The Bends

The Inspiration

After listening to Icecoldjazz talk about playing Deep Dive + Swift out of Zahya on the Shadownet's RWR scoops episode this week I was struck with the desire to give it a try for our local CO here - held just two days before the release of RWR. So I put 3x Deep Dive, 2x Swift, and filled in the rest, played 3 or 4 test games on Jnet the night before the tournament and made the deck. I also stuck a single copy of Networking in last minute before the tournament because I knew at least one player, jelo, who I thought I was likely to play was on a very tag heavy deck.

The Games

Zahya felt amazing on the day and went 2-1 for me. That single copy of Networking cleared something like 17 tags out of a player on NotAgain's Hello Sicko Department R+, which felt amazing. I somehow didn't die against it. The game I did lose with Zahya was against Trillian on Punitive R+ after stealing all 3 copies of Regenesis and getting greedy on an RD run after Anemone fire, finding the single copy of Snare that he had put there after a Bacterial and my brain was shut off.

Deep Dive did win me a game and Zahya delivered a lot of pressure even on decks where you can't really run centrals (like the Hello Sickos deck).

It's good fun! Thanks to Icecodejazz for giving the inspiration to build it (I'm curious to see his version, as it sounds like he's been working on it for a while), and had a great time at the tournament (15 players at the end of a meta is pretty amazing). Oh, and I came in fourth which was neat!

My corp deck was The Unicorn by ThatsNoMun which also went 2-1, with a real chess match with Izzy where 2x Mavirus saved the day for me.

The Strategy

I am probably not the best person in the world to describe the strategy behind this deck, but in general you want to apply a massive amount of pressure early game - face checking multiple centrals turn 1 and 2 - playing early Bravados and Jailbreaks on centrals, then following up in the next turns with something like Boomerang or Inside Job into Diversion once they're back up to 5 credits feels pretty good. I think an early Deep Dive is fine but not my primary game plan.

I'm generally trying to get Swift out before Deep Diving, which does tip your hat pretty heavily - they'll see it coming, but I think you try and install Swift the turn before you deep dive if possible. Otherwise Swift will act as an Diversion click reducer.