Keep Calm, its not a Big Deal Outfit

This is my spicy take on The Outfit for the Boaty McBoatface Age which I brought to King of Servers@ German Nationals 2022 aka König von Deutschland for our team consisting of with @114141 on PE / Sable and @yehonatan_ on PD / Lat and me with this beast accompanied by Bing005's Wonderwoman which we named Aesops, Aumakua and Apocalypse Walk Into A Boat

Being rich (or at least richer than the runner) and threatening Hard-Hitting News into Boom! is one of the few things, which might protect you even if all your ice got invalidated and you don't really intend to rez ice anymore, like when you're already on 2 Bad pub and the runner has begun dripping with money through connections congress style on a Boat with 5 counters.

On the day the biggest disappointment was Stavka. The Idea for Stavka was to maybe sometimes get surprise trashes, protecting SDS at the same time but in practice it was only ever used to boost Surveyor strength by virtue of just being installed next to it - which ultimately only cost the corp 2 boat counters anyway... so I would recommend changing that for more Ice Wall and / or maybe a Veritas.

So this is just reinforcing a lesson this deck already attempted to learn: Currently, in the mid to long term Ice is useless. Boat will always just sail through. You may have a very short window of opportunity where the oligarchs did not loose a Boat to filthy cyber criminals yet, so rush a remote as hard as you can (preferably netting an Atlas with a counter).

So how did it play out?

I lost twice in 4 Rounds

• one game against Steve in which I never drew any econ - no Hostile Takeover, no Too Big to Fail, no Hedge Fund and I guess one Rashida which got trashed out of the remote after a dodged DoF to 0 by virtue of rezzing HQ ICE. (https://netrunnerdb.com/en/card/21080). In the end only a Surveyor and an Enigma on HQ got rezzed, both dodging a DoF. Both had been installed turn 1 (IceHQ,IceHQ,Click for cred). It was positively hilarious that the first and in the end only econ I could get my hands on in that game was the single Government Subsidy just to taunt me. Stargate tore up R&D in the meantime for a crushing defeat against an opponent that piloted his crim really well.

• The second loss was due to me gambling with an open 5 cards HQ with a SDS in it against an opponent who already scored an early Above the Law and Atlas (by about turn 3). Of course the following runner turn was gonna be install Rezeki, run HQ... I think that game had like 4 Single Access - 3 of which the winning agendas.

The other games were positively hilarious: score out with Big Deal on 4 points twice after making them sweat with Eco Warfare Hard-Hitting News - used only to open a scoring opportunity for an Atlas counter!

• If I had a for each time I Hard-Hitting News'd Hoshiko flush with cash, I'd have 2 . But it's weird that I could afford it twice.

  • It was credit perfect when I finally got to score out with Big Deal after clicking for creds a whole turn to get to 18 (which must have looked really strange from the unsuspecting runners side).

• Most memorable was probably the game with the Canadian contestant @bking. He had a pretty early Boat and me in the ropes from pretty much then on, but I opened the opportunity to score an Atlas for 2 Counters (thanks to Audacity - also pitching 8 cards right after benefiting from a Rashida installed in an unprotected remote.) - thankfully with a SpinDoc as backup - after slowing the Hoshipko down a bit via Hard-Hitting News. This was followed up by combining the Boat with a Hippo plus Stargate which made short work of R&D seeing 2 agendas twice in a row, with me agonizing over using an Atlas counter just for preventing the second steal on the second run - which I ultimately decided against - having the runner on game point with 4 agenda points. After the second time, I decided to use an Atlas counter to get at the Hostile Takeover that I knew would be on top of R&D after the mandatory draw. Scoring it that turn for a Scoring Area consisting of 2 Hostiles, and the Atlas with the last remaining counter. The next turn I 'just' had to survive the Stargate, for scoring out an Atlas-tutored SDS with the Big Deal (already in the unprotected HQ at that point) and this time my luck didn't run out.

Seeing my opponents faces after the Big Deal was always worth it :).