Lunatic CI Variant (2nd @ Berlin Double Play)

I played this deck at the Berlin Double Play Event. It went 5-0 in Swiss, taking me to to first place, then lost in the Top 3 Cut, giving me a second place finish in the end. It is rotages latest iteration of Lunatic CI with the Cerebral Overwriter swapped out for the third MCA Austerity Policy (which is definitely a good swap). MCA puts pressure on the Runner and I can't remember a single situation where an opponent tried to run something that lay advanced in a Remote.

Game 1 against Emil (Lime) on Apartment Geist: Emil quickly dropped an Apartment with a couple of Fall Guys and other trashables, which meant that a kill was almost impossible. Fortunately, this deck plays 3 Scarcity of Resources, which slowed him down so much that he couldn't contest my MCA Austerity Policy, which allowed me to score the Elective Upgrade. That closed out the game quickly.

Game 2 against Mario on Leela: I left R&D open in the beginning. He took the bait, indexed me, stole a Vitruvius and a Global Food Initiative and died to double Punitive.

Game 3 against Oliver on Tag Me MaxX: This was the shortest game of the day. Turn one I made some money and drew some cards, probably with a Violet level Clearance. In his turn, he ran HQ, saw an Enigma and built up some stuff. Next turn I play Ultraviolet Clearance and ice HQ. Certain that it is the Enigma, he took his MaxX draw and ran it Click 1, where he faceplanted the Brainstorm with 6 cards in hand. Unable to find an agenda, he died at the end of his turn.

Game 4 against Odol on Apocalypse Steve: My memories of this game are quite fuzzy, but pretty early in the game he stole an agenda (probably Global Food Initiave), which allowed me to kill him with double Punitive.

Game 5 against Vaclav (Watzlav) on Turbo Bird MaxX: This game was pretty long and very tense. He built up his board state and quickly stole four points, but then whiffed on a couple of accesses. I manged to raise my defenses and stop his single access runs. A big turning point was when he milled his second Indexing. Not having found a Same Old Thing, I was able to Ark Lockdown both of them without a possibility for him to play them. I also Ark Lockdowned both Black orchestras, which left his Femmes as the only way to get through my Engimas. We had a bit of back and forth, making money and playing things until he had to Levy and went low on money. That was the point where I could confidently slam down the Elective Upgrade in a three-deep Remote and advance it twice. Since he was too poor and didn't have a lot of breakers, he couldn't contest it. I scored a Vitruvius next turn and, with the game pretty obviously over the next turn, he Legworked me twice, but fortunately found only one Agenda, which allowed me to win the next turn with the second Vitruvius.

Game 6 against Alex (ff0x) on Smoke: Alex knew what deck I was on, so he dropped an early Biometric Spoofing, which makes the kill harder. But then he stole a Vitruvius while I had a loaded MCA Austerity Policy, which allowed me to Punitive away the Biometric Spoofing and gun him down with a barrage of Neural EMPs.

Final against Adam (Inermis) on Kenny Quetzal: In the final I got to play Adam, who kicked out Alex in the first game of the cut. Since I was the top seed, I could choose which deck to play. My mate Daniel told me, that all the polish players were in Brain Rewiring CI, I chose to play CI (also, Corp just feels more natural and linear to me and I was already pretty tired, nicely showcased by my first ever game loss in the last game of the swiss). I had a brilliant start of draw, Hedge Fund, Scarcity of Resources, which made his life extremely hard, since he plays a lot of resources and hasn't build his deck to score early agendas. He recklessly facechecked my Ice in the beginning, but unfortunately I hadn't drawn a Brainstorm yet, so I couldn't really punish him for it. With my first MCA I overscored a Vitruvius, which made his life even harder, but then I made a couple of crucial errors. The first was using a Vitruvius counter for a Hedge Fund to recover after an Ice rez. Cards in hand are important (to make it harder for him to hit agendas with Clan Vengeance), but still, Vitruvius counters are worth even more, so I should have just clicked for a Credit and pitched some cards at that point. But even worse was a play of Ark Lockdown on his Paperclip, then Archived Memories for a Wall of Static I discarded earlier and use it to Ice Archives. I felt extremely safe there, scored a GFI with MCA (which was another mistake, the GFI should have been the second overadvanced Vitruvius instead) and was ready to win next turn with Biotic Labour for Vitruvius, but then he ran Archives. I confidently rezzed the Wall of Static, but then he pointed to his ID, which I completely forgot, popped two Clan Vengeances to trash my hand and scored 8 points for the win. This was a game, where I completely screwed up. It was already quite late, I had to get up at 4:45 that morning to catch the train to Berlin and had played six rounds of Swiss before. My head was a complete mess, so I made all these errors. But still, it shouldn't go unmentioned that Adam played very well this game. It was really hard for him, but he fought the uphill battle through the Scarcity and managed to pull out a win. If you can do it under such adverse circumstances, you really deserve to win the tournament, I think.

You can watch some games on mrlabbes Twitch channel:

Game against Watzlav here (Game starts at 14:05. And although it cuts off directly before I score the Elective, I think the most important parts are caught on stream. What follows is just me scoring and him Legworking me twice, which I think isn't that interesting from a strategic point of view anymore)

Game against ff0x here (Game starts at 10:25)

Game against Inermis here (Game starts at 29:00. Unfortunately, the stream is not the best quality and stutters a lot)