Amoral Argus (Top 16 AfrEuros 2020)

Top 16 (4-5) at Nisei's African and European Continental Championship 2020 (117 player event)

Shout out to the Nisei OP team for keeping Organised Play alive through the lockdown, and to all the players that made it through 8 odd hours of staring at a screen and doing run-maths on a Saturday!

A criminal dominated meta is not an easy time to be playing Argus Security: Protection Guaranteed. Every win feels hard earned, every loss is a bitter defat. There are no god hand draws against Criminal, there are no automatic victories, instead you need to rely on 2 of the following 3:

• do not make any mistakes
• get a bit lucky
• succesfully bait your opponent into making a mistake

This is not an easy thing to achieve in 7 rounds of swiss, nor in a cut of the best 16 players from across Africa and Europe! It does, however, make for some good games of netrunner (like this one against world champion Pinsel).

In the end my record against Criminal was 1-5, beating Leela once, and losing once to Leela, twice to 419 and twice to Geist.

Other wins were against Hoshiko, Adam and Sunny.

Tips for playing argus

Be ruthless with our discards and our ICE rezzes. At some point in the mid game we are going to need to choose a line and stick to it. If we have a nice Data Raven remote set up maybe we discard Hard-Hitting News and go all in on a Prisec kill. If we have enough agendas in HQ to win, maybe we leave R&D open (and what will be will be).

Consider pumping into Data Raven traces. The runner being low on credits is normally better than us being high on credits.

A Hard-Hitting News is worth landing as long as the runner is on less than 12 credits (minus any infinite drip).

Take risks, and dare the runner to do the same. In the early game, they do not know what cards we are holding. We might lose an agenda, they might lose the game.

Card Choices

Take the canonical argus list from Euros 2019, and make adjustments for the worst matchups (419 and freedom)

-1 Archer, -1 Hortum, +2 Spiderweb as boomerang tech. In retrospect, a 2nd hortum (or a 3rd econ warfare) might have been better than the 2nd spiderweb.

-1 Fast Track, +1 Cyberdex Virus Suite, to allow us to rush behind border control (against aumakua)

-1 Economic Warfare, +1 High-Profile Target, because hunting grounds and citadel sanctuary mean that sticking a single tag might be the only way to land the kill, and because stargate and freedom will trash at least one HPT

-1 Too Big to Fail, +1 IPO, because bad pub is bad when we need to tax single accesses and turning wheel farms (which we do)