Sly Fox v1.1 (1st place / 22 players / 5 rounds)

With this deck and No Time To Waste v1.3 I won a tournament that took place today in Reggio Emilia (Italy) and saw 22 players participating for 5 swiss rounds.

This is just version 1.1, but it's basically the result of many different Personal Evolution decks that I've been playing from months. I do really like this Identity and tried many different options, but mostly wanted to go with one including Trick of Light, which is a card I really like a lot (used to splash it 3x in my NBN fast advance decks).

Anyway this deck is not meant for scoring agendas. Really, it's not.

It uses mostly expensive ice and just a couple Ice Walls for use with ToL, plus the very awesome Kitsune (which is reason enough to get an AI Icebreaker in your decks, now). Ice like Komainu, Tsurugi or Lotus Field usually slows the runner down a bit and helps setting the pace of a game.

There's obviously many assets, but I generally don't install them all the time. I might install one and advance it once or twice, just to place a third advancement in the turns after to avoid leaving it unadvanced after moving two tokens with a ToL. Just so the runner can't simply go and trash them without any risks.

Also, I don't actually have many assets doing net damage, because it's the easier one to defend from. As one of the last changes I added a single Aggressive Secretary because it's something you generally don't expect, and while you can still live with 1-2 brain damages, losing one or more of your installed programs in late game can be devastating. It worked in one of the first games of the tournament and it's reason enough for me to stick with it.

Just 1 Psychic Field because it's not so reliable, but it's nice to also have a card that does not need advancements. Mostly because once the runner sees how you're gonna play it (in my case installing just 1 card at a time, and advancing it), leaving something non advanced will create confusion. They might suspect it's just a Jackson Howard or not... either way you lose nothing.

Kitsune is the real star of the deck, anyway. It proved invaluable to me in all the games I played today, actually winning for me even when it didn't fire. Having it there might be enough for the runner to stop and not run on the server... especially if he knows you have installed it, cause he saw it from Celebrity Gift before.

The deck won me 3 games, all by flatline, and lost twice.

One loss came from a game against a Noise mill deck (he managed to mill about half of my deck away, at least). I still managed to prevent him from winning for a very long time by installing Lotus Field on all my central servers and Swordsman on Archives, thus preventing him from running there (he only had Crypsis and Darwin as icebreakers).

I know what you might wanna know: how come he milled so much when you have Cerebral Static in your deck?

Well, can't do much when you start with 3 agenda in hand and that current. I did install it, but as soon as he got an agenda it was all over, and the milling started again. Too bad I won the game before leaving enough time for me to get wasted right after, I guess! :)

Anyway the other loss was another very long game (after I won rather quickly with my Silhouette), and there were a few close calls. It all winded down to the last turn, in which either he won, or I would have won the next round anyway. Sadly, he stole one agenda for the victory! Still, a rather tense and interesting match.

The victories were obviously all carefully executed, I mean you can't just go and kill people, come on...

Jokes aside, winning by flatline is no easy task when confronted with a good player, and the level of the games at this tournament proved to be rather high. The italian meta is definitely growing and that can only make me happy!

All in all, I could have maybe played the last turn differently in my first loss, but I think it was quite the feat, to win against Noise given my starting hand. So I am quite content with my results at the tournament.

Even if my runner deck performed much better, it was a fast advanced Ronin that gave me the tournament victory and caught the runner by surprise, in the end.