CHAT are we cooked? (24th @ London Regionals)

CHAT - Conduit Hermes Aeneas Tao

(and "are we cooked?" because I didn't do very well with it lol)

The ultimate game plan is to ruin the Corp's ice with Hermes+Tao and then hammer R&D with Conduit+Aeneas for credits and points.

The deck is just Larrea's list from NYShowdown with -1 DJ Fenris, +1 Pinhole Threading, +3 Stoneship. Go read that writeup for more on the card choices.

The Stoneships were in anticipation of seeing more kill decks, and they certainly felt like they smoothed things versus PE on the day; Pinhole is really our only early pressure tool to deal with key assets/upgrades while we're not fully set up. I didn't cut back down to 43 cards because (a) I couldn't decide what to cut, and (b) Stoneship is essentially just a deck-thinner against non-kill corps, so the slowdown from adding the extra three cards shouldn't be too big. (This might just be cope, though. If you don't anticipate much kill, you can probably just cut them again.)

Game 1 - Loss vs Ob

I didn't feel able to keep up with the click + credit demands of trashing all of Ob's Svygator Excavators while still finding time to get my breakers down to crack the remote. I Pinholed a Holo Man, but this only delayed scoring by one turn - Azef then hit two breakers out of hand, and I overextended breaking into a three-upgrade remote. I did get massive Aeneas value and trashed all three upgrades, but couldn't then stop an SDS score (trashing my fracter for the second time) followed by a Slash and Burn fast-advance for the win.

Game 2 - Loss vs PE

Managed to get the Conduit engine running in this game, but ended up losing on time. I misplayed my final Conduit run - I'd forgotten to account for the extra House of Knives damage on top of the Anemone/Data Loop tax, and accessed 4 cards deep with two cards in hand while my opponent had a Sting! scored and Snare! money.

Game 3 - Win vs PE

Got a Hermes down early, and managed to get a lot of Conduit value - R&D was only defended by a single Anemone, so I ended up bouncing the same Hostile Infrastructure back to hand four separate times rather than getting rid of the ice. R&D did eventually cough up the points, but I had to get Conduit to eight counters to get there.

Game 4 - Draw vs BtL

This game went to time with a single point each - my opponent had scored an Eminent and two Standoffs, and I'd sniped a single Eminent from the remote. Hermes functioned very well as a tool to throw off the corp here, as they had to manage having a click left after scoring. Pinhole was also key to trash an Oberth. I ended up drawing through the entire deck, and on my final turn, when time was called, I managed to just barely break into the remote to trash a second Oberth Protocol thanks to a cheeky Euler flicker and three extra clicks from Hannah.

Overall

I feel like this deck ran into a few issues:

• Lack of early pressure. Echelon is awful as a first breaker, and the other two breakers aren't particularly cheap early on. Having no alternative ice solutions for the early game (e.g. Propeller/Revolver/Botulus/Physarum) meant that I found it very hard to contest anything before I was properly set up. This is probably a piloting issue, though; I might well just need to have more confidence facechecking.
• Lack of recursion. Having only one copy of each program and only two Simulchips meant the rig felt very fragile. If I drew into a breaker, I felt I had to install it before running, since losing it to damage would mean I had to do a Simulchip/SMC shuffle to resurrect it. I'd also otherwise no longer have any ability to deal with that kind of ice on facecheck, since SMC/Simulchip can no longer produce the relevant breaker. DJ Steve might have helped a little on the Simulchip front, but not the other two issues.
• As I found in my final game, this deck doesn't have a good way of dealing with Archer. Even with the full rig down, it still costs a whopping seven credits to fully break.

It does have its strengths, though:

• Against decks with limited/weak ice (e.g. my game 3), Hermes/Tao can really mess with the corp's ability to defend their servers. In addition, scoring around Hermes can be hard for corps that want to fast advance and/or score a lot of small agendas (e.g. my game 4).
• Conduit is already a strong card, and Aeneas makes the repeated R&D runs sustainable.
• Turbine is good! (Might be better with Buzzsaw, but we can't really spare the influence - flickering Euler and passing code gates for free is a fun trick, though.)