Second Breakfast (Vegan Government Takeover Rush)

Since the rise in popularity of really brutal runner responses to meat damage (lots of Plascretes, triply-protected Paparazzis, etc. on top of the usual I've Had Worse shenanigans) thanks to the return of Account Siphon Anarch, Blue Sun decks have had to go in two directions. First, do as Max (aka WhackedMaki) did and go full murder - jam in advanceable traps, Housekeeping, Snare, and Janus and dare the runner to compete. Or second, go vegan again.

Going vegan may sound weird to people who haven't played The Second Coming before, but like I said in the write-up to that deck, I was winning a large minority of my games off simply sticking Government Takeover into an Off the Grid server and daring the runner to come take it. They'd often either collapse before the finish line, give me the money/grip advantage needed to murder them, or both. And the problem with going only halfway to Murder City is there are some games where the runner drops an ungodly number of anti-death tools and you just can't feasibly murder them. (For instance, my greatest enemy, Forger.) At that point, you're just a slightly less formidable glacier deck, sloughing off useless kill pieces and hoping you didn't fuck up the run math and/or they can't see their obvious outs. I've lost count of how many games I lost simply because Government Takeover was on the bottom of my deck.

Going vegan thus enables you to take advantage of Blue Sun's naturally formidable servers without feeling like you're always serving two masters. Here, you have one and only priority: rush up to big money, and then shove out a Government Takeover Off the Grid (with another OTG or Ash behind it, if you're lucky). For some reason, testing has proven this strategy to be surprisingly formidable.

Breaking down some of the changes from The Second Coming:

• Agenda Swaps - Naturally, Posted Bounty is no longer useful. Just as well. Now we can have another annoying agenda nobody wants to score in NAPD number 2, plus a single Hostile Takeover as a sort of oddball Public Support, thanks to...

• Fast Track - Two Fast Tracks may seem like a lot, but you don't want to sit around with this deck. The longer you let the runner set up a killer rig, the less likely it is your servers, as gigantic as they may be, will hold up. And you're gonna have to spend a good three turns sitting on your ass pushing the Government Takeover across the line. So getting it the moment you want it is important. Plus, if you draw it naturally, you can just Fast Track the Hostile Takeover for the seventh point. (The Hostile could theoretically be any 3/1, but it is nice to be able to score it out of hand.)

• Private Contracts returns - Two reasons. One, we just don't have enough influence after three GFIs, three Jacksons, two Ash, and two out-of-faction code gates. Two, Private Contracts actually does something which Adonis Campaign can't, and that's push out money as fast as humanly possible. You don't need infinite money with this deck, just enough to be sure you'll score your Takeover, and Private Contracts, for its faults, does push like mad. (You could also play Capital Investors, but Private Contracts' high trash cost and limited supply means runners won't fight over it much.)

• Orion? Turing?! - Orion is an odd duck. Sometimes, it's just a horrible piece of ice to put Oversight AI on, being far more vulnerable than Curtain Wall. But again, as a semi-rush deck, you're willing to take more risks for quick cash. Turing is an experiment in place of the second Tollbooth, which so far has proved promising. In this deck, it's essentially a 4/5 ETR, and the anti-AI clause is a big deal. It's seriously frustrating for Anarchs in particular, who already are having their D4v1d counters sapped by your big walls/Orion and who will often have to reach outside of faction to break it consistently. Time will tell whether we'd rather just have the more expensive automatic tax, and something else in the 15th influence slot.

As for the name, well... I came to Netrunner from Magic, and Magic has a history (an ancient history, granted) of using breakfast/cereals as a naming convention, especially for combo decks. I know that's not a good explanation, but I saw "Second" and "vegan" and put them together.