HAND (1st place Omaha 6/3/18)

DECKLIST ERROR: it's 3 Day Job instead of 3 Daily Cast. Sorry!

Largest Counter Surveillance: 19 cards

Largest Game Day: 15 cards

Largest Mars for Martians: 18 credits

Largest Severnius run: 8 cards (5 accesses)

Largest Obelus draw: 10 cards

This deck is built around the synergy between God of War, Obelus, Severnius, Game Day, and Mars for Martians. More tags gives you more money and handsize, which gives you more draw, which gives you more card accesses, which gives you even more draw. Tags are so good for you that it's often correct to install 2 God of War so that you get tags even faster.

The previous version of this deck, from before High-Profile Target was a card, had an 80-90% winrate in testing with Isaiah. It was able to run 3 Game Day and 2 Levy. -1 Levy doesn't hurt much, but -1 Game Day has a noticeable impact on the deck's consistency. You can still bring the old version of the deck, but you'll just auto-lose to HPT decks. This version feels like about a 40% winrate against HPT Argus.

This deck's gameplan is to assemble your rig and, if necessary, your protection package. Start getting God of War tags as soon as you can, then when the corp is on game point, clean out HQ and dig deep on R&D. If you didn't just win, then you have a turn or two to get ready for another large R&D dig, and so on until you win the game. Freedom's ID isn't very important to the deck, but there's no 17 influence Anarch and Freedom sometimes kills important cards.

The strength of this deck is that it can access any server for free using Dean Lister/God of War. It doesn't really matter how much money or ICE the corp has, as long as they can't score out before you start hitting 5 cards at a time from centrals. Mars for Martians also gives you large bursts of money, so you can afford to pay 12 credits to break Archer with God of War if the game lasts long.

The weaknesses are HPT, of course, and sufficiently fast rush.

I only played 7 games at the regional, and this deck went 2-1 with wins over Punitive Palana and HPT Argus, and a loss to Skorp rush. The Punitive Palana had no chance, but the other two games could have gone either way. The top 4 was 3 Argus 1 Next. I recommend playing Isaiah's Freedom build instead unless you expect very little Argus.

Writeup of the games:

r2: against Jamie's Punitive Palana (Mwanza, Bacterial, Obokata) deck. I had a really slow start and had to click draw through half my deck, but his wasn't good either. He scored a Chronos Protocol early and removed some unimportant stuff from my trash, but I got set up and drew my deck. I was able to stop the next score with Deano. I popped Levy early in case of another Chronos. He started pushing out something else. I drew my entire deck again and accessed a bunch of cards. He was on basically unlimited money thanks to Palana and Mwanza. He scored another Chronos that put me at 15 cards in hand, 0 in deck, 0 in archives. I sat back and waited for him to do something. Eventually he went for a score, and I played By Any Means and Counter Surveillance for 19 cards to trash the rest of his deck.

r2: against Tom's Skorpios rush. We both had pretty good starts. I got my setup rolling much faster this game, which was good because he got to 4 points with an atlas counter early. I stole a lot of points from single or double accesses with Severnius, and Obelus helped me keep pace. I stopped him from scoring a 2-counter atlas, but he Hunter Seekered my God of War. I drew into another one pretty quickly, but he got to 5 points with an atlas counter. I ran HQ, hit 2 cards, but missed the Audacity and he won next turn.

Winner's Finals: against Mason's HPT Argus. I got a fantastic start and dropped Dummy Box, Wireless Net Pavilion, Paparazzi by turn 3 I think. I had to let him have the first IAA'd card, but it was a GFI and I was able to lock down the game very quickly. He was unlucky enough to get all his tagging ice and not much of his hard ETRs.