Results

R1: Win vs Pravdivost Consulting: Political Solutions

R2: Win vs Weyland Consortium: Building a Better World

R3: Win vs Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design

R4: (timed) Win vs NBN: Reality Plus

Tournament Afterthoughts

To quote @Tolaasin, turns out that Ice Destruction is good (who knew).

Premise

Rumour has it that there is a ChiselCharm Boatshiko list doing the rounds in Standard. In theorycrafting what such a list might look like, I realised that the core of the deck was all Startup legal, so I played a few games, tweaked a few slots (T400 MVP), and decided to take it to our Startup GNK.

Matchups

One of the joys in Startup is that you can never be sure quite what the Corp is up to. But, usually, whatever the Corp is trying to do, destroying all their ICE stops them from doing it.

Piloting

Use Endurance to run servers and get ICE rezzed, and then use Chisel or Botulus to make that ICE irrelevant. We can use Botulus on an unrezzed ICE to challenge an early agenda push, but we can probably only get away with this once. As a rule, we should only be installing on rezzed ICE. We want the Corp to be paying the rez cost of ICE before we invalidate it, and we don't want the ICE that we target to turn out to be a Magnet (because that would be embarassing).

Don't be afraid to use Devil Charm to bring ICE into range of Mimic or Buzzsaw (especially if we suspect that we might be Ganked!).

Chisel doesn't need Devil Charm to be effective. We can use it to destroy Gold Farmer without Devil Charm, or we can just use it to bring Ansel 1.0 down into Mimic range.

Think carefully not only about which server we want to attack this turn, but which server we might need to attack next turn. The fun thing about Botulus and Chisel is that they reward us for correctly anticipating what the Corp is about to do, and they give the Corp the opportunity to punish us when we get it wrong.

Card Choices

T400 Memory Diamond

The problem with Botulus, Chisel and Devil Charm is that they clog up our hand while we wait for the Corp to make a play. The problem with Fermenter, Buzzsaw, Cleaver and Mimic, is that, until we find Endurance, they eat up all of our memory. A single T400 Memory Diamond fixes both of these problems, and smooths everything out.

Gachapon

It's fine.

We fire it at the end of the runner turn (to get the extra Botulus / Fermenter counter). Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not. In both cases we can thin our deck (which improves subsequent draws).

Stargate

It's easy to think of this as our win condition, but, honestly, it's only really needed in the Jinteki: Personal Evolution matchup. I think I used it as a closer once on the day.

Alternatives

No Free Lunch

We could play this instead of Career Fair. I don't think that it matters either way.

Notable Exclusions

Ice Carver

We could play this instead of the 2nd Cookbook, but I think being able to reliably find Cookbook is just better.