Argus has evolved (7-3 at German nats)

3-1 at the team tournament and 4-2 at the main event (I had a bye, and my 2-4-1 was a runner game).

Not too much to say here - it’s the Argus kill deck in Earth Station.

Obvious changes are 3 Prisec > 3 Crisium.

More IPO than Too Big To Fail because you’re more reliant on ice to tax them on credits than Argus is, so too much BP seems like a bad idea.

The only interesting change is 3 Data Raven > 2 Gold Farmer and an extra Afshar.

3 Afshar seems obvious in a deck that really wants HQ to be taxing. I tried Winchester just to have another sentry that wasn’t Archer, but there were too many times where it did nothing, and it’s really not that great once you’ve scored a hostile.

The logic behind swapping Ravens to Gold Farmers was that, unlike Argus, you aren’t trying to click compress them by making tags stick, and with no Prisec or Argus ability I thought it would be too easy for Runners to just run through them and remove the tags afterwards. This seemed to be a good swap based on the limited testing I did, and most of the time it felt nice. In all the games I lost though, Runners were so rich that the Gold Farmer tax didn’t matter, and maybe Data Raven would have given me an out.

For example, I played against Pinsel’s Earth Station deck in the team tournament, and he stuck a Data Raven on HQ, which was extremely annoying in combination with Crisium, because it effectively means you can’t contest the remote by first running HQ, unless you are happy to float a tag (or have more than 4 clicks).

All in all, the deck is really fun to play, but I can’t tell whether it’s “better” than Argus. I do think it’s better against Shapers, because against Argus they can just run the remote, take all the tags in the world, and remove them all with Misdirection as long as they have clicks to spare.

Many thanks to everyone involved in organising the whole weekend, you should be really proud of yourselves!