House of Blues - Curious Comics SC Winner - Feb 7th, 2015

This is the deck I took to first place at a small SC in Victoria, Canada. Legal up to O&C. It was only 8 players, but there were some other very strong players there, and first place came down to a turn and a lucky R&D access. (My runner deck was the Modern Parasucker Gabe, card-for-card as seen on Stimhack.com a few weeks ago.) This deck went 5-1 on the day of. It's not a huge showing, I know, but this deck is the culmination of what I've been playing since Blue Sun released, at Worlds, and now with Order and Chaos.

It's a pretty standard glacier + Scorched plan, with no bad publicity to enable NAPD and increase taxing. Play conservatively, get rich, goad them into overextending or just overpower their economy. I'll go over some key decisions that went into this version:

Living in a post-Order and Chaos world: A few of choices are in direct response to the first week of O&C being legal. Crisium Grid is the silver bullet for Eater-only decks, while also being useful against Criminal and Shaper run events. It didn't actually get used on the day-of, but I stand by the choice. Caduceus used to be Errand Boy, but the former is much rougher for Anarch to faceplant into, and can't be walked through with Eater. Midseason Replacements was chosen after weeks of using SEA Source for influence saving, simply because if I tried to kill someone with I've Had Worse, I wouldn't have gotten nothing out of the trace. Leaving all those tags gives me a second chance to kill and the ability to disrupt econ.

Agendas: Posted Bounty wins games. I've tried using one or two Hostile Takeover in there for a faster last point, but that alternate tag method is so valuable. High-Risk Investment used to be Priority Requisition, and I'm not 100% sure which is better, but High-Risk is certainly easier to use. In theory, both glacier and Midseason-Scorch can be beaten by having a ton of money, and this allows you to keep up. In reality, I have yet to use the token. Still a small sample size.

Other ICE: Nebula is a Grim that doesn't give me bad pub. The extra cost is negligible in Blue Sun. The dream is Wormhole-ing a Data Raven, but frankly Wormhole may be the final nail in the coffin of Yog.0's dominance. Anarch has D4V1D, but other factions will be looking elsewhere. Datapike hurts them where I want to - their credit pool - when face checked. Enigma is much less useful there. Tollbooth continues to be amazing.

Notes on playstyle: We had some neat discussion on different playstyles with Blue Sun at the end of the day. Something I very deliberately incorporate into my style is almost always bouncing my ICE. Not only does it keep my credit pool fluid, but constantly facechecking the ICE suite I'm running can be painful. What was a Hive for the past three turns is suddenly an Orion. Even against a Reina deck, that extra tax is worth paying, as having so much face down keeps the runner on the back foot. My most frequent mistake is rushing to score. You have time. Take it. Build your fortress. Them them throw themselves upon it. You're trying to overextend them, not vice versa.

So, that's my build. It basically comes from the bblum school of Blue Sun, just with the kill package still in there. I feel that it's just too valuable of a threat, and I win with at least as much as I do by scoring. I do want to explore other Blue Sun archetypes, this is just the one that will always define the identity to me: big money, big ICE, and a big gun to your head.