[Startup] Naval Captain Quetzal

This deck is a great example of why endurance is very banned in standard. Quetzal doesn’t need icebreakers. They need endurance and botulus.

If your opening hand doesn’t have sure gamble (or at least steelskin), mulligan. The goal is to rush endurance out as soon as possible, it doesn’t matter if you 0 your account to do it. Playing it turn 1-2 means your opponent is only going to have an effectively protected scoring server if they dump every last piece of ice onto it, which will inevitably leave R&D and HQ open. Early boat is going to create an immense amount of pressure; get in a free run at least once a turn, use Quetzal to kick over those early barriers, and hurl down botulus to crack open your opponent’s composure. Bankhar helps cover your breakerless runs even further. Just make sure to respect Snare! With those out you can run as your first click every turn, generate a boat counter, then spend the rest of your turn doing whatever you need to: make money, draw cards, etc. Running as your first click feels good.

Without early boat you’ve still got buzzsaw, mimic, and leech to cover your butt while you wait to draw it and try to make enough credits. And because they’re in the deck you have ways to break ice without spending endurance counters, or even win without it (which I managed to do once during a 3-0 win streak).

Overclock is there too to help you spend less on runs, but I managed my win streak without using it once. It could probably be swapped for something else, but it’s still useful if you want to make a trash run and kill that SanSan, so keeping 2 is probably a good idea.