Netgrogger: Boston Regionals Report

Yesterday was the Boston Regionals at Pandemonium Games, conveniently my closest game shop. I went 5 and 7 during the Swiss rounds, which was ok. I would have loved to hit 50/50, but I did rank high enough to get the participation card and I also had some fun, which is the point.

Much respect to my friend Sam, who registered day-of and took 3 games with his core-only Noise deck. Sadly his stock Weyland (as in, literally shuffle the Weyland and neutral core cards together) wasn’t able to squeak out a win, though at least one was close. That would have truly been Achievement Unlocked.

My runner deck, a Yogasaurus “Kit” Peddler, only won one game.

I was up against three NBN (two The World Is Yours* and one Making News) and one of those was my win, but the others I think I didn’t put on enough HQ pressure and they fast-advanced to victory. I had intermittent R&D locks, but Fast Track laughs in their face and sometimes they’re just unlucky.

There were two Weyland, a Because We Built It and a GRNDL: Power Unleashed, both of whom did a fair bit of advanceable ice, the latter using it as Trick of Light batteries, which I realized too late and didn’t pay enough effort to kill it with Parasites and Data Sucker.

My last game of the day was an epic match against Personal Evolution. He succeeded in decking me (I took out the Levys that would have saved me late last week). I guess I was expecting more trapsy Jinteki (which is why I added Infiltration) but whittle-you-away Jinteki I wasn’t prepared to face, either with cards or with strategy. He was really fun to play against. The scrubs table got a little rowdy.

My next move as runner will be to switch to a deck that has to work with more breakers. I’ve been doing too much AI and Kit/Yogasaurus, so I get either very confident in making it through or completely scared away.

I need to remember against fast advance that agendas can tend to concentrate in-hand.

I also need to think of the times when I’ve built a 3-ice server as corp and don’t have enough money to keep the runner out, or the ice isn’t end-the-run, and think that maybe I should run on those giant servers myself.

On the corp side, I did relatively better, with 4 wins. I kept the two Gabes at bay, both with well-timed Closed Accounts plays (I’m so glad I dropped one of those in the deck last week) that gave me the window to get my Accelerated Beta Tests started.

I came up against a Chaos Theory / Overmind deck (not dissimilar to the one I abandoned two weeks ago), which was pretty easy to shut out given enough ice. He made a mistake that I’ve tried to keep myself from doing which is to spend an entire turn on his R&D lock. Yes, you can see things for a little while, but all the ice and operations you don’t get rid of will end up stopping the lock, and you won’t have developed your position at all in the meantime.

The other 3 games were against Mac, and Magnum Opus was the MVP. The one I did the worst against was a true big-rig player. She ended up with Personal Touches on a Torch, a Corroder, and a Garrote, with a Magnum Opus and a Toolbox for econ support. She had done an excellent job of trashing my econ assets, so I was poor and there was nowhere she couldn’t get in.

I think I made one clear mis-play against another when I had the opportunity to trash 2 programs and I opted for the Magnum Opus (duh), but then took out the loaded Datasucker rather than the Corroder. If the Datasucker ever gave me trouble I could have just purged virus counters anyway. Not that program trashing is the saddest thing to a Shaper.

A few times I over-advanced a Project Vitruvius (it makes a nice NAPD bluff, actually) and once I was able to pull some econ back from my archives which was nice. I may try to do that more in the future if I seem to have a double scoring window.

I’d like to tweak the deck to have a little less trace (against Mac with money it’s basically useless) and try to sneak in some more program destruction, probably by bringing back Archer and sticking in Aggressive Secretary. The Criminals I faced tended to run a bit poor and maybe could be Dracoed, but the Shapers were rolling in dough so there was little point.

Play-wise, I need to protect my econ assets a bit more to scare the runner off a little bit.

I also like to take the deck very slowly, drawing single cards and waiting for my agendas to trickle in while I add more ice to the board. This is very poor play against a Shaper who also wants that time to build up a giant suite of efficient breakers. I needed to draw more to get to my econ if it wasn’t coming up naturally, and maybe always try to keep one agenda in hand in case of scoring window.

Girl Who Decodes (45 cards)
Rielle "Kit" Peddler: Transhuman