The Gr00t of All Evil

I was hoping to end to store championship season with a first place finish, but instead I got 4th three times due to Astro BS. This deck went undefeated at one 20 person event and had only one loss at the other. It made me top cut three times.

History

Like many Blue Sun glacier decks, it started off as a Mushin No Shin Off the Grid combo deck. I regularly found that I wasn't able to reliably score unless I drew all of the combo cards. The biggest step I took was to cut the Mushin. The combo of Crisium Grid and Off the Grid was usually enough to guarantee a score in an OTG remote. The Punitive Counterstrike plan helps a lot here, as after spending all their money getting in to score my agenda they are usually low enough to get double punitived.

Agendas

Not too much to say here. The deck does not focus exclusively on the flatline, so three pointers that relate to economy are best. I had Eden and Utopia shards for a while, but I found they did not generate as much advantage as High Risk Investment or Priority Requisition. HRI in particular was exceedingly helpful against day job. It can also combo into double punitive to ensure swift death.

Assets/Upgrades

Caprice is outstanding in this deck's plan to use one super secure HQ to score. Caprice+OTG+Crisium almost always pushes runners to focus on R&D for agendas and ignore my HQ. This is great when I have 2-3 of my 6 agendas in hand! Three OTG was a choice I made later in the deck's life after seeing so many OTG's trashed out of R&D. Many runners would also try to legwork me after I bounced it to try and kill it for 0. My favorite choice and the inspiration for the name is The Root. I needed a 1 of economy asset and didn't have the influence for adonis. This and crisium grid can combine to give you the 3 credits per click adonis would.

Operations

Most of this is standard Blue Sun fare with punitives to support an alternate flatline plan. The best addition was all the recursion in archived memories and interns. Certain runners cough MaXX cough go bonkers to trash your crisium grids and it's so very satisfying to interns them right back next turn. Archived memories does that as well as combine with a single punitive to secure the kill in three clicks.

Ice

Special shout out to Frost Duty here. I picked his brain on multiple occasions about ice choices. I chose to run a balance of sub types as opposed to overloading on one type and focusing on taxing. This deck does much better at taxing in the late game and forcing the runner to get breakers can slow them down enough to allow me to set up.

I chose Fire Wall over Hive since I want to be strongest in the late game rather than rushing out agendas behind an increasingly useless hive. Tollbooth is one of the best possible ice in a Blue Sun deck because you can spend many turns playing hide the tollbooth and costing the runner 3 every time they want to check a server. Mother Goddess is excellent early to lock out an important server to all but AI breakers. Later on it usually functions like a bastion. Excalibur is tailor-made for the Off the Grid plan but disappointing to see in multiples. My final note is on Orion. Good players will often run every server looking for your curtain wall and trying to get you to commit those 14 credits to rez it at no cost to them. Orion forces them to pay up if they want to play that game.

Match Ups:

Anarch

If you don't like Eater/Keyhole shenanigans, this deck is a great choice. Running up to six crisium grids really ruins their day, especially since their answer is often knight. The punitive plan is really good here, because if they score six points I've Had Worse will not save them from a 6 point punitive. Imp is troublesome for many reasons and will usually trigger a purge. Be especially careful to not leave your tollbooths and curtain walls exposed to potential cutlery. Mother goddess is a great boon here.

Criminal

This deck does really well against most criminals. Crisium grid shuts down most of their tricks and they have fits breaking all of your huge barriers. Once you contain their initial aggression, you are in a good position to win. Be sure to ice archives to block sneak door beta! Your HQ super server is much less secure when sneak door is in play.

Shaper

This match up is the most challenging simply because it's so hard to tell what they can do. Test run D4vid can break your oversight ice out of the blue and access servers you previously thought were secure. Lucky find can take them from 0 to accessing in just two clicks. The best plan of action is to tax them out of the game. Most shapers use Lady as their fractar and there are only so many barrier they can break. Exploit this. They also tend to dislike having their recursion trashed by taurus.

Apologies for the overlong post. I had a blast playing this deck this season and look forward to when Astro is banned. Err... I mean the deck's continued success.