The Crusade (Exeter Store Champ Winning Corp)

I have taken this deck to two tournaments so far, and it has gone undefeated in both. It is a lot of fun to play, and feels like less of a grinding tax deck than pure RP with ELP, instead it is great at opening scoring windows. Using Grail net damage or program trashing hits, fear of Grail without a full breaker suite, cool Excalibur plays etc.

I started testing this RP Grail deck to see if the concept was any good, so that I could consider adding Excalibur (at the time The Source wasn't out in the UK) What I found was that the Grail suite significantly helps the early game situation, since the runners do not want to run without a full breaker suite once they see some Grail Ice. This stops the standard play of drop a Killer and run, which puts all your servers under pressure and means the runner can threaten your asset economy. Once the RP drip economy is online it is a devastating deck, and I have found that the Grail Ice allow you to get to this stage much easier.

Agendas - Standard RP agenda suite, you want the agendas to be difficult to steal. Nisei MK II is a devastating card that can win you games if it is scored. I believe that 3 Future Perfects is correct for this deck as you only want to score 3 agendas to win.

Economy - Standard drip economy of Mental Health Clinics and Sundews, getting these online and protected is key to success. I am running Medical Research Fundraiser instead of Celebrity Gift because I do not want to reveal if I do, or do not have Grail Ice in hand, however I need early game burst economy to threat the expensive ice. In a lot of games if you can get your drip economy going there won't be a need to play this card, but it is definitely needed for early game. Melange Mining Corp is another card to try in its slot, but it needs to be defended and makes your R&D more porous.

Ice - The Grail suite has really been extremely good, the key is to keep Lancelot in hand unless you need Ice on the board, this is because Runners will not run without a sentry breaker against RP, however they will run without a Barrier and Code Gate breaker, which will allow you to hit them with program destruction using Merlin and Galahad. It is also worth noting that Net Damage done by Merlin will often have a significant game impact, killing key cards and in some rare cases flat-lining the runner. Excalibur - This gets a special mention, as you can have some amazing plays with this card. There is the obvious one of putting it on archives, so there isn't a cheap server to use to bounce across to the remote. However I have found that runners expect that and so in fact put it on another central, this often catches people out. My favourite trick though is to put it on the scoring remote, as a failed Psi game, lost Ash trace or if you have a Nisei MK II scored means that you are definitely safe if they cannot break or bypass it.

Many runners will take time to set up because they do not want to run without a full breaker suite. This will mean they play breakers and draw a lot, I have found that this creates scoring opportunities that are not normally there and getting out the first Nisei MK II can win you the game.

Criminal is this decks best match up, which is good because of how strong Criminal is right now. I've also been testing this against Stealth Andy and it has stood up remarkably well, though its definitely not an easy match. Shaper is also a good match up, though the Parasite recursion can hurt, it is definitely manageable since they need to do a lot before they can run, as long as you can keep your ice on the board. The 2x Interns help with this a lot, as well as getting back Sundew or Caprice if needed. In fact Interns has been a key card in this deck, and made an important difference in most games. Noise is likely a worse match up, as he always is for RP due to the Parasite recursion, though hopefully the Grail impact will lessen that. I've not tested enough to know yet in all honesty.

In the tournaments I played this against: Andy Sucker x2 Silhouette Katman PPVP Kate x2 Chaos Theory Turbo Rig Chaos Theory Blackmail Andy Stealth x2