What does Alice do again? (2nd Place Toronto Regional)

I somehow managed to come in second in the 18 person XPlanet GTA Regional Pro Am Run for the Cure with my weird home-brew Alice deck, along with a Sync deck that I mostly net-decked.

I always enjoy playing weird off-meta decks, and having people be a little bit confused having to play against an ID that they spent exactly 0 time thinking about when practicing.

DDoS was the star of the show with En Passant as a follow up to get rid of the ICE opening up centrals. The trick to this deck is to get some early pressure so all centrals get iced, and then don't face plant ice you don't need to. Don't be afraid to sit back and let the corp play out a bit while you get some money. Alice also helps with this game plan because the corp needs to spread their ice out even more.

When I build decks I probably don't focus enough on one thing, which is why I only have 1 Stargate, The Turning Wheel and Bhagat out of a 50 card deck, but I do my best to stay flexible and take my outs based on the cards that I see. I don't usually worry about digging for specific cards because that way lies madness.

Best case scenario is when the corp puts one ice on each central and then builds a gigantic remote. You know that you'll never run that in a million years and you just trash the ICE on centrals and trash whatever they need using whatever tools you happen to draw.

Archives Interface is a Toronto meta call because there's always someone who plays Mushin, or Breahed Dome, or something else that I want to get rid of in archives. Unfortunately, I didn't need to install it at all over the course of the day.

The losses that I had (2 to the same Argus, and one to Titan) were decks that had Economic Warfare into Hard-Hitting News to discourage running, and then I had to spend too much time recovering or just getting killed. The slower decks I played against because I had time to draw a lot of cards and install the pieces I needed for that match.

Round 1 - Win against Jinja Sportsmetal. I was patient setting up and won on centrals.

Round 2 - Win against Punitive Palana. Again, I picked my battles and only stole agendas from centrals when I needed to.

Round 3 - Loss to Titan. This was a great game and it came down to the corp scoring an SDS for the win behind a Wraparound before I could draw my Corroder.

Round 4 - Win against Biotech. Trashed the Urban Renewals, trashed the Kakugo on R&D and dismantled the deck.

Cut game 1 - Win against same Titan as round 3. I was seeded #2 and I thought this was a better match-up even though I lost in the cut. DDoS was the star of this game.

Cut game 2 - Loss to Argus. The ability to rush while baiting me into PriSec and Hard-Hitting News kept me on my back foot.

Finals game 2 - Loss to the same Argus again, with a pretty similar game overall.

Overall it was a great day, with 18 good players in the field and this was the best I have ever done in a non-GNK tournament. Thanks to all my opponents for giving me great games. I don't think I had any games for either my runner or my corp that were won/lost due to randomness.

Congrats to Adam for beating me in the finals after playing 2 great games. It was a very deserving win.