Project CROW 5

Welcome to the fifth iteration of the Project CROW mini-campaign for beginners familiar with System Gateway and System Update 2021. It consists of a set of duel decks that are upgraded over three stages. We start at the first stage mainly with cards from System Gateway + System Update 2021, but introduce a few key cards from the Standard pool (see here for further information on the tournament formats Startup and Standard). At stage 2, we open up the card pool to the Startup format, but also add some more necessary Standard cards to teach some further elements. Stage 3 are the two decks Frog off, Keeling! and Calibrating...TUCANA! that @percomis and myself brought to the 2023 EMEA Continentals placing 16th and 30th respectively (out of a total of 145 players).

New cards

We arrive at the final stage. This is the actual deck that we played at EMEA Continentals 2023. There are a few important changes from the stage 2 list:

• Tucana - We now arrive at tutoring heaven. You will be searching through your R&D pretty much every single turn, sometimes even multiple times per turn. This gives you a lot of consistency, as you can pick and choose which ice you need where and free up your Ob triggers to fetch other cards. Both Calibration Testing and Mavirus as well as Extracting any 3-cost card will lead you to Tucana. Fetch this as early as you can and profit from every single score, making your servers more invulnerable in the process. Especially so, now that the Runner is using Hermes as their console and will bounce all your unrezzed cards, so make good use of the fact that both Ob and Tucana bring cards into play rezzed.
• Border Control - An ice that is already good on its own, but shines especially in Ob. This is your primary target to fetch with Tucana, as it acts as a gear check forcing a breaker on the table and then can be used during the run to end it and fetch a different 3-cost card. Typical targets are Mavirus, Calibration Testing if the Runner happens to be running into this on their last click or Afshar / Magnet / Sandstone as great 3 cost ice options.

Description

This deck offers many options at every point of the match. With all the tutoring effects, you can basically just pick and choose, which cards you'd want from R&D right now.

You can use a neat trick with Tucana while scoring an agenda that is not Azef Protocol. Fetch a Stavka triggering its on-rez ability. This gives you a trash that triggers your identity, which you can use to turn an Ice Wall into a Spin Doctor and shuffle away the agendas you threw away with Audacity or Slash and Burn Agriculture while scoring the agenda in the first place.

The Runner deck will force you to go at break-neck speeds to avoid getting locked out by the combination of Clot against the fast advance and Hermes + multi-access cards to bounce any agenda you try to score slowly in your remote. With Tucana you can defend yourself while keeping up the speed of the game, putting ice where it's needed most and turning some of it into other cards with Extract later on.

A typical play pattern is building up a big scoring remote early on to score the first 2-4 points and then later on trying to fast advance to get over the finish line. You can actually install Mavirus on any server, so pick one of your centrals to defend particularly heavily (often HQ) to then still be able to fast advance through a Clot.

Overview lists

These links show you all the necessary cards to build all three stages of the lists and give dedicated in/out lists for each stage transition.

Corp Overview | Runner Overview

Decklists

Corp 1 | Runner 1

Corp 2 | Runner 2

Corp 3 | Runner 3