Pretty pickings from the meat corpse

I played this deck at a beginners' tournament in London. The deck-building restriction was a single core set and single deluxe box of each player's choice, so I plumped for Order & Chaos. I think my strategy for building went against the grain of my opponents: rather than taking as many pieces from the deluxe box as possible, I picked up my old core-set-only Weyland deck, looked at how it would work with Order & Chaos options, and went from there. I played a fair amount beforehand against other Order & Chaos decks, and some against Honor & Profit, so went into the day pretty nervous about coming up against Creation & Control.

The basic strategy of the deck is fairly similar to core-set Weyland (in my humble experience) or Supermodernism, to a certain extent: go fast and start scoring behind binary end-the-run ice. This puts the runner in a horrid position: rush to fetch decoders and fracters to keep up (and risk ending a turn tagged or having one's rig wrecked by Archer) or watch as I continue to score out. Simple, no? I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I think that's why there are only 5 cards in the deck from Order & Chaos (hmm, what does that say about that box? Sigh). Fire Wall works because it's taxing, it's etr, and it's cheaper than Hadrian's Wall. Firmware Updates plays to Argus's strength (taxing the run for every iddy-biddy point) and makes the two Walls even chunkier. Three advancements for the cost of advancing Firmware three times? Okay!

On the day: I played four rounds of Swiss, and the deck went 3-1. Three match-ups against Noise, including one where all three virus mills were agendas into archives, and one against Kit. The three wins were all against Noise, even though I feared I've Had Worse would be sufficient Scorch protection.My experience of core-set Noise is that he sets up slower than other IDs and I could rush to win. Snare!, as ever, did excellent work weeding out aforementioned IHW and disincentivising runs. Posted Bounty forfeiture seems also highly underrated, in my small experience. As a runner, you simply cannot afford to leave a double advanced card in a remote for a turn. But do you really want to run through a Data Raven or Checkpoint to take a look?

The loss came to Kit. Turn one, my opponent installed a Decoy, of all things, and even though I'd begun the game with Posted Bounty and Scorch in hand, it became a race to score out. I scored 6 points, all 1-pointers, which seemed fairly laughable, and saw only 6 pieces of ICE all game. The deck's biggest weakness, I feel, is that against a wealthy runner who can summon breakers on the fly, Argus's tax is neglible and its servers porous. This basically proved correct.

Nods to Data Raven for always evincing a sigh when opponents hit it, Fire Wall for being a nifty tax, Snare! for that 'I have to show you that' face runners pull a moment before they say it, and Aggressive Negotiation for being a son-of-a-gun. Maybe my favourite clutch play was leaving a double-advanced Hostile Takeover on the table for a turn, with AggNeg in hand, and my mandatory draw was... AggNeg. I scored Hostile out, played both the negotiations and sat back to admire my hand full of Scorched Earth, before remembering I had a click left...

Compliments to my worthy, friendly, kind opponents and thanks to Dark Sphere and Tagore for organising. Ps not sure if this should be tagged as placing highly in a GNK but I've done it and you can shout me down!