Cheltenham Masenqo (Euros 5/6th, 34th, 97th)

This is the updated version of the Masenqo deck, Dave Hoyland piloted to 5/6th, Mark Mottram to 34th and myself to 97th at Euros 2018. Despite the rapid tail off in finishes, the deck went an impressive 20-3 during the Swiss rounds. Dave and Mark did make a slight change by swapping one of the IP Blocks with a Vanilla.

This deck has a very flexible strategy, scoring out and killing with Punitive approximately equally often. The runner has an unpleasant decision to make: Spending a lot of money getting into a remote (ICE costs at least as much to break once than it does to rez) either to see an NGO Front or getting killed with Punitive or just letting you score out while you can still defend centrals fairly cheaply. There are a few other neat tricks you can use to win quickly too which is nice for a long tournament. Mark killed someone by install, advance, advance a naked SSL turn 2 when he had 2 Punitives in hand and Dave killed another player early after they shuffled their meat protection in Citadel Sanctuary back into their deck to steal a Degree Mill. The surprise factor of Punitive Counterstrike kills a lot of runners in the Swiss but Dave managed to get some players with it in the cut despite sharing deck lists.

There a few key changes to this deck since the first Masenqo list. Rashida was printed and that had to be added. We feel that 3 NGO, 2 Rashida, 2 IPO was the best combination of economy cards to use but there is not much in tweaking this 1 or 2 cards either way. 3 NGO seems sensible as an extra bluff but you may be able to drop an ICE for another Rashida. The ICE suite changed slightly to include EULA as an extra tax and 3 News Hounds with Scarcity which is just a monster piece of ICE. With the popularity of Employee Strike as the runner's restricted card, News Hound is so expensive to break most of the time even with only 3 currents of your own. You have to be a little wary of an Indexing or Legwork after scoring an agenda to turn their current off but at 2 credits to rez it's an amazing include. Turn 1 Scarcity and 2 News Hounds on HQ and R&D was enough to win a game versus MaxX.

The deck also dropped it's 1x copy of MCA Informant. Film Critic has disappeared a lot from the meta and if the runner is using this then they are not including Employee Strike so you make a lot of money with your ID ability. The silver bullet wasn't doing enough work and it's better to focus on scoring out with Ash. Finally we swapped the Red Herrings out for a Navi Mumbai City Grid. We were a little concerned with the number of 1 trash cards in the deck now we had added Rashidas too. I was especially pleased with this change as it stops Anarchs using D4V1D so costs them more than a Red Herrings would anyway plus it has some nice fringe uses against Pirate decks, Maxwell James and Dean Lister.

Another interesting feature of this deck is that it runs no restricted card, which may could be relevant if FFG ever do anything to NGO Front or Rashida. Also it's very nearly a legal Cache Refresh list. Another Cheltenham player entered a version in the Cache Refresh tournament at Euros and scored well with that despite building it on the car journey home at 1am. Overall I think this a cool deck archetype and I was honoured that two very strong players decided to play this deck at a major tournament.