Not Az good Az I hoped: Mankato GNK 1-3

Part Next in a series: Grosseteste Learns to Deckbuild

I really wanted to bring a Sunny deck to my GNK. Sure, the Sunny archetype I'd played was gutted, but maybe a trace-y runny Sunny was viable. Turns out such a deck (at least the way I built it) still requires a nonzero amount of setup time, and the Corps on jnet are not messing around. They are ready to ice everything immediately and get rich, almost as if they were ready for run-based Criminals, so my imitation half-assed version of a Criminal run deck didn't stand a chance. I saw that a lot of what I wanted to play was Criminal stuff, so I decided to full-Az it for the GNK.

A dramatization of Sunny ascending from her mountain of credits to break through glaciers. Only in my dreams? Or instead maybe Az launching himself from Kati's hopper?.

I thought I'd try the new Criminal ID, and ended up playing more Downfall cards than I anticipated. I liked the Az discounts, and also the clickless installs of hardware at the start of runs through his console. What can you do with hardware? Well, there's stuff I was packing anyway to get through and allow some facechecks and dampen traces, and multi-access. Wait, isn't Clone Chip hardware? Could Az be telling me to spend all his influence on Shaper BS? I think that is what he's telling me. RDI and Stimhack both do good work in this deck with the leftover influence pips.

I found this deck super fun to play, partly because my playing runner temperament is usually to just run whenever I can and be aggressive without regard for safety, while my deckbuilding runner temperament is like planning for retirement: making sure I have the all the pieces I want in there, and having them available for a long time. With this deck, I got to keep more "permanent" stuff on the hardware row, where no one's touching it but me, and I don't have to care so much about the programs and resources which are ephemeral anyway in this deck. There's still the voice in the back of my head saying "What happens when you've used all your Clone Chips and trashed your fraud breakers? But reaching the bottom has not been a problem.

Every draw provides a puzzle. What can I do to get through with the cards I have now (and the cards in my stack and my heap I can get to)? How can I get through right now, this turn, and see as many cards as possible? Did I mess up and get stuck with a bunch of tags? Let's just GET THROUGH with a couple more multi-accesses and maybe the corp doesn't have a kill package ready yet. They're welcome to trash the Crowdfundings.

THROUGH, THROUGH, THROUGH, HE'LL GET THE TRAIN THROUGH!

In all seriousness, I think that this deck is better than my piloting of it was in this GNK. A couple of my losses were due to just inexplicable blunders at critical times, with non-fatal but crippling blunders adding problems at other times. Believe it or not, having a time horizon as short as I have described can be a detriment at times. It might be good to ask yourself before running early, as a purely hypothetical example, what if they're on Hard-Hitting News? (Hint: they're always on Hard-Hitting News). I think at least part of the problem is I need to slow down, maybe record my jnet matches and review them. And play more on jnet. In short, git gud.

But seriously, I'd appreciate any advice or suggestions on this deck. I tuned it for "super fun" and didn't go further. Any way I could fit in more money?

Source for the gif