No going off script! (Adelaide Regionals 1st Place)

Classic NEH Fast Advance. I wasn't sure what to run for regionals, as corp decks seemed to be having a tough time. I played a butchershop deck at a practice event the week prior to regionals, but felt that it leaked agendas, and that a confident and competent pilot could beat butchershop with relative ease.

Was 1st place after swiss and finished 1st overall.

I expected a mixture of PPVP kate, and a range of Anarchs. I hoped for as few leelas as possible as my performance is quite poor against her, and ended up facing her twice. The deck went 1-3 in swiss (first round bye) and 3-0 in playoffs. Despite the seemingly bleak swiss numbers, the deck is excellent, and the numbers speak more to the quality of my opponents than the deck itself. Matchups were as follows.

R1: bye (Store Championship win)

R2: Win v Sage Andy

R3: Loss v Stealth Kate

R4: Loss v Leela

R5: Loss v PPVP Kate

Top 8:

Win v Leela

Win v PPVP Kate (opponent from round 5)

Win v Stealth Kate (opponent from round 3)

The deck is still fast and furious, and your rounds should rarely go to time. The most exhilarating starts are those 1 ice starts with city grid, hedge fund, two astros, ice, and just hope not to get punished by R&D accesses whilst you take a huge lead. There were a couple of games like that, and the thrill of those games is pretty intense. That being said, if the game goes long this version has some decent taxing ice, despite the power of atman 4 against it. Eli 1.0 and Ichi 1.0 do a great job taxing atman, and are otherwise great cards anyway.

I was originally going to play cortex locks and fewer elis but found in practice that this made the deck just that much more vulnerable to early accesses, and it's those early indexings, legworks, and makers eyes that lose this deck the game. With the spare influence I thought about putting in a rototurret but I didn't really want to go over 15 ice, and wasn't sure what to cut for it. I also expected more parasites than I ended up seeing on the day (I think I saw one).

Shipments, cyberdex, are there for value and anti clot. Cyberdex unfortunately did not do as much as it could have and never showed up at the right time, leaving me to purge virus counters about 10 or so times in the day, including four times in the top 8 game v ppvp kate so that I could eventually biotic out a beale and overscore it with two astro tokens for the game. Not sure I'd keep it. Maybe a fast track is worth it in that slot, or a second marked accounts. Or ice. Whatever.

In any case still a great deck, not as tiring to play as stuff like RP, and not as time consuming, so always a good choice.