Moving Parts (5-0, 2nd seed at Games Plus Store Champs)

I went 5-0 at the Games Plus store championships with this, backed with Just Ice & Agendas 2 which went 3-2. This deck went 1-1 in the double elimination rounds.

This deck was the product of an unholy love for Replicator and a last-minute brewing session about an hour before we left for the tournament. Props to daytodave for suggesting Imp as a way to make productive use of my influence - it was an all-star during the tournament and plays nicely with Test Run and Clone Chip silliness. I mostly used it to deny either SanSans or economy cards; it was a very glacier-heavy meta, and I think I played almost exclusively against Weyland and HB decks (with one Near-Earth Hub). The local meta is a little bit inbred and a little bit rogue; Astrobiotics and Replicating Perfection are somewhat rare around here.

Needless to say, this deck doesn't have a lot of hope against Replicating Perfection. But the deck did well, and a lot of that is just Stealth Kate being Stealth Kate; free runs nearly every turn are hard for a corp to handle. I wish I had a way to put pressure onto Archives, though, because it's much harder to ice three centrals than two. Utopia Shard was an attempt to do that. (Credit goes daytodave for that pick.)

That said, it might've been slightly better as Hades Shard - even outside of decks that put cards into Archives, it's great to be able to snipe agendas that the corp thinks are safe with Jackson Howard. It's hard to say, because Utopia Shard definitely got me points in most games where I played it, and it ripped a Scorched Earth in a game where that really mattered.

The deck doesn't run Magnum Opus or ProCon, and doesn't run very much that takes lots of money. Outside of Femme, everything is 3 or less after Kate's ability. You don't need a lot of money to run (except through Eli, yuck) and you can run aggressively pretty early on the game thanks to Self-Modifying Code. Let's be fair - I run aggressively no matter what I'm playing; it's just a good habit.

That said, the early facechecking can be rough if you don't have Dagger access. In the one game I lost with this deck, I hit two separate Architects in early runs and couldn't come back from that tempo loss.

Because of Eli and big barriers, I wished that Corroder was BlacKat a surprising amount of the time. They're not that different but I don't think BlacKat is ever significantly worse, except in terms of influence requirement. I've considered Cerberus "Lady" H1, and it would have been fantastic in a lot of games, but I'd need to shift cards around to make it work in long games. I think you end up playing a somewhat different deck with it. Atman would have been very good, too; I just didn't think of it when building the deck, and I probably would have to make room for Datasuckers to make Atman shine.

Parasite was exciting; there isn't a lot it goes onto easily without Datasucker around but it's a good option to have. It does something in nearly every matchup.

Outside of all those, there's not a lot going on in this deck that isn't already familiar to tournament players. The usual synergies that make Kate what she is are there, and the powerful Shaper cards are mostly there. I would recommend this deck, but if you plan on playing this, you might want to consider shifting the influence just a bit. There's a lot of flexible space, between Imp, Parasite, and Utopia Shard; they're all good but maybe you want D4v1d, or BlacKat, or Sneakdoor.

BTW I AM PUMPED THAT I GOT JUST ICE & AGENDAS TO T4 OF A STORE CHAMPS