Passionate Murderman (1st @ Copenhagen Startup CO)

This deck is revisiting the play style of the Murderman deck I played last year in the same spring Startup CO in Copenhagen and as a standard version in Danish nationals. This year the deck is wearing red, which is the colour of passion, and it passionately follows the same game plan as its predecessor, trying to proactively (and sometimes passionately) murder the runner while they are busy setting up their rig.

The general strategy is to ICE up a remote, install a couple of cards in the root and then triple-advance a card. That puts on pressure that can quickly end the game in different ways:

1) If the opponent doesn't run it, the next turn they can die to advance-->advance-->score Fujii-->Neurospike. Malapert helps find the combo.

2) If the opponent doesn't run it, the next turn they can die to advance-->score See How They Run-->Neurospike-->Neurospike. Malapert helps find the combo.

3) If the opponent runs it, it could be a murderous Urtica Cipher, perhaps sitting on Angelique Garza Correa.

4) If the opponent runs it and manages to steal the agenda, they usually have to take quite a lot of damage from a combination of ICE, House of Knives stabs, Fujii ability, Personal Evolution ability, Angelique and pseudo-damage from Daniela. If the runner survives this, they likely had to end the turn with low hand size or take tags from Phoneutria or Cloud Eater on the way, and this can lead to a murder on the following turn from Angelique expendable ability or Mindscaping net damage.

Snare! is MVP at protecting centrals and can make the proactive kill from the remote easier. Phoneutria combines well with it to protect centrals and creates an interesting choice for the runner: Take a tag and keep more cards in hand or go down to 3 cards in hand to avoid a tag. In both cases hitting a Snare after that turns on the Mindscaping or Angelique murder threat. They usually can't do both clearing the tags and drawing more cards after the Phoneutria-Snare combo.

This deck went 2-1 during the 2024 Startup CO in Copenhagen, Denmark in single-sided swiss, murdering two runners and failing to find Mindscaping in the third one while the tag murder threat was on for a couple of turns. Together with my Prepaid Addict runner deck, it carried me to 1st place. Shoutouts to @Xtreme for running another fun tournament, to @kagolskab for playtesting help, and to all the players during the day for good games.

Thanks for reading and Always Be Running!