Apex Predator - 7th @ Torino CO 2022

While preparing for the tournament, I had some ideas on how I wanted to approach it. I didn't want to bring "the best decks" because I didn't care about the placement. I have way more fun building my own half-jank decks. Tournaments are often a place where I bring incomplete ideas and I'm usually guaranteed playing against refined decks and against players who try their hardest, so it becomes very clear if something can truly work or not. I also wanted to play a bunch of new cards and didn't want to bring the same decks as my testing friends @ALFlex and @wowarlok. This is what I came up with, and here's my corp.

Aight hear me out. I know we're in jank territory here, I don't think the deck is amazing or that it will win tournaments or anything. What I care about is exploring the new cards and hopefully finding new ways of playing the game. Runners have been a little repetitive lately, so this is trying to play with different patterns altogether. When I saw Avgustina spoiled I thought it was kinda bad. Then I remembered thinking the same about Cookbook when it came out, but we all know that card was pretty good where it was good. I also found out thanks to @b4ralai that full mill decks could actually work too, using weird ass deckbuilding choices (pretty hot if you ask me) that made up his NotRunner list. I took some of those concepts and went a slightly different way, as I believe you absolutely need to put some pressure running if you want a chance of not straight up losing to Drago and the likes.

Reaver looks a little bit like a meme, but it's fun and it works fairly well. You have many trash effects in the deck, you're starved for draw and you can find it reasonably easily thanks to Gachapon, a pretty good card with Avgustina anyway. It may not be the card you keep through all iterations of the deck, but it's a good place to start. Pawnshop is there just in case, but it just didn't do enough. It should probably be a 3rd Simulchip or even DJ + something. I kinda missed having no recursion in one game, but I expected most of them to be very fast and I was right about that. I didn't look at all the viruses, but now I'd surely include at least 1 eXer. It may not be the flashiest card, but it gives easy accesses + mill and even draws you cards when the corp purges lol. I had a Conduit in here at some point, but I wanted more tempo.

The deck did well for how weird it is, going 2-1-2. I won against Asa and Sports with fine Noise-level mills, split against Trap PE on time, lost against Outfit and Pravdivost. I'm a little sad about the Prav loss as I think I was in control of the game, but he read me very well. Huge thanks to @ALFlex and @wowarlok for the testing games, @Berzelius for the organization and all the others for showing up and making the day (and dinners) amazing, as always.