[Start Up] Seb Would Like to Have Some Diamonds

I ran this deck at the Netbrummers Startup Tournam3nt and had a fairly tricky time with it. Overall, I went 3-3: winning all of my corp games and none of my runner games.

I think Seb has a really high ceiling of potential, but, at least in my experience, the floor seems high too. I’m really at home with a lot of different kinds of Anarch decks and that’s perhaps what makes the ideal play patterns a bit foreign to me. I was describing a turn I’d had to two friends at the event and they both said in unison “thaaaaatttts Shaper!” So many of your cards provide such distinct lines – particularly Privileged Access, where you’re making potentially 3 distinct card choices that can cascade in really exciting ways that chain together more tag dancing and (when you get it right) buckets of tempo and value. Buckets and buckets and buckets. But value and tempo don’t win games, getting hold of agendas does.

Mimic was a bit of a rogue choice, but looking at the Start Up pool of Sentries, I still stand by it as a sensible choice – if you don’t want to spend influence. We have lots of ways of reducing ice strength so it’s mostly fine. I say mostly fine because I also ran into a Cloud Eater after a fairly recent purge (well done and thank you for that Fern :/), which was a key moment that cost me the game. Still, I don’t think I’d have wanted to have Boi-tatá instead as I probably wouldn’t bankrupted myself to defeat anyway.

I originally had 3 Creative Commissions and pivoted to 1 Creative and 2 Diesel, which I think was correct – 3 Diesel might even be the right number.

Main conclusion from the tournament: Oh my, corps are gonna kill ya in Start Up. It seemed like everyone’s corp wins were flatlines (mine certainly were). I had a jokey first draft of this deck that packed 2 (that’s right, 2!) T400 Memory Diamonds as tech against Punitive and Neurospikes – I honestly wish I’d brought it. Without the tools that Standard has, staying alive in Start Up is preeeeety tricky right now.