still have a bad matchup, so it wasn't worth making the deck worse in the general case.

2) I did miss Yog.0, but as you mentioned ParaSifr solves these issues in the long run. Also, it's 9c to pay for tracker and macrophage, both of which are kill on sight. There was an idea that you could play archives interface to kill problem cards out of archives so they can't be friends so there's that. My advice is to cut corners on the big ice. Take some net instead of paying the extra 3c for DNA. Click through FC3 and ParaSifr it later. Force them to run the trace. Don't be afraid to facecheck.

23 Aug 2017 aandries

Glad you did so well, your changes were on point. I took an hour walk at work contemplating how to beat Moons and AgInf, this deck was my solution. First time i told Spags he said, "Wait, is,it Temu Whiz or Sifer-Site?" "Both."

23 Aug 2017 Saan

I got through Regional season playing Blue Sun Boom with MCA Informant on the meta call that it's stupidly easy to kill dudes, and cards like D4v1d and Sifr were never played any more and it was easy enough to play around Emp Strike. Over the course of 3 Regionals and Nationals in Seattle, I think I lost a total of 3 games with Blue Sun. The shit was on fire.

Looks like I can't play that deck any more for the foreseeable future ;). I love that this deck is just like "but what if we just played all the good cards, tho." Grats on #2, and it seems like #1 was a very near thing as well.

24 Aug 2017 FightingWalloon

@aandries- How did you arrive at your conclusion? What else did you consider? I'm just trying to learn a bit about the thought process that leads to this answer to that problem.

24 Aug 2017 zmb

Did you ever have problems with Parasite getting Ark Lockdown'ed?