Reversal of Fortunes (27th at Worlds)

This deck went 6-2 (with a timed loss) at the 2017 world championships, facing 3 MaxX, 2 Valencia, Geist, Hayley, and Sunny; the Geist match was recorded on stream. @sirris also took a similar version (without Mumbad Virtual Tour) all the way to the top 16. My runner deck was aggro Chaos Theory.

@Zeromus and I always knew that CI would be well represented this year, mostly because the increased hand size gives them easy access to good economy in the form of UVC and VLC. But when we tested Ashigaru glacier, Ashigaru proved to be too hard to rez when you still needed to keep credits to maintain a large hand size... until a game where Bryan Stinson was able to go off. So our post-game conversation went something like this:

• Me: "Man, Stinson is totally ridiculous. If he ever fires you just straight-up win the game!"
• Zeromus: "Hmm, is there a way to force the runner under 6 credits?"
• Me: "Well, there's still Reversed Accounts..."
• Zeromus: "Huh. How much influence is that?"
• Me: "One!"
• Zeromus: "Okay, so what if we go up to 2 Stinson and also play 2 Reversed Accounts? Popping MCA Austerity lets you click Reversed a bunch of times..."

It wasn't until the next day, when I was throwing a prototype version together, that I noticed the lovely synergy between Stinson and Virtual Tour. The only catch was fitting 2 more assets into the deck, and Jeeves turned out to be very valuable in his own right.

I'm very proud of this build, and if Worlds were tomorrow I think I'd play the exact same list. The deck is fast, flexible, and quite tricky to play against. It's not very vulnerable to runner hate cards because it is perfectly capable of playing a fair game, while also having the potential of doing seriously unfair things with Stinson and Ashigaru. However, there is no easy roadmap to victory. The general formula is to tax the runner enough to land a good Stinson hit, lock up the centrals, score an Elective Upgrade, and fast advance the win - but every game is a new puzzle on how to actually get there.

Enjoy!