Startup - Glacier BtL (3-0 @ Netbrummers Startup Tournam3nt)

TheRealLap 68

This brew would not have been possible without help from my fellow commrade, Max (Chonky Seal/Cyber Seal). Without him, I would have probably brought weird R+ to hurt people with Snares!.

Core Principles and Play Pattern

Most of the deck is pretty self explanatory - decent ice, econ and recursion. As such I will mainly focus on 4 cards and leave the others to later:

1) Charlotte Caçador - She is the backbone of deck, whilst you can still win without her, your life will be so much better with her company. Due to our ID's ability, she practically enables us to repeatly play a Government Subsidy + Draw a card using a click per turn. Any glacier BtL would have to run 3 of her, as the return is higher than any other card. When do we say goodbye to her? Whenever we think we have enough credits to score out and rez ice without needing to play more econ.

2) The Holo Man - Now that we established we will be rich, Holo Man is a repeatable way to turn our credits into agenda points with frightening efficiency. The potential to just score out 5/3s without completely taking two turns off is huge as we can both improve our posistion and threatened to score out on the same turn. The threat of any not advanced install into a 3 point score forces the runner to make unfortable run in contesting which yields a window of oppurntunity that we can use to score. Key numbers to keep in mind are 6 credits for 5/3, 7 for clearing house and 4 credits to triple advance ice.

3) Clearinghouse - Our hope was always for the deck to have a scoring plan, and it still does -- it just turns out that the best thing to score, in a world of Hermes and Arissana, is a 6/7 agenda named "Clearinghouse." - Sokka's The Worlds Grind. The quote still rings true today only instead of Arissana we have Tao and Kit. The inclusion of Clearinghouse, means that we would need to minorly change our pattern of plain install to install+advance in order to threaten clearing house on 6 immediately after Holo+advance+advance. Most games I won(in tournament and on Jnet) are from Clearinghouse and in world of no Pinhole Threading, it is the most non-commiting 7 point agenda out there.

4) Isaac Liberdade - A quick look at Weyland ice reveals 2 glaring problem - our code gates and sentry melts under full rig. With Unity, Carmen, Echelon all breaking them with 3 credits if not less. Issac racks up the tax very effectively whilst helping you save clicks, espciailly in pushing sentries up to 6 strength by placing advancement counter at the end of turn. In the case of Pharos, we can even reach to 12 strength which even Pressure Spike need 4 credits to get up to strength.

Reflection

The idea of ending the game by FA Hostile, whilst doable ended up to be unnecessary distraction. As mentioned above, Hortum, Hammer and Ballista are whilst decent ice, they do not tax the runner enough and should be replace with more taxing barriers. Crisium Grid is very nice and necessary with all the Cataloguer, Trick Shot, Jeitinho, Burner,Privileged Access and many more that are floating around, I am hesitant to rack it up to 2x but 1x is definitely the minimum. Finally, given the success of murder as a solution, one should explore more inclusivity for Clearinghouse. Drop 2 ice, 2 hostile and 1x AAP would be a starting point.

But What About Punitive Counterstrike?

Slots are tight and so is our Econ, for a runner on 8 credits we will need 14. Not to mention we need 2 punatives or have scored a Basalt to have get it working. If we have influence to spare for Archived Memories then it would be worth considering but alas with 2x Holo Man our counterstrike plan will need to take a back seating. If you are Nuvem SA: Law of the Land though that would be another story, as @znsolomon has cleaned me up after magically going up from 8 credits at the end of my turn to 17 after first click before sealing the deal with 2x Punative using basalt.

Thank you for @harmonbee for running the tournament and congrats to @znsolomon for winning back the trophy after a very intense final game. I swear I will one day beat you in a game, maybe 5th time's the charm : P

Stay Safe and don't get ‘personally liable’ed - Lap

0 comments