Thought Experiment

The obvious (and correct) choice for playing Crim at Worlds was Simon Salford. Unfortunately that was a problem for me. As I've experienced on several occasions, some people just effortlessly chain Doofs, Bravados and more together like a pressure waterfall. Whereas I'm more likely to forget about the ability or mistime it and end up more like an intermittent drizzle. So I looked at other options.

For a long time I thought I was going to play Ken Tenma; there were enough run events I wanted to play anyway to get reasonable value, and of course the extra influence is very useful. But one day I ran into a couple of Azmari lists that just sat on "event" and racked up about a million credits, which was... sub-optimal. This got me thinking about whether you could play Crim without relying on events so much.

The first part of the puzzle was combining Security Testing with Pennyshaver (which later became Paragon to help with selective draw) and Find the Truth for a neat way of gaining three credits while peeking at R&D. Then DreamNet was added so that you would draw a card too. And while we're doing that, we may as well get two link for a fourth credit, so it was moved into Az.

At this point I decided to try it out in the real world, so headed into jnet casual and came across a CtM list. I won. Easily. Like I'd never won against CtM before. I ended the game on 40+ credits with another 30 on Pennyshaver. I screenshotted it and posted it in the testing group with the joke "well if we want a deck that beats CtM, I think I've found it!". At that point we didn't think CtM was a factor, so there wasn't much rejoicing. About 48 hours later, Whiteblade shared that he thought CtM was the best list at the moment, and suddenly this was a real consideration.

A bit more testing later, and Steffmonkey had joined me in this endeavor. We changed a few cards: Paragon for Pennyshaver, Hernando instead of the third Boomerang to help with glacier, a Deuces instead of a second Wheel to help with draw, and I locked it in as my runner a lot earlier than I expected to.

Stef campaigned for a PolOp which we couldn't find a cut for, but I really wish I had, as I came up against very little CtM and a whole lot of PD. As a result, the deck was a bit of a disappointment on the day. But it was a lot of fun to play so no regrets.

Thanks to Stef for joining me in this little experiment and going through The ProcessTM. And thanks to the rest of the #worldsplaza crew for entertaining my crazy ideas and generally making Worlds21 a great time.