"Oh! You'd like to steal this agenda? By all means, I'd be delighted!"

Alternative title: "You should definitely play Spin Doctors"

I am usually a big netdecker, rarely confident enough in one of my own brews to take it to a tournament, so I am as surprised as anyone to find myself riding so high in the rankings!

Since seeing Kikai's Norwich CO Fast Break combo deck in action at my local meetup, I thought combining some of its ideas with the core damage plan of TheKing's Fite Nite Sports could have some potential. Arella + SanSaning out multiple agendas in a turn seemed fun! I did try it in Sports initially and I think that the deck can work in the id. What I found however was that I never actually struggled much for money or draw, the more important thing was getting at least one core to stick, ideally more. Switching to Thule gave another angle of attack, aswell as a tax that does become relevant with the right play patterns.

That should give you some idea of the game plan. The idea is to go fast, and take a few risks to score agendas (because any stolen just become Buyback/Fast Break fuel) whilst also heavily prioritising getting at least one core through Djupstad. Once that is achieved, all the gendies apart from Food can be fast advanced easily. Along the way you should hopefully be feeding them a few negative agenda points.

I am publishing the list as I played it for posterity but no one should play it this way, it is objectively correct to play spin doctors, they are in every deck for a reason (cut an Arella and the Sprints). I think what happened is the deck originally only had 1 Arella and for some reason I cut the Docs for a second and then got used to playing it that way, I think I thought that flood didnt really matter as I wanted my agendas to get stolen? (this is just strictly wrong for so many reasons, as I said not the best deck builder! Luckily on the day my cards just came in the right order!)

The deck has lots of fun lines (for the corp I mean, I can't vouch for how fun it is to play against! ^^) and can both go full FA or build a remote based on the matchup. It has good counterplay for apoc decks, at some point they are gonna have some Nightmares and if you're not drawing them you can always just chuck a couple of 1 pointers in Archives as a nice present. Clot is for sure an issue, but you can play a fairly decent NA gameplan behind the threat of a Nightmare, so as long as you figure out the matchup and start scoring from the board early enough you should be fine. I've even found Caldera to not be too much of an issue as you can often just completely tax them out on creds by windmilling through a Djupstad remote. That is not to say that I think this deck is gonna blow up the meta at all, it really benefits from the unknown swiss factor. Stargate is by far the biggest issue so if you suspect it make sure to save plenty of ice for RnD (...and, you know, include some Spin Doctors in your deck!) Oh, and I'm pretty sure Freedom is just an autoloss.

A little variation I have tried since is to sacrifice the Mavirus and a Spin for a Hangeki and a Sprint, to really make sure they are either taking core or negative points! It seems to work well, although I'm pretty worried about Clot with no Mavirus.

Results

I corped first all day so nothing went to time

Round 1 vs @Hello Apex: Endless Hunger vs Meridian = sad tentacle boi (This very deck absolutely rolled my rush Ob at UK Nats. I was ready this time!)

Round 2 vs Lewis 419: Can't remember this one particularly clearly, apart from a big double agenda Fast Break to close out. I think they were possibly pretty lax about running straght through Meridian, something you do not want to do vs this deck!

Round 3 vs @MattOhNo Esa: Was a wild game, Esa matchups tend to be! Either you completely roll them as they just want to play all their core cards or they play carefully and methodically like Matt did and it results in a strange dance around lots of wierd lines! A core damage hitting Stargate felt extremely lucky, but it was soon Simulchipped back. It is hard for Esa to avoid being fed Nightmares though.. An unexpected Light the Fire install had me sweating with a Vitruvius in a Giordano remote but having to take a -1 from Meridian dissuaded its use and I scored off the table. Was v. close though!

Round 4 vs @Cobalt Adam: Took advantage of what seemed like a rough mull to find windows to score a few points off the table early on (I think even install adv an Ontological?), this together with some pretty dreadful luck on the Adam's part when eventually setup and hammering centrals led to me FAing for the win.

Unofficial Top 2 Cut in the pub vs Apoc Hoshiko: Other people in the top 4 had to rush off so we didnt play an official cut however me and @Cobrabubbles had one more in us so adjourned to the pub. I got off to a dreadful start, with my first two draws being unscorable Ontologicals and Cobra doing a great job of moneying up and carefully controlling the board. I eventually managed to solve my flood with a sprint, heavily ice centrals (smelling Apoc a mile off!) and start scoring from hand. Cobra was really unlucky not to find his MK and so had to eventually start running through drafter to Stargate which gave me back the Biotic I needed to score out. 7-6, down to the absolute wire!

Thanks to @TheRealLap and all the Warwick crew for organising such a great event!