T-Rex Surprise (1st Place Leeds SC)

1st Place Leeds SC (12 players), 2nd place Sheffield Patriot (11 players), 3rd Place Sheffield Wargames Emporium (22 players) – all events paired with Whizzard, because I’m not an idiot.

Look at Chaos Theory’s face on Shattered Remains. Doesn’t it fill you with joy? As Conan used to say, there’s nothing better than crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you and hearing the lamentation of their women. Part way through this year’s Store Championships, @katsushika and I started messing about with ways to subvert people’s expectations of CI7 and Hasty CI – starting with his original “classic” list of SEA + Scorch and refining it to get the most leverage.

Favourite war stories: Runner mulliganing a hand with a “useless” plascrete, then using I’ve Had Worse for draw. Runner looks hurt and says “you lied to me” “Aw, I wanted to see the CI7 combo” “You run Aggressive Secretary” before hitting Shattered Remains Playing 7 Enforced Curfews against the National Champion Triple Biotic FA Global Food for the win Voter Intimidating fully loaded Liberated Accounts or Kati Jones

Things to Worry About: You don’t want to spend all your money unless you’re going to win (although it is sometimes possible to recover). Vamp and Account Siphon are your enemies, be careful of Shaper who seem to be moneying up loads or Criminals that don’t seem to want to Siphon you (they’re storing up). One game against Siphon Whizz I rezzed all my ICE on HQ because I knew I’d get repeatedly siphoned anyway, sometimes you have to take the hit.

Archives Interface has been used a fair amount – don’t leave things lying around in Archives if you think you might need them e.g. Biotic.

Your ICE suite is limited and may need some recursion pieces to get it back if destruction is on the cards. Use your recursion cards wisely. While I’m talking about that – keep track of recursion – I lost one game because I’d missed my last Reclamation getting Keyholed (I was too busy being happy it wasn’t an agenda).

Don’t hold out for the kill forever and maintain a good eye on when you should just abandon it altogether. Don’t neglect scoring early on – it’s easy to just get cards and money and ignore that fact at some point you’ve got to win the game the old fashioned way – remember you’re not playing CI7!

Don't get Keyholed.

Agenda Suite

The givens are 3x Vitruvius and 3x Food. The rest can be a mixture – I find Efficiency Committee to be a pain to score but it’s highly useful in enabling multiple scorches with Archived Memories when you have the counters on it. Or just getting loads of cash with Reclamation Order and play 3 Restructures or Hedges all in the same turn. I’ve run with three ABT before now, as you can just straight up Biotic them out and if you suspect you might struggle to land tags in your meta, going for the scoring route is viable. Chronos is a good splash if you don’t want to add a tech card like Ark Lockdown, but as a 1-pointer it can make your scoring plan a bit awkward.

Assets

You’d expect there to be Jackson here, and I’d love to have some, but he costs influence there are other cards I need. The Clearances give you plenty of draw and you don’t generally need to discard. Plascrete is often a card you want to get rid of, but Sifr or other consoles, Clone Chips, Interfaces and many other things make good targets. I’ve long been a fan of advancable traps and in this sort of deck most people can’t even envisage such a thing being part of the decklist, so it will often land.

Operations

All the money, all the time. VLC is boss as you’d expect being basically another free turn, and Daft Punk (BLC) seems almost quaint now, but still worth a couple of slots. Full set of recursion cards obvs. There is a ton of Employee Strike about, so three currents are a must to make sure you’ll see one (Reclamation and Archived ensure you’ll win the Current War) and Enforced Curfew handily drops the Runner’s hand size. A brain damage from Ichi (you often have cash to boost traces unexpectedly) or the Runner self-inflicting -1 Hand Size with Sifr often put them in One Scorch Range.

1x SEA and 2x Scorched are the only kill cards – seems light, and sometimes you’re struggling to find another piece, but keep your eye out of opportunities and it normally works out okay. Eff Com counters, Biotics, Vitruvius counters etc. give you chances to replay the same Scorch multiple times. Voter Intimidation is great (again, you can recur it) – especially for killing Aaron Maron, loaded up Kati Jones, NACH or other annoying resources. Keep an eye out for Levy in the bin and snipe a Same Old Thing if you think that’s their only way of getting it back, for example.

Subliminal is a good economy card, but can be swapped around. Another BLC, Ark Lockdown, Preemptive Action if you really must have a way of getting things back from Archives. Even another piece of ICE or a suitable upgrade or asset.

ICE Suite

The ICE started out more aggressive (and therefore expensive) in nature to discourage facechecks and aggressive running, but the cost plus how prevalent ICE destruction is led me to change that. Some hard ETR are always useful, especially as Siphon protection or to score out an early agenda or two and put the pressure on. Mother Goddess can be very good early and a surprise later on, (if you over-write rezzed ICE) and it let me win on game that way last turn. Plus it’s a good help in maintaining the CI7 ruse. Then you want some awkward ICE that punches the runner in the face if they’re ill-prepared – enter Ichi and Fairchild.