Meteor Storm! (Winner, GNK Card Kingdom Seattle, 09/28/2014)

Card draw simulator
Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Repartition by Cost
Repartition by Strength
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
Hub of Scorch (2nd Place, Guardian Games ST 10/18/14)
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talking_chicken 429

This deck took 1st place in a GNK tournament on September 28, 2014, and I've already made the lists public, so I might as well publish them here, too. There were 24 entrants with 5 rounds of Swiss and no cut. It went 4/5 on the day, where its only loss was to a Noise, and I made a mistake on turn 1 by intending to play a hedge fund and pulling out scorch by accident. :P

This deck is an extension of some 3-popup decks that I've made in the past and have had surprising results, including a 5th place at a Plugged In tournament. NEH makes this deck a lot better by emphasizing its strengths (now you draw lots of cards while making all of these remotes), shoring up some weaknesses (extra influence to spend on snares to help with huge central assaults), and just making room for a few more useful cards. I've broken from the balls to the wall 3 popup tradition and added a bit more ice; just enough to make it taxing for the runner while not putting too much of a dent in NBN's coffers.

The plan is still the same. Overwhelm the runner with remotes. If they go for the remotes midseason them when they steal an agenda. If they don't get the train rolling. You also have the advantage of initially looking like the dominant archetype in the current meta, and runners might get a little bit too aggressive and get burned as a result.

The deck can be surprisingly versatile; out of the four wins I had, one was a 7-point psychobeale, one was an astrotrain into breaking news, one was a triple scorch through plascrete, and one was a poor guy who hit a snare with two cards.

The deck's biggest weaknesses are probably anarch in general (Noise, Whizzard to a lesser degree, Imp, Keyhole), and potentially repeated siphon spam, but it's not a losing battle; you just have to get a bit luckier in those matchups. There's a lot of targets anarchs have to trash to completely ruin you; if they hit a scorch, you can still fast advance, and if they get agendas, they might not have enough money to deal with the punishment that might follow.

11 comments
14 Oct 2014 Diegofsv

This is insanity! Great deck.

14 Oct 2014 jawZ

Fancy idea. I really like it!

14 Oct 2014 Flux

I made a fun NEH deck that had Psychic Fields, Snares, and Midseason/Scorch. It flatlined the runner about 80 percent of the time, just because they weren't expecting it. It was pretty hard to win a second time with it, though.

14 Oct 2014 talking_chicken

I agree that this deck does best if the opponent doesn't know what's going on, though it's held up to repeated plays in our league fairly well. You still have an astrotrain threat outside of the flatline threat, and the runner can have a difficult time keeping up with both even if they know what to expect.

15 Oct 2014 Dydra

Original Idea. I'd love to play someone who uses this deck. However, I feel that the Anarh Siphon recursion decks ( I'm currently running a Quetzal version of it) will ruin you hard.

Also if you hit a 0 Ice opener against Indexing decks, would be pretty devastating too.

In my humble opinion, you should definitely get in reclamation order in, so pick up your scorches when you burn through the Plascrete Carapace directly in your hand rather than counting to jackson them back and draw them again.

15 Oct 2014 talking_chicken

I played against a Quetzal siphon recursion deck during the tournament (he ended up getting 3rd place) and won, though the game was close. I made some mistakes during the game, too; I had a data raven in front of HQ and kept forgetting that I can put my money into the trace instead. Closed Accounts and Psychographics hurt their game if they keep the tags, and dropping the tags might be too slow. They can't siphon forever; eventually I was able to stabilize thanks to some asset economy.

I think I'd rather have the snares over reclamation order for now; it's nice to have some built in HQ and R&D protection if they think multi-access will be easy. Since there's so little ice, I'd almost rather have alternate ways of keeping the runner busy. If they get a plascrete down I'll be looking for the third scorch, but I'll probably start shifting my gears more towards the astro/psycho plan instead. I'll have to try it out, though.

I'm hoping that with 6 pieces of taxing ice and 3 Jackson, I have enough protection from a turn 1 indexing if I suspect it. If for some reason none of those show up, then I might have drawn into a midseason and some econ instead to punish the hit when it happens.

I also picked up Up and Over from my FLGS today and I'm thinking Reversed Accounts would probably be good in this, too.

15 Oct 2014 skydivingninja

I really liked playing the old TWIY* decks with 3 Scorched/Midseasons that could also win with a fast advance plan, this looks like a bigger version of that. I like it!

15 Oct 2014 temporar

Do you feel you added the right ICE to the mix? What are the potential alternatives?

15 Oct 2014 talking_chicken

The only ice I'd think about changing are the data ravens. The popups are essential IMO and you can't do much better for 1 influence than Eli. I'm looking for ice that'll produce at least a 2 credit swing even when the runner has the right breaker out (unless they decide to Yog the popup, and even then at least I still get money). Information Overload seems like it could be neat, but the rez cost is a bit too high for this deck. I think the best in faction or no influence choices would probably be Bastion or Mother Goddess, and maybe Rainbow. Data Raven's pretty taxing on its own, though, unless they Femme it, and it's decent siphon protection on HQ.

16 Oct 2014 ossa

What's the strategy behind playing six 1-pointers? Score Breaking News out of hand and the let them drown in tags from TGTBT?

I played a nine ice NEH with Dedicated Response Team in Portland last weekend for the lulz. It went 3-1 (sometimes Noise is just gonna Noise). This style of deck is super fun to play and it's even better when people don't see it coming. Congrats on the win!

16 Oct 2014 talking_chicken

The biggest reason behind the six one pointers is to give more midseason opportunities. Smaller agendas overall means that there'll be more turns where you have the chance to drown them with tags. The 3 TGTBT also does double duty by helping tax the runner a bit when they run into it; if they're not going tagme (voluntarily or otherwise), there's an additional cost of a click and two credits when they steal it.

Breaking News is also great because of the trick plays you can do with it, like being able to combine it with astro/sansan and scorch/closed accounts them even when they're not tagged.