Sol Flare (1st Place @ Chaos, Games and More)

CrimsonWraith 3638

I know, I know, I'm a sell out. After playing Cerebral Imaging (with Scorched Earth) and GRNDL (no Scorch) in two tournaments last weekend and my wife taking all the Future Perfects for her Jinteki deck, I decided to sleeve up NBN for today's tournament. AstroBiotics is a bit boring, I haven't had any luck with Never Advance (outside of Tennin) lately, and my Making News Scorch deck doesn't bring anything particularly new to the table, so I decided to try my hand at Scorched Earth in Near Earth Hub. It worked, I went undefeated with this deck, 7-1 on the day, and won the tournament.

I got an early Midseason off in all four games, typically courtesy of throwing an NAPD Contract or Breaking News out as bait. Played three Noise decks, each were entirely reliant on resources (Wyldside/Aesop's) and utterly crippled by being stuck with at least a half-dozen tags. I won via flatline in all four games, though I was in position to score out as well in most of them.

10 comments
31 Aug 2014 Argamas

Welcome to the dark side Crimson! ;)

Did you consider switching BN for TGTB? Or is BN too good to pass on?

31 Aug 2014 CrimsonWraith

I thought about it, still not sure if it'd be better or not. I wanted to straddle the line between scoring out and flatlining my opponents - I originally felt that TGTBT would push me too far towards flatlining being my primary win condition and wanted to keep the ability of Fast Tracking a Breaking News and scoring out of hand (via Astro or SanSan) for that 7th agenda point.

As it turns out, I believe TGTBT would have been much more useful yesterday. I never scored out, so I never needed Breaking News' 1 agenda point. I did throw Breaking News out naked in a remote on two occasions, setting up to advance twice, score, and trash one of the Runners' resources on the next turn - but every Runner took the bait and got Midseason'd instead. The BN would have been more useful if they had not run it, the TGTBT would have been more useful seeing that they did. It's a toss up, I don't think you can go wrong with either option.

One of the benefits to this deck is that, with the exception of just a few cards, it looks and plays just like AstroBiotics out of the gate. This promotes aggressive play from the Runner and makes Snare and TGTBT very dangerous for them trying to deal with AstroBiotics via multi-access on R&D.

31 Aug 2014 Argamas

Did you miss closed account? And do you have an AAR from an OCTGN Test? ;)

31 Aug 2014 CrimsonWraith

That was one of my last cuts. I brought this over from my Making News Scorch deck and swapped Closed Accounts for Marked Accounts. I didn't miss it a bit yesterday, as Scorched Earth proved to be enough tag punishment by itself. =) I do have some recorded games with the deck, but I have 12 videos or some from the OCTGN 3 tournament I've still got to add commentary for and publish. =D

1 Sep 2014 GreatGreedyGuts

This looks like a lot of fun. Curious how it compares to MN Scorch, but this seems so fun.

Why Marked over PAD Campaign? The initial savings of money in comparison to clicks? I find PAD much nicer to have because of the click-savings, buuut if getting up from 0 is the problem I can see Marked being nicer.

1 Sep 2014 CrimsonWraith

My first impression is that MN Scorch is more consistent and reliable. Draco is an incredible piece of ice in that deck and felt worthless in NEH. Some of the bite for your Midseason is missing as well without the recurring trace credits. Still, the extra card draw with NEH is helpful, and you obviously have the extra influence for new tricks like Snare. I enjoy playing both decks, and I'm not quite ready to declare one absolutely better than the other - but I'm leaning towards MN Scorch at the moment.

Maybe it's a local meta thing, but Whizzard is dominant here, and even non-Whizzard players are going hard after asset economy right now. Marked Accounts have thus far served to slow down the Runner's economy as much as they have to sustain mine - and if the Runner is hell-bent on trashing everything, the credit swing is much more in my favor with Marked Accounts than PAD Campaign.

1 Sep 2014 GreatGreedyGuts

Fair on both points. As a Whizzard player myself, I can't say I don't prefer trashing PADs for 1 over MA for 2. It's a shame cards are so tight with the Midseasons/Scorched plan, since it prevents you from having more Jacksons or Marked + PAD, but I can't see anything I'd feel comfortable yanking out. The two Snares are a very nice inclusion.

4 Sep 2014 NisheFr

only 13 ices ?

5 Sep 2014 CrimsonWraith

That's really all you need. You only have to protect the central servers and a single remote, and its okay if you have a porous server here or there because if the Runner steals an agenda and you have the right cards in hand, they die.

10 Sep 2014 aphid

I played this deck in a tournament this weekend, came second place. Worked out really great, scorching everyone. My only loss with the deck was in the second game of the finals (me coming from WB and having lost vs Institute of Tennis), where I played noise (having previously flatlined the same noise twice). He sniped all my economy cards with mills, disabling midseasons (because he drew cache mainly), and then locking me out with medium. I really think this and CI is the best place for scorched earth.