smokegate 2.0 (1st @ Sheffield Regional)

Built to beat the various flavours of Gagarin that are knocking around: Beth, Misdirection, PolOp, and Net Mercur all make removing tags and trashing Judges easier - so far so Shaper - but the pressure of Stargate and Switchblade means you can generally take one key piece off the top of R&D each turn, and that does plenty.

Stargate isn't the best multi-access in the glacier match-up but it does good work if your opponent over-commits on the remote, and either way you've got Smoke's hyper-efficient breakers working nicely.

4-1 on the day, beating Gagarin once and Aki's Blue Sun three times. Only loss came to PE: they got a fast start and I didn't, and a 40 card deck that likes to run isn't particularly well placed against a million Kakugos and two million Houses of Knives.

There is one spot of influence, which can be anything you want if you can find a cut. I couldn't, and if I had, then I'd have taken a second Critic. Back-breaking against glaciers with a Punitive plan.

Thanks to everybody at Sheffield for a wonderful day; to paulyg for hosting an excellent tournament; and to the UK Netrunner scene generally for being such a lovely group of people to hang around with. Truly, you are all the second greatest prize in gaming.

(The first is the skull goblet that I have in my house now. Obviously.)