Mti Moons (US Nationals 2018, 7th)

ramus 309

This is the runner deck that I played at US Nationals in Seattle. On the day, I went 4-1 (2 IDs), @checkthebox 3-2 (2 IDs), and @jaredrules 4-2 with this deck.

Lots of people have probably tried this deck (once you remember Political Dealings is a card), though I'm not sure if anyone dared to bring it to a tournament until now. A bunch of people in Seattle (@checkthebox, @cjfm, @grogboxer, and @jaredrules with a honorable mention for @podoboyz99) tested this deck, found it bonkers at first (@cjfm to @jakodrako: "Tell Boggs to restrict Political Dealings.") but also learned all of its weaknesses as time went on. The three of us went with this deck, while the rest went with boring Azmari decks.

It's a high variance deck, ranging from very fast wins if the runner doesn't keep the board under control to falling flat on your face (such as my loss against @podoboyz99 where I ended the game with all centrals and one remote iced and nothing else). You can see a rather one-sided game in the cut at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/277096646?t=11m30s which demonstrates what happens if you don't trash the assets the deck puts out. It loses to Val with a good start, but all Corps in this meta lose to Val with a good start, so there's no difference anyway.

Your general gameplan is to just score everything out of hand via Political Dealings (invulnerable to Clan Vengeance) and all of your draw cards. Don't be afraid to install naked agendas either-- they don't serve any purpose sitting in HQ, serve as Moon counters, forces the runner to check remotes, and you generally want to feed the first Medical Breakthrough anyway. If you manage to get the assets to stick, the deck just starts playing itself, especially with TS recurring key cards. Clot and Apocalypse hose this deck as-is, but there was no point in countering with CVS (alternatively, just Moons+Dealings on their turn) or Hostile Infrastructure as there's no Clot or Apoc in this meta.

The flipside of the gameplan is to try to slow down the runner as much as possible in the early game. Cortex Lock is a pain to deal with early game, even after the first facecheck as the runner will have to keep checking the remote if you install stuff behind it. Along with that are the usual gearchecks, DNA Tracker if you get a lot of money, and Excalibur for Indexing or just dumb plays (put out 3 or 4 remotes with 1 agenda, and get a 66-75% chance of scoring if they don't have Employee Strike). As usual, Blacklist is always a good card versus Anarch decks.

You have about 10 influence that you really don't want to change (3 Moon, 2/3 TS, 1/2 DBS). For the rest of the influence, we considered a few options:

  • Architect being the obvious one, which provides the absolute best possible start of using Mti to install Architect in front of Estelle Moon and immediately re-installing it.
  • Tour Guide for the general asset synergy.
  • Biotic Labor, which @checkthebox convinced us to use-- it allows you to close out games at 5 points if the runner manages to get your assets under control. There's also the comedy option of Political Dealings + Jeeves + The Future Perfect, which I actually did once during the tournament.

There's probably a lot of ways to tweak this deck. For the more minor changes, the others went with Mental Health Clinic over Hedge Fund-- I stayed with Hedge Fund to allow T1 Hedge Fund to avoid Mining Accident. I also explored a Hostile Infrastructure + Breaker Bay Grid version to further slow down the runner, but I felt that it slowed down the deck too much.

5 comments
26 Jun 2018 Havvy

I saw this deck on twitch stream, inspired to me try it out!

27 Jun 2018 phette23

Dope decklist. I tried to make this same idea work (Moons Pol Dealing Mti) but didn't get nearly as far. Biotic, Excalibur, & no (fear) CVS are all really nice touches. Great finish & great work on this.

27 Jun 2018 Krasty

Congratz to be best Mwekundu on US Nats! Did you think about to swap TFP for Improved Protein Source (can be scored just with PolDeal and Model) ? After that, I think you can cut Biotic for any other spicy stuff you wrote about in description...

27 Jun 2018 grogboxer

you never want to cut Biotic.

Two of the others that played this at Nats played SSL instead of TFP. Protein Source is tempo-positive for the Runner, seems bad in a deck like this.

(note that I backed out of this deck for Nats like a coward)

28 Jun 2018 jaredrules

Yeah, I think the switch to SSL was good. Plenty of times the money was very welcome.