Fast Food Chain: 2nd (5-2) Atomic Empire SC, Durham, NC

This will no doubt look familiar to those of you who know how to read the deck of the week, and to those of you who have been keeping track of store champs decklists. And the underlying reasoning is sound: in a world where runners have seemingly limitless credit pools, repeated ways to invalidate ICE, and instant-speed tag removal, one of the few ways the corp can still cheese the runner (while trashing their rig and bouncing them) is the psi game.

The runner can still set up an impenetrable board state if you let them go long, so don't. Rush. Put the runner into positions where they can't run but know that they have to.

This deck went 3-1 in the swiss and 2-1 in the cut. The loss in Swiss was a Smoke deck that set up quickly and then blindsided me with Rumor Mill (great include on his part), and the wins were sprints against DLR Sunny, Ken, and Dumblefork. The two wins in the cut were against Dumblefork in very close games, and the loss was in the second game of the grand final against Reg MaxX with Sifr, a game that came down to the runner having the exact right amount of resources plus Rumor Mill to invalidate the scoring remote after Levy, then sniping the lone TFP from HQ. I ended up taking 2nd in a 10-person SC, with this deck carrying my aggressively mediocre Sifr Kate Control.

Specific choices:

• Targeted Marketing: @maestro recommended this in his writeup, and I can heartily echo him. Rumor Mill typically results in a slam dunk steal if they hold it for an IA or IAA play, and there's little you can do about that, but if you shut it off the next turn, you're back in business. And TarMar is good in the normal ways too--naming Wyldside or Faust (or Pancakes if they have Wyldside down) early against Dumble served me well all day. Two TarMars means you can do both.
• Merlin: Two net damage is often the lowest-impact Grail subroutine, and 6 is a lot. If the tradeoff influence is a third Jackson, I'm fine playing only 2 Merlin.
• Cortex Lock: You want either 0 or 3. I'm leaning towards 0. This might be because I never saw it early all day (except one game where the runner inexplicably had zero interest in running HQ). Very low impact late game, though you can surprise a runner with a couple damage if they forget that Sifr gives +2. I might revisit this when Obokata Protocol comes out.
• Macrophage: My intended answer to Medium. It successfully ate one parasite on the day (by which I mean it got demolished by one, not that it removed it from the game). If I had more recursion, this would be Cyberdex Virus Suite; as it is, I'm not entirely convinced CVS isn't still better.
• Swordsman/Mother Goddess: If I'd correctly predicted the amount of Faust I saw, this would just be 2 Swordsman.
• Philotic Entanglement: I wanted to get cute and sneak out a win by never-advancing. It never happened. This should almost certainly just be a third Corporate Sales Team, because money helps you go a lot faster than 0 net damage does.

Shoutouts to Shane and Atomic Empire for running a smooth and professional event, as always.