Sealed Shut (6th @Euroafrican continentals) 3-3

This is the Acme list that I brought to Euroafrican continentals, my buddy rustryder brought a variation of it.

After Asian continentals it was clear that a corp needs to be able to deal with apoc Maxx. Previously I wanted to bring PD to euroafricas, but against this archetype it felt awkward, and playing against 419 felt shaky too. Even after adding crisium grids I wasnt quite satisfied. I had less than one week to make a good corp deck, It was time to get to work.

I thought crisium grid was the natural hate card to go to, in the meta it hits apoc, DOF, conduit, as well as various other things like the odd counter surveillance. It is almost never dead. Thats how Acme came to mind as an ID, crisium gets better the crazier your ice is, and acme has by far the craziest ice. Matuszczak and Odol had previously shown that the ID should be taken seriously and I decided to finally give it a spin but with my own twist. After 20 games in jnet casual I was convinced there was serious potential for the deck and decided to take the deck off the grid and into intense targeted testing with Sokka to see how all the important matchups go.

The gameplan is the same as in most old Acme lists: Create an unassailable void remote after collecting enough cash and score out. All the while making sure centrals are not too vulnerable of course, crisium helps with this, and makes it less likely that we have to dedicate an anoetic to a central.

Now for the includes!

Agendas:

I felt it would make more sense in a meta with so much virus stuff around to go with an agenda suite that includes sandbox. I had seen Sokka trying it in his Acme and it makes a lot of sense to me. If nothing else it gives the ability to purge for 4 creds while you are recurring your subliminal and sitting on a daily quest :D

I wanted to spend as few slots as possible on agendas so I went with 4 3-pointers and 4 2-pointers.

• Bellona is a no brainer of course with paying for itself on score and being hard to steal.

• Send a message is not ideal but can be great if you manage to score it. The best available option. I did not want to include a gfi which gives no tempo on score.

• Tomorrows headline, cause it is always a bit of a tax, lets you threaten never advance on 5 points, and can snipe a wheel or other important resources.

Ice:

Most of the ice is no brainer Acme ice that just becomes insane with the ID ability. Just be careful with positioning, when building a remote you often want to start with something other than data ward to then later finish the remote off with the ward. Notably because Acme makes our ice so strong we can include fewer pieces of ice in our deck and still have taxing servers, our remote often doesnt need to be more than two ice deep.

• Only 2 FTP since it is not very useful vs apoc, or early game in general.
• Enigma to get a little more cheap etr ice in the deck. This helps protect daily quests and rashidas while you are gathering the cash to rez your monster ice. Early in the game you might only have the cash to rez one big ice and one small one. Notably it is a spiky ice, so it is harder to farm wheel counters from it.
• Tollbooth because there are no code gates that become insane with Acme. Hower tollbooth is pretty insane on its own, 9 for an orchestra to break and 7 for amina. Engolo is 6 creds but shaper is not big atm. Only playing two copies though because it is not great vs botulus and 8 expensive ice in the deck is enough.

Operations:

It was hard to decide on the exact slots here. The list feels super tight and cutting cards is painful. I kind of wanted to get a market forces in particular to stop apoch anarchs from collecting tags. DRM was another consideration, but never felt needed enough.

• Preemptive action was chosen over market forces. I decided that the ability to recurr anoetics or getting back crisums and good ice post apoc was more important.
• Attitude adjustment to deal with flooding, but also to shuffle back an agenda that got apoced, stargated, imped or anoeticed.
• Not running spin doctor. Mainly because I did not want my recursion to be trashable with an already squishy deck, but also because it shuffles back fewer cards than preemptive. Yes spin doctor can give draw, but you might be forced to lose your recursion early then and we are not playing a tempo deck.
• 2 Sublimnal messaging! This card is soo good in this deck, once you have spiky centrals it is easy to recurr. It gives money but can also serve to pad HQ to make agendas safer. But above all, this card feeds anoetic so you can trash fewer real cards to it. We are running two to see it early, but also for the reasons listed above. Getting two cards to pitch to anoetic is even better than getting one.
• Hansei review just to add a fourth hedge fund to the deck to make it easier to rez a big ice early. Often you will have a subliminal for this card to trash.
• Predictive planogram because it is a flexible card that both help us find our wincons and money for our big ice, but at the same time serves as tag punishment.

Assets:

• Rashida because gud
• Daily quest because this deck is ok with playing patiently collecting cash and strengthening servers. Our gameplan is for our servers to be so taxing that the runner just runs out of options.
• NGO front to drag those poor runners through our ridiculously taxing ice, and to get money of course.

Upgrades:

• 3 Anoetic because this is our main wincon. Having multiple is good for several reasons.

1. One anoetic on two different servers is sometimes a good idea even if you have to trash one later to rez the other.
2. They easiliy get trashed from centrals. Another good reason to have preemptive in the deck.
3. Having multiple in the remote gets around polop, after they pop one you just rez the other.

• 2 Crisium, because three is probably too many :D

• Cyberdex virus suite because it hits a lot of cards in the meta and can give sandbox money.

The deck did well at first in the tournament winning the first three games handily vs two 419 and a freedom. Although getting very lucky against a legwork in one game after greedily deciding to let daily quest tick for one more turn.

After that it went downhill unfortunately. I lost one game vs mjps apoc Maxx in the swiss and once more in the cut. And then went on to lose vs lostgeek on hivemind Maxx.

In testing it seemed the deck has a slight advantage vs 419 and apoc Maxx. It has a bit of a harder time against hivemind Maxx. where you really need to get a sandbox scored asap to have a decent chance. Once they are able to tranquilize your ice, things get difficult. You need to be ready for that when it comes with a lot of money and a counterthreat of scoring out behind an anoetic. With more time to test and refine perhaps room could be made for a macrophage to remedy that situation somewhat, but it remains to be seen if that makes a difference.

I believe I made a 1-2 crucial mistakes in both games against MJPs Maxx that may have cost me those games, so I still think it is not a bad idea to bring this deck as a response to apoc Maxx. However I will say that the botulus in his list made it a bit tricker to play against than my more pure version of apoc Maxx, because it helps make Hydra a lot cheaper to get through. Careful play is needed to purge at the right time to not let the apoc be a cheap one. Regardless credit to MJP for stellar piloting!

I´m happy with how the list turned out and I think it should be an option to consider going forward, especially if Hivemind Maxx is not expected. Not bad for five days of brewing and testing :D

Big thanks to GilesDavis and Rustryder from my team Unband for the support and testing for the tournament! And a special thanks to Sokka and The king for countless hours of invaluable playtesting and discussing.

And as always, thanks Nisei for organizing the tournament and keeping netrunner alive, this game truly is beautiful!

10/10 would tech against my own deck again!

Edit: Changes that I might test and see how they feel are -1 Subliminal (Though this would be a bit painful) -1 F2P +1 Macrophage +1 Market forces