Apocalopolis - 5th @ DomeCon

I've been wanting to play Apoc for a while again, since Asa is kinda the deck to beat these days. It has a pretty good matchup against most things, aside from a kinda shit Earth Station matchup. Tradon had what looked like a pretty cool list he played to 10th at German Nats, so I hugged him on slack to share it with me. It turns out it was a published list and I'm just bad at looking for stuff, so I looked at it and asked him a few questions about card choices. His basic answer was "lol, do you think I tested this at all?" which was a fair answer.

I swapped the ID to Alice, since Spags had a good point about that with his Apoc Alice deck. Roughly what he said was that you don't get much mileage out of Val's BP, since you're not running a ton. With Alice, you almost always get them to commit an ICE to Archives early, which is great because you usually ust DDoS right through it, and it keeps that ICE from going somewhere better. Also, you don't have to use an influence on Rebirth, because you're already playing the ID you want. Sage wisdom, that Spags. So I swapped it.

I decided that I wanted to try out Buffer Drive as a really, really bad recursion device to get a spent Apoc or DDoS back in hand quickly, and although it's a very expensive way to get it done, sometimes it's the best way to get it done. I don't know if it's 100% the best influence use, but it was useful.

I also dropped down to 2 of each breaker in order to add Eater, which ups the consistency by quite a bit. Honestly, I don't think I installed real breakers at any point today. I further dropped a copy of MKUltra because I wanted to play a 3rd copy of Daily Casts, since the deck just burns through money. Finally, I decided that I was probably already good enough against asset spam with the whole Apoc thing to need the Hacktivist, and I almost never get currents played against me right now from the Corp side, so I dropped them in favor of a second Amped Up and 2x Stimhacks. Yeah, you might hit Apoc with the Stimhack, but if you needed to use Stimhack, you weren't going to Apoc them when you needed to anyhow. Also, Weyland seemed to be popular, and Amped Up is tech against Border Control (coolest move in a practice game: I ran R&D and Archives, then got Border Controlled on HQ. Used Amped Up, but knocked Apoc out of my hand. Ran HQ anyhow, then used Buffer Drive to put Apoc back on top, drew it, and played it).

I lost 2 games with this, but won the other 4. The first game I lost was against Earth Station: an already identified lousy matchup. This ES was a Tower of Power build, where they glacier the ever loving fuck out of their centrals, then Biotic RPC a Governmant Takeover from hand, also scoring a Hostile at some point. This deck also only played Vanity Project as their other agenda, making for a 6 agenda deck (2 Hostile, 3 Vanity, 1 GT). He's using W2W to advance his HQ ICE, and stacking things 3-4 ICE deep, and I'm drawing furiously trying to find a DDoS, having already found and played my Eater, and had an Apoc in hand. I was dumb, though, and wasn't thinking about the fact he was only on like 10-12 credits, and I was pretty rich. If I had just ran, I probably could have apocced him that turn. I didn't, and next turn he found a Mass Com, gaining him 10 credits. The game was downhill from there. There was a turn where I was unable to break into a single HQ run when I had nearly 30 credits, and a Stimhack. Border Control stopped the run (after I had payed 8 to Cayambe), and I realized I only had like 8 credits left.

The other game I lost I lost due to me only finding 1 Sure Gamble as econ against an HHN rush GameNet, using Psychographics. I was doing okay, and eventually Apoc'd him, but he HHN'd me that turn, and had the Food in hand for the following turn.

I won the rest of my games pretty handily, beating out a Political Dealings RP list (appoc'd twice), an Azmari 6 agenda deck (appoc'd once), and 2 Asa decks (appoc'd one with a buncha stuff, and just ran around collecting agendas in madethe other. His mulligan was really bad).

Overall, the deck feels pretty good. Obviously Earth Station mattress your life suck, and, in hindsight, might honestly be a good reason to still include Rebirth. Also, a third Wanton wouldn't be bad, since it's a great play the turn after you Apoc them. This also makes Alice's ability great, since now they either have to draw up a bunch in order to have something to discard (in which case you hammer HQ), or to get to run Archives and make them discard something they might care about.

Thanks again to all the players I played, met talked to, and hung out with! Super special thanks goes out to Dome_, without whom Germany would lose one of the best tournaments I've been to.