Prepaid Time Traveller (4th/58 Reading Regional 2017)

This deck went 5-2 (4 wins and a loss in Swiss, and a win and a loss in the cut), paired with a CTM deck, to bring me to 4th place overall in the Reading Regional. This list would look very familiar to anyone play in the good old pre-MWL 1 glory days, though, with you four influence down, you lose a lot of options you would previously have (primarily sucker, parasite and stimhack, or, in other lists, D4v1D). The game plan is to remote lock decks that you can remote lock (HB Glacier, NBN Glacier, SYNC) and R&D lock everything else. This deck has only 2 cards released in the last two years; the two copies of Beth Kilrain-Chang. Everything else has been kicking around for far longer than that!

The Engine

Obviously, the heart of Pre-Paid Kate is the lean and mean economy engine with 3 PrePaids paying for all your events, discounting your econ. 3 Dirty Laundry and 3 Sure Gambles are nice influence free options, with 3 lucky finds as the whole reason you play the deck; the ability to burst from 0->9 is amazing and not to be underestimated. As with any Prepaid Kate list, the difference between seeing an early prepaid and not seeing any is huge. I find that I tend to not play any econ events early if I have not seen prepaids yet.

The Breakers

With Eli 1.0 back in the fray, Lady is a no-brainer. I think it's monstrous that Lady somehow costs inf when paperclip exists, but whatever. It's still your best bet against Eli, and does a decent job of breaking other ice.

Gordian is your backup against code gates of all sorts, and is generally the breaker you use the least of. I can definitely see this becoming an Inversifciator with further testing.

Mimic is an all-star for breaking most common sentries. Yes, without sucker, you can be a bit vulnerable to bigger sentries, but that's why have.....

Atman is still the most balanced and cleverly designed AI breaker in the game, and has a variety of uses in different matchups. Against moons, Atman 5 is an all-star. You will make your money back vs Fairchild 3 over installing a Gordian in two runs, and paying 3 to break Fairchild 3 is lovely.

The Multiacccess

R&D Interface is like your bread and butter - honest to goodness, solid see more cards a turn that allows you to r and d lock decks that you can't remote lock.

The Maker's Eye is when you need that additional oomph and to see a few more cards.

Legwork is key because a lot of modern decks have very clogged hands - Moons, CTM, SYNC, Aginfusion all tend to have lots of agendas stuck in hand as they wait for biotic/moon counters/sansan/your clot to die/caprice. If you remote lock an opponent - agendas are gonna pile up someewhere!

The Flex Slots

Film Critic - 2 is the right number, I think. It allows you to score meow meows against SYNC, turns off Lakshmi against Moons, allows you to safely steal Obokatas and TFPs against Jinteki, and stash agendas against Midseason decks.

Clot Because CTM and SYNC is still a thing, and because it slows moons down - they either have to risk an agenda on the table, or they're going to have to build a remote you can lock.

Daily Casts Because money is good

Plascrete For that extra security against SYNC - it turns an OK matchup into a good one!

3rd Astrolabe Because asset spam is back with a vengeance.

Notoriety because fuck you GFI.

Matchups

1st Round: Sync Boom (Mark Rist). I had a great hand with plascrete in my opener, and quickly draw into an SMC and a critic. While he gets a breaking news early, I stop him scoring a second agenda, and we end up in a money race; Beth means that you'll inevitably win any sort of money race, and I am able to stop him scoring cats with a Film Critic when he realizes he is losing the money race. Further, 24/7 is nowhere near as scary when your opponent doesn't have a second agenda to forfeit!

2nd Round: Moons (Chris Dyer). Moons is a bit of a hard matchup - you can slow them down at the start, but without Whizzard's 3 recurring creds, you find it a lot harder to control a truly bonkers Moons board. R&D Interface really comes into its own here, allowing me to do several deep R and D Digs to get at the agendas I want. The clot threat buys me three turns as Chris keeps trying to purge the damn thing away, allowing me to build up the resources to do one last hail mary run on R and D to steal 2 agendas to win the game

3rd Round: HB Grail (Lin Kirby) This is a really weird game because I had absolutely no idea what I was facing. Ultimately, SMC really helps the Grail matchup, and Atman 5 did its work against Fairchild 3. I win by scoring the last agenda just as I was about to pull off a Notoriety run.

4th Round: Moons (Tim Fowler). No Money, no Astrolabe, no chance. I wasn't able to get set up anywhere near quickly enough to contest Tim's board or to get my engine/multiaccess going. Ouch.

5th Round: Jammy HB (Ben Ni): While I did a good job of forcing him to move Caprices around servers; to protect his scoring remote and his R and D, to be honest, Ben just got unlucky in this one. He fired an ABT that landed two points in the bin and got him no Ice. I then let him trash my entire rig ( a dog and a SMC) to Ichi so I can click a Turing and clone chip back the dog to break the eli behind the Turing and snipe another agenda. Finally, after I run R and D click 1, snipe an agenda off HQ click 2, he scoops before I could even run archives and play the Notoriety.

6th ID With Moons 44 (Ciaran Maxey). I am very luck Ciaran decided to ID with me. He completely wrecked me in our "friendly". Voter Intimidation is a pretty good counter to Film Critic.

Cut

Top 8 Round 3: Moons (Alex Hilson). Alex juts got super unlucky. I stole 4 points from single accesses turn 1, have an absolutely godlike hand with 2 prepaids, 2 money cards and a diesel, and am able to keep most of his board down. I manage to snipe a 3rd agenda off a Legwork, and, in a desperation move, he installed a naked vitruvius alongside two other cards. I happened to pick the Vitruvius as my Dirty Laundry target. Ouch.

Top 8 Round 4: Hasty CI (Sam Burdock). Sam had a pretty good start, and I kept a very slow hand, hoping that Beth would give me a big advantage. Ultimately, I underestimated the speed at which modern CI can combo, and I lost very, very quickly; before I even got my clot out.

Overall, I'm super happy with the deck; it was great to play Prepaid Kate again, and it turned out to be a surprisingly decent meta-call. I'd definitely consider swapping the Gordian for an Inversificator, because of the utter-mindfuckiness of that card. Any other comments/suggestions welcome! :p