Tuberculosis - 4th, NY Regionals

Went 3-2 in the Swiss, 2-0 in the cut, losing only to a Skorpios (expertly piloted by Chris Fazio) and a RecoCo Combo CI.

Unlike my corp, I was all over the place with this build leading up to the tournament. I've noticed assets coming back after what felt like a brief hiatus during the Kitara cycle, so I felt Freedom was well positioned and I've been playing a lot with the ID recently.

Consume is a fun splash, and obviously a good card for Freedom. Five pips is a lot, but you're in Anarch and hardly need out-of-faction cards, anyway. The trade-off is not having room for Indexing, but Freedom has multi-access built into the ID ability, and the real advantage of Consume is that it enables you to go tagme without sacrificing your econ. This is especially relevant against CtM, which I didn't see on the day. Still, clicking for 10 creds every couple turns is a great joy and without the card I wouldn't have any clue what to call this deck.

Reclaim allows you to run Inject despite some of your key programs not installing from the bin and also to hit Zer0 with willful abandon.

The morning of the tournament, I made a few changes I wish I hadn't. First, I cut 2 Hippos and a Dirty Laundry to make room for 3x Clan Vengeance. My reasoning was essentially that every other Anarch would be on it and I'd be putting myself at a disadvantage not to take one of the in-faction power combos available. It also synergizes with Consume, such that most corp players will feel forced to purge after you fire CV. Disrupting their hand and Timewalking them in a single trash ability feels killer.

However, that whole "Freedom has multi-access built into the ID ability" thing really only applies if you can make value single accesses as often as possible. This is also key to your ability to build up virus counters, both for trashing and to continually threaten the remote. With Black Orchestra and MKUltra as awful as they are, this is impossible to achieve even with lightly defended centrals, so it turns out Hippo is core to the gameplan. Some corps try to "play around" Hippo by keeping outermost ICE unrezzed, but unrezzed ICE is ICE you don't have to break, so who's really winning?

The other change I regret is going to 2x Yusuf. When I cut the Hippos, I also added an extra Datasucker, reasoning that I'd need to be breaking more ICE over the course of a game and it would lessen the pain of using the two heap breakers. In doing so, I also added an extra Turntable, to ensure I'd have the MU available. 2x Datasucker felt right, and I appreciated the consistency of the second copy of the console; the mistake here was cutting a Yusuf for it.

In R4 of Swiss, I played against RecoCo CI and won handily, with Yusuf allowing me to check every remote and take my pick of what to Freedom trash and what to trash for money, all the while building up counters. In R5, I played against the exact same corp list, but Injected both Yusufs into the bin by turn two. I spent the rest of the game digging for a Reclaim, locked out of HQ, and unable to contest assets.

So, if you'd like to play this list, I recommend -3 Clan Vengeance, +2 Hippo, +1 Yusuf.

You can see the deck on stream, against the lovely Sanjay and his Acme deck, here: https://youtu.be/d17YG1Uf7jU?t=25085

The game was for fun after a very quick corp game for the final Swiss round and I let my concentration falter a bit. It may have been more fun to play than to watch...

In the second round of the cut, I played Scott Kincaid's Pālanā glacier, both of us a little cagey having lost our first cut rounds. I stole the first Nisei out of the remote, then found a GFI and another Nisei on top of R&D and spent a few turns setting up before nabbing the winning agenda.

Round 3 was against Ethan Rodkin's Mti. With a Tollbooth on HQ, DNA Tracker on R&D, and at least one unrezzed Chiyashi floating around, it felt like he didn't bother with ICE that cost less than 8 to rez and my entire bank to break. I found an Obokata early, but he followed up with a Nisei and I had to abandon the remote and commit to running R&D once per turn while trying to keep my econ up, slowly building enough virus counters to have a hope of threatening the remote through a Nisei counter. This was an extremely difficult, fun game, and the only time I relied on Clan Vengeance to find the win.