Seamusmodernism (1st at KoS, Undefeated)

I didn’t do as well at Magnum Opus as I’d hoped but we did win King of Servers so that was nice.

The list wasn’t tested but I showed it to @Nemamiah the morning of KoS and he declared it Fine. Shout out to @AndytheLovell for assisting in the fifteen minutes theory crafting that produced the list.

Nothing revolutionary here but some people were interested and it went 5/0.

Although Weyland has had quite a good run of things this year with Skorp, Titan, Argus and the Outfit (aka bad Argus) performing well, I had no confidence in it for the Magnum Opus meta. The predicted rise in Shaper decks sporting both SMC to beat gearchecks and Misdirection for Hard Hitting News were bigger concerns for me than the new restriction of Surveyor.

Speaking of Surveyor, this needed replacing and there wasn’t an obvious candidate. Two Archer already felt like enough without Standoff (the slots for which had been taken by Prisecs). Fortunately it was then announced that the Champ designed cards would be legal for the event. Enter Border Control. That’s what the Rainbows are. It didn’t immediately strike me as a great rush card. Like a Nisei token, it felt best in combination with some taxing ICE to force the runner through before using its trash ability.

However, credits aren’t the only thing that you can tax in Netrunner. My favourite thing about playing Rush Weyland is the taxing of the runner’s clicks on crucial turns. The tension of whether they’ll correctly read the vectors along which you’re planning their demise, and whether you’ve accounted for every trick they might be holding, is a shining aspect of the game for me. To that end (admittedly partly due to Clan Vengeance making non-installable cards worse) my regionals list had included Data Ravens and Prisecs. Along with the Argus ability these cards often meant that the runner had to run first click or risk floating tags after a steal.

The reasonably conservative remote of Border Control and Data Raven leaves the runner a click down and a tag up on getting the agenda from the remote and living to tell the tale.

As luck would have it, this theory proved correct with Border Control winning me two games outright and closing the deal on a third. You can see the deck played on Dodgepong’s Twitch VODs against Dan D.

Good news – you can play Modernism in the current meta.

Bad news – I think Project Nisei will probably restrict Border Control.