Cheating Bankers - 1st Bromley Store Champs

~ The Theory

Plan A: Ride the Project Atlas train with Trick of Light to victory.

Plan B: Send the runner to tag hell with Hard-Hitting News and BOOM! them into oblivion.

Plan C: Build a server with Priority Construction and jam agendas in it.

~ The Practice

Plan A worked properly once all day, but was good enough to get me halfway to victory in nearly every game. Global Food Initiative makes me sad, I never scored it but it does keep the agenda density down. A consideration for future variations would be to find better suite and make room for Hunter Seeker. A third Hostile Takeover would have made victory in round two much easier and 3/1s can actually be scored, would need to test it.

Hard-Hitting News definitely did work. In the round four matchup versus Valencia it got fired four times until the tags stuck and the BOOM! could be pulled in off Project Atlas.

The ICE suite wants tweaking. Mausolus is excellent, Colossus is a touch expensive, has no ETR, but is a real pain for runners, Hortum is good until Black Orchestra turns up and is then sad (especially as this deck floats bad pub more than I anticipated), Wormhole is great if there's a rezzed ETR and Ice Wall is little more than a gear check that never showed up on time. I would certainly consider switching out a Hortum and an Ice Wall for something else, though if the advanceable stuff is thinned out I'd consider swapping some or all of the the Mass Commercialization for IPO.

Going up against a couple of Kims and seeing Imp hit the table suggests that an extra Preemptive Action would have been a good include as well and worth considering based on the expected meta.

As for the assets, well. Illegal Arms Factory is bait. With a nice big, juicy trash cost it can, in theory, set the runner up to eat a Hard-Hitting News and be unable to clear the tags, or if left running provide some serious tempo when digging for Trick of LightPriority Construction/some ICE. In practice it saw less use than I'd like, but has proved itself in testing, which is why there are three in this list as opposed to the previous two. Elizabeth Mills removes bad pub and blows up things like Laguna Velasco District, in theory, or gets trashed out of R&D, in practice. Depending on what you expect to see opposite you, I'd consider swapping out these slots for alternative, Crisium Grid being something I was considering the night before. Ultimately, I just like these cards so that's why they're there. Cyberdex Virus Suite made it because Clot and the Turtle make me upset.

The two games this deck lost on the day were a royal flood of agendas to Kim and a tight fought battle against Hayley after an overly ambitious start of a turn one Hostile Takeover.

~ The Conclusion

Titan Transnational: Investing In Your Future FA is really good against the Anarch builds I saw on the day, which seemed to lack a real way to deal with the Project Atlas train once it got going. Kim is bad if he can get at the Trick of Lights (I never actually ended up using Audacity), but a good start and you're pretty solid. An early Ice Wall on R&D would have been nice in most games to prevent bleeding out agendas in the first turns, but that's acceptable if it gets the train going. Having the Hard-Hitting News/BOOM! Plan B won games where the runner exhausted themselves trying to chase the train. Plan C doesn't really work, not when runners are getting upwards of three bad pub at any rate, so go fast and mulligan for Project Atlas.