Protagonist Retold – 1st at EC Nats

See my corp list here for more thoughts on the tournament

My testing groupmates (Chromatically, Icecreamcollege, ripnetrunner) suggested I post my Outfit-only and total jnet stats in lieu of write ups for my corp and runner decks respectively. I’ll still include a write-up but here you go as well (see Outfit stats in the corp writeup linked above).

It turns out that you can get pretty decent by averaging 10 jnet games a day.

Where did this list come from?

The rest of my testing group had done very extensive testing on the best bigshiko. I hadn’t. I picked this deck by scrolling through the testing group chat history and picking a deck that called to me. I liked that there were no Zer0 (not that it’s a bad card, I just never knew what to do with it), it was in the low 60s deck size, and I trusted the group.

It worked out fine :)

Interesting parts of the deck

Most of the deck is standard goodstuff Hoshiko. Here are the notable parts:

Legwork:

This deck is essentially a value anarch pile that we are trying to convert into stargate and maw lock. Sometimes we can’t get that set up quickly enough though and just need some accesses. That’s where legwork shines.

We believed that it would be good against Outfit and Ob (the two decks we were most concerned about) and it definitely was during the tournament. The legwork got me through the loser’s finals against Steven’s Asset Ob and was extremely effective in many other situations.

Aumakua:

Super helpful in the Ob matchup. Decent against Asa as well. Not great against Outfit.

Number of cards:

This was a number that we fiddled with a lot. The argument is that you need at least 55 cards for Bankhar. With 55+ cards, we would need 3 sets of breakers +stargate/maw to not lose to rush/FA but cutting down econ and draw would make the ratios suboptimal. The bigger deck size, of course, does mean a less consistent draw.

This deck list contains 63 cards but Steven and Chris (icecreamcollege) played 70 card decks which also seemed to work pretty well. You can see Steven's Ra7i0s deck here.

Other things we could have played

Miss Bones:

Seriously considered it the night before because I was concerned about the Ob matchup. Went with legwork because it’s more versatile. I think it was definitely the right choice and legwork got me the one Ob win I needed anyways.

Misdirection:

Misdirection did not seem like the real solution to hard-hitting news to us. It’s a card that needs to appear early enough and is useful in fairly specific circumstances. Given how big the deck is, we didn’t feel that we would get it consistently at times where it is important and it’s better to simply play around HHN.

Tournament Result

During swiss, this deck won 2 and lost 2 + 1 ID.

One of the losses was against seebass7 on Outfit. I partly played incorrectly and partly could not set up fast enough to prevent fast advancing. Other members of my testing group played 3 stargate as Outfit tech so perhaps that was part of the problem here.

The other loss was against Janktivist on Mad Boom Asa in round 2. I don’t know if I could have won but I definitely misplayed by not trying harder to trash an MCA Austerity Policy. As a testing group, we hadn’t really prepped for the Mad Asa decks and I felt very unprepared for that matchup.

Since 4 of the top 8 cut was playing Asa, the night of day 1 and the morning of day 2 was spent grinding games with Steven. By the time top cut started, I had not won a game yet but I had learned some good lines. I ended up only facing only one Asa that day: DeeR in the grand finals. I tried to keep my money high, maw important combo pieces and trash important assets as necessary. I was prepared to die at every turn but somehow I hung on to get my first Mad Asa win and a chance to win the tournament.