Little Buff Bioroids (4th Place at Startup Worlds)

This is the deck I threw together for Startup at Worlds, a format I haven't played since Worlds last year in Barcelona. Looking over the new legal sets, Mercury: Chrome Libertador seemed like maybe the most fully-formed runner (and carved up abs) package available, so I went with them. They're clearly goosed.

Props to Sindarin for naming this, and our Corp deck too.

I'd been playing a ton of Rielle “Kit” Peddler: Transhuman leading up to Worlds, thinking I'd play her for Standard, but panicked off after two unfortunate Ob Superheavy Logistics: Extract. Export. Excel. games in Crown of Servers, getting Lobisomem blown up too many times by the The Holo Man & SDS Drone Deployment combo. After COS, Snare Bears and House Hippos teammate Whiteblade111 said to me, "Dave, your deck sucks," and that was that, panic-Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist it was for Standard.

In that Kit deck, with which I had well over 100 practice games, I was running Hermes, “Pretty” Mary da Silva, Trick Shot, Jailbreak, a The Maker’s Eye, and Psych Mike, and found the R&D crush to be pretty good, while unravelling the corp's board with Hermes on the digs. I shovelled that concept into Mercury here, and it was a fine result.

The deck went 3-1 on the day, with one loss to the tournament winner, Stephen l's Jinteki: Personal Evolution, which matchup I totally misplayed from turn one, opting for a careful, install-all-of-my-breakers-from-hand (had two of them in my opening) before-getting-aggressive-with-runs gameplan, and paid for it with a Fujii Asset Retrieval/Neurospike death, not forcing rezzes early enough and crushing the corp's economy.

Wins were against Epiphany Analytica: Nations Undivided, Nuvem SA: Law of the Land, and Jinteki: Personal Evolution, which I learned from my previous too-cautious error and went totally aggro against, running more recklessly, and eventually winning on a big R&D access, which if the Fuji and the after-the-game revealed Snare! were in reverse order, I would have died. I guess luck goes both ways.

This deck wants to play aggressively and just dig for multi-access from turn one, bouncing ICE back with Hermes and closing out with Eru Ayase-Pessoa if needed, which it did in one super grindy game against a glacier Nuvem SA: Law of the Land in round 4. Between Eru and Sneakdoor Beta, you can treat Archives as a door that goes both ways (I was here yesterday), and cheat your way in for some good HQ and R&D pressure.

Always Be Running event page for Startup

This deck was fun to play, and though I basically never play Startup, I had a great time of it all day with lovely opponents.

Huge thanks to NSG and the volunteers for making Worlds 2024 such an amazing event!