HB: Tricking Out the Future (5th Place Louisville Regionals)

This is my variant on HB Fast Advance that I played at the Louisville event. This deck focuses on maximizing credit differential with the runner, both by playing expensive and taxing ICE and by utilizing HB:ETFs power to it's advantage.

The key choice that makes this deck slightly different is to use Trick of Light as the other fast advance mechanism to complement Biotic Labor. Trick of Light really shines here (pun intended) as the turn you score an agenda you spend a net of only 1 credit (Gain 1 installing, spend 1 advancing, spend 1 to ToL). This really mitigates any tempo loss that scoring an agenda would normally give you (compare to the 6 credits you have to spend to Biotic something out or the 7 to use a SanSan City Grid).

Gila Hands Arcology is one of the keys of pressing this economic edge. once you have one scored you never bottom out of credits and being able to take 3 for 2 clicks is just incredibly good in this deck. Scoring a Gila as the first agenda raises your win rate significantly. I am definitely going to test cutting something to add a third one of these in given how good they are for the deck. The opponent also doesn't really gain much for stealing a second one, so as long as I can get one I'm okay with seeing the rest go.

Remotes in this deck are only used as extraneous features for Eve Campaigns (another great card for swinging credit advantage) or Jackson Howard. They also make a great home for Ice Walls at a 1c profit with the ETF ability. This enables you to only defend your two critical centrals, with some backup for archives as needed against Gabe or Noise (or the increasingly popular Sec Testing Andy Datasucker deck).

I decided to drop my third Jackson Howard for Closed Accounts to protect the otherwise toothless purple deck from TagMe runners. I also decided to use my other one off slot for Archived Memories. I tested using Reclamation Order instead, and while it was more powerful I value the flexibility of my clicks more than the ability to recur often unneeded extra Biotics.

This deck went 4-2 in Swiss and 2-0 in elimination. In swiss my losses were to Kate bigrig, due to very unlucky accesses in my estimation (my opponent went from 4-7 in one 2 card R&D access while I was on 6 AP) and to a Noise SMC + Clone Chip deck due to my own mishandling of his Stimhack during his last chance to win in a glory run on R&D. My wins in swiss were against a Kate deck similar to my other list from this tourney (my friend and I played nearly identical decks), CT rush, Gabe Knight, and a Noise deck. In elimination I defeated a very unorthodox CT deck running Crescentus, Sneakdoor, Nerve Agent and Djinn and another Noise player playing the more traditional DLR mill deck which I was able to control and keep broke once he was tagged thanks to Closed Accounts and the economic edge to just turn on ICE left and right. I really broke him when he took his last 4 Armitage dollars off his codebusting and then Sure Gambled to end on 13 creds and I immediately closed his accounts. Overall I was very happy with the way this deck performed.