space rockets (undefeated at Louisville in Swiss)

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Derived from
Fiery Informant - 1st/2nd Place Brighton BABW
Inspiration for
Still Space Rockets 3rd Place GenCon
Space Rockets
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stoppableforce 576

whoosh

This is the SYNC deck I took to Louisville's Regional, the last Regional of the year for me (and basically the last tournament I'm attending before Worlds, I'm pretty sure). It's basically just @beyoken's Fiery Informant yet again but with a couple fun card choices.

Also I desperately need deck slots, please love me my list.

Macrophage is because I desperately needed something to help me from Medium digs, as they tend to be the bane of my existence. Naturally, I faced zero Medium-packing decks all day (well, one might've been, but it never quite got there). I considered Gutenberg over Turnpike; Turnpike still does something if the runner is tagged, but 100% of the time, I placed Turnpike on R&D. It may as well have been a Gutenberg.

The other snowflake card here is Biased Reporting, and I gotta say, I am super pleased with how Biased Reporting is working out. I found people entirely capable of playing around Sweeps Week, and I didn't just want to slap in IPO because that gets weird if (a) you get siphoned or (b) you need money before firing a HHN, but I didn't want to drop Sweeps Week entirely because it's still better early game, so back at Cleveland I was trialing 2 Sweeps + 1 Biased Reporting (in CTM in that case), and Biased Reporting put in work in most of my games at both regionals, barring the one game in Cleveland where Josh Wilson saw it coming off the top of R&D (and I knew it was coming because he had to read it) then threatened a Jackson to make me shuffle it away because of the recovery it would've meant.

Current Biased Reporting record: 14 credits vs. @daine's Sunny deck, and that's after he trashed 2 or 3 resources.

Anyway, as I said, this deck went undefeated today in 4 rounds in Louisville, but through a combination of Anarch Problems (Yog.0 as the bottom and 3rd from bottom cards, losing Datasuckers to random damage, etc.) and general misplays my runner deck only went 1-3.

  • Round 1 (Craig, playing Geist): We had a very tentative back and forth early game, with Craig's econ starting strong then petering out. The turning point is when he finds an NAPD in R&D and steals it, leaving him low enough for me to land an HHN; he claws his way back out from under it, but it leaves me time to get more tags on him later. Victory: flatline.
  • Round 2 (@daine, playing Sunny): I get a couple ice early and a very quick Breaking News, but then Daine - after setting up a super healthy drip econ - also plays Film Critic and NACH. I resign myself to scoring out... somehow. My memory is a little hazy but I know I got rid of the Film Critic, I think it was via MCA Informant, and then Daine stole a GFI and tried to host it on a Political Operative, which I reminded him was not actually a Film Critic, and NACH went away. His econ was still super strong, but I kept managing to land a tag here or a tag there when it counted, the most important being a trace 12 on Turnpike on a Deep Data Mining run that netted Daine just as many points as it did me (2 kitties for me, 1 GFI for him). A few turns pass and I have 3 BN and 3 kitties scored and I realize he's somehow passed turn with 1 tag. EOI finishes the game. Victory: scoring.
  • Round 3 (@brototurret, playing God of War MaxX): As soon as I saw MaxX I flipped my ID over round 1, reasoning there's only 1 kind of MaxX that would be showing up at these events, and I was right. Double IP Block on HQ sealed it up for a while, he managed to accumulate a couple tags while poking R&D through a Pop-up; meanwhile I'm trashing every resource that shows up for 0-2 credits. Eventually I found a Boom before he found a God of War and our quick set of games ended. (Seriously, it was like 20, 25 minutes tops, altogether.) Victory: flatline.
  • Round 4 (...I'm sorry, I've forgotten his name, but he was on Alice Merchant): A good start with Wyldside and Chronotype and a very early Maw quickly turns bad when he runs a Jackson Howard without enough money to fight the HHN afterwards. I score a couple BNs, seal off my servers with Resistors, EOI 15 Minutes away for an NAPD and then take back the 15 Minutes, and then get him to score all the QPMs for me (once with his own ID ability). Victory: scoring.
4 comments
15 Aug 2017 CactusJack

@stoppableforceyour deck helped me get my first GNK tournament win, thanks! It went undefeated, and won by Boom! every time. Brutal deck. Felt like it had answer for everything.

5 Sep 2017 aero

Showing up late to the party here :) Well done on this win! Can you speak to how Macrophage worked for you? And do you think All-Seeing I would have been helpful at any point? Also, what do you see as far as changes go for rotation?

5 Sep 2017 stoppableforce

@aero:

Can you speak to how Macrophage worked for you?

Unfortunately I cannot, as it never showed up all day and none of my opponents at Louisville ever put a Medium on the table, which is primarily what it's for.

And do you think All-Seeing I would have been helpful at any point?

It would probably have been decent in my game against Sunny, but it was mostly just a fluke that I managed to even land tags in that game to begin with.

Also, what do you see as far as changes go for rotation?

First, addressing the above two cards: post-rotato I think Macrophage gets more important post-rotation and ASI gets worse. Given the loss of RDI and Indexing and NACH, shapers are going to be even worse off for multi-access, and the majority of runners will be anarchs, who will doubtless be packing Mediums or Gods of War or Datasuckers but not a good way to break Macrophage. Same for criminals, Medium was already their multiaccess du jour but probably moreso now.

As for ASI: a lot of Anarchs are going to be packing Mining Accident, at least for a while. Losing five credits hurts you a lot more than taking a bad pub, but taking a bad pub turns off ASI completely.

The changes this deck needs for rotation are pretty few: you lose NAPD, Jackson, Pop-up, and Sweeps Week. Keep in mind the changes below are just what I'm testing right now.

  • Explode-a-palooza is my current testing card over NAPD. It's the same size credit swing, and Film Critic will probably get more rare with the number of shapers dwindling (losing NACH especially hurts them against this deck), plus you can always use the raw credit gain with Pop-up gone.
  • Special Report makes a great Jackson replacement specifically in SYNC; you throw agendas back into your R&D and hopefully draw into combo pieces instead. It kind of alleviates the previous need to throw agendas in the trash if you got super flooded. You could also do some combination of Special Report and Preemptive Action if you liked.
  • I've actually cooled on Biased Reporting, especially with what I foresee as a drop off in decks with tons of resources (the best target for this card). I've replaced BR and Sweeps both with IPO.
  • Currently am trying Special Offer in place of Pop-up, but nothing can really take Pop-up's place. It's possible they might just need to be money cards instead, but I don't know what.

One other change I'm trialing because of a runner card that's gone is losing Observe and Destroy - which was mostly used to trash Plascrete, something Best Defense couldn't do - and picking up an Enforcing Loyalty. (Remember, with NAPD out and Exploda in, the deck gained an influence.) The most common criminal meat damage protection card at the moment is Citadel Sanctuary. The strongest runner econ card is Bloo Moose. A card that exists just to trash the two of them for 1 influence is probably A-OK in my book (you could also do things like replacing the Special Offers/Pop-ups with a hard ETR code gate and trashing criminals' primary code gate breaker if you wanted).

5 Sep 2017 stoppableforce

@CactusJack that's great, congrats! This deck has gone through a lot of hands and a lot of refinement starting with Ben Ni's 2nd place finish at worlds last year, so I can't take much of the credit, but it's a blast to play and usually seems to be well-placed against the field.