Offworld Skunkworks - 1st Stevenage SC

Results

4-1 at Chatteris SC with wins against Steve Cambridge: Master Grifter, 419: Amoral Scammer and Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist, and a loss against 419: Amoral Scammer.

6-0 at Stevenage SC, with wins against Steve Cambridge: Master Grifter, Zahya Sadeghi: Versatile Smuggler, and Hivemind MaxX: Maximum Punk Rock.

Thanks to RealityCheque for running two awesome tournaments!

Kudos to Pinsel for sharing the core of a Skunk/Void Asa list in slack (which Havvy then shared in the Cambridge discord channel).

Binarydogs was also kind enough to share a UK refinement (originally including a spicy 1 x Border Control). I love how committed the UK competitive scene is to list transparency. Be sure to check out The Process .

Premise

This is just a very slightly refined Skunkworks/Void Asa list that went 4-1 (and placed 3rd) at Chatteris SC - but I'll try and do a better job with this deck write up than the last one!

The basic premise is that the Manegarm Skunkworks + Anoetic Void interaction is pretty disgusting, and the synergy with Asa allows us to build an impenetrably taxing remote very very quickly. That being said, I'm generally okay with any Corp strategy that brings Political Operative into the meta (just installing that card makes me feel smart).

Matchups

This list is reasonably well positioned against criminal, because the same upgrades that can be used to defend the remote are also effective at defending HQ.

As long as we hold some ICE back in hand, this list also has game against Apocalypse, because we can use Asa to quickly rebuild our board state (hopefully faster than the runner can rebuild their side of things). (In theory, I've not actually tested this matchup).

Against virus spam: Cyberdex Sandbox is MVP. We should prioritise scoring this agenda first, but we also need to be 100% sure that it is safe in the remote before pushing. Scoring Cyberdex Sandbox is the difference between winning and losing in this matchup.

Card choices

I explained the agenda suite changes in my last write-up - but, to summarise, we're playing this list as a rushy glacier list, rather than a clever asset/combo list - so out with the tempo neutral/negative Project Vitruvius and in with the tempo positive Offworld Office.

Since Chatteris SC I've swapped one of the Eli 1.0 for a single copy of Macrophage. Although the matchup against 419: Amoral Scammer is definitely winnable, having a little extra Aumakua hate is no bad thing, and (I'll be honest) the Hivemind anarch lists that emerged out of the Early Bird tournament terrified me!

I also swapped an Ansel 1.0 for a 2nd Fairchild 3.0. I like Ansel 1.0, it's a good card, but it sometimes gives our opponent too much flexibility in terms of spending single clicks to only break relevant subroutines

Piloting

Mulligan for econ and ICE. T1 rashida behind ICE, ICE HQ is a great start. Leaving R&D open is fine. We will lose some agendas this way in the opening few turns, but that is perfectly fine and okay.

Hold on to Spin Doctor for Violet Level Clearance turns. We should be aiming to create VLC turns whenever possible in the early game, and leaning on Fully Operational in the mid to late game, when the number of remaining Spin Doctor starts to reach zero.

Against Shaper and Anarch we can rush out hard in a remote. We should aim to win around T10. Against Criminal we will need to go slower - ICEing centrals against Aumakua, and protecting HQ with either Manegarm Skunkworks (recommended), or simply more ICE. Aim to win around T15.

Match Reports

Chatteris SC

One thing I noted in the Chatteris SC is that Drafter fired (sometimes multiple times) in 4 out of the 5 games I played. When it does fire, we really want to have a good target for it in archives - so we might be tempted to include a third Manegarm Skunkworks, but probably the better thing to do is to just make sure that you have a high value Drafter target in archives at any point (rather than recur them all back with Spin Doctor).

Stevenage SC

Lots of criminal matchups again, but with less Drafter fires, and some hivemind MaxX games thrown in for good measure.

R1: T12 WIN vs Countzer0 on Zahya Sadeghi: Versatile Smuggler - ICEd up all servers early, and then started to push agendas (sandbox into sandbox into GFI) through the remote.

R2: T16 WIN vs twisty_b on Steve Cambridge: Master Grifter. Always a tense matchup against criminal, where we never has as much money as we think we do, and our servers are never quite as safe as we might like. There was a pretty wild Boomerang + Inside Job play on the first agenda shove, which meant pitching 2 x agendas from Anoetic Void - but fortuntely archives was ICEd and we managed to recover.

R3: T14 WIN vs hemraa on Steve Cambridge: Master Grifter. Hemraa got an early Sneakdoor Beta down, but then tunnel visioned on an open R&D - which slowed down their tempo, and gave me time to build up my economy and scoring remote. Slightly dodgy scoring order of Offworld into GFI into Sandbox, but we got there.

R4: T7 WIN vs algebraic on Hivemind MaxX, by scoring Cyberdex Sandbox into Luminal Transubstantiation into Global Food Initiative. (Luminal Transubstantiation is such BS).

R5: ID against Swiftie so I can eat some pizza before the cut. Artichoke + Olives + Mushroom, on a thin base. P. good.

CUT-R1: WIN vs algebraic on Hivemind MaxX, by scoring Offworld Office into Luminal Transubstantiation into Global Food Initiative. This matchup is considerably tougher when your first agenda score isn't Cyberdex Sandbox, and the luminal probably should have been into a purge rather than pushing the Global Food Initiative - but a deep conduit dig on R&D hit only hit 1 agenda (and a Cyberdex Virus Suite) - so dodged a bullet there.

CUT-FINAL: WIN vs algebraic on Hivemind MaxX, this time scoring Cyberdex Sandbox into Global Food Initiative into Luminal Transubstantiation. When I started to close the game, Algebraic took the same line of going for deep R&D digs - which was good, because the scoring remote was nowhere near as scary as it looked.

Tournament Afterthoughts

I think going to 3 x Global Food Initiative is right, but I'm starting to doubt the move to Offworld Office over Project Vitruvius. There are times were being able to bluff a never advanced 3/2 is really advantageous, even if it's tempo neutral.

In any case, it doesn't really matter. Corp is in such a strong position at the moment, that it's not worth spending much energy worrying about it. This is a good deck. It's not particularly clever - but it's straightforward to play, and doesn't require much thought.