Frantic Journalism 3rd Edinburgh BABW

This is the deck that carried my ass to 3rd at the Edinburgh babw this weekend, going 3-1 in the swiss and 1-0 in the cut (my corp deck faired far worse at 2-2 and 0-2). I'd been out of the meta for a while and didn't really know what to do so I fell back on my favourite runner, and she served me well. The game I lost (Railgun) was a timed loss where it went to time because my opponent was ill and absent for most of the game, and we worked out afterwards that with the full time I would have won, having already made it impossible for her to combo or score out. However, a couple of my wins were pretty lucky so it probably balances out. Wins were against CtM with a Biotic; Door to Door Making News; NEH something (I won too quickly to work out what it was doing, having only 5 mins left after a long corp game); and Sync 24/7 Boom.

The core of this deck is getting a Magnum Opus online as quickly as possible and getting your breakers in the bin so you can start camping remotes without the need of Blackmail, safely facechecking before a parasifr, and jamming Medium when you get the chance. This is achieved by a combination of Frantic Coding and Inject; if you don't see Coding or Opus in the starting hand, then you need a damn good reason for not mulliganing, as there isn't much other econ. Obviously you need to be wary of Ark Lockdown, Blacklist, Chronos Project what with throwing so much stuff in the bin, but you have plenty of recursion to proactively pull out important things if you suspect them, and plenty of ways to achieve victory if something important is lost.

Card Choices:

Blackmail is the reason I play Val, and En Passant goes incredibly well. Only a 1-of here to make room for some other cards, though it should possibly be more. It's my first time playing her since parasifr so I haven't worked out exactly how much additional ice destruction is useful. Saying that, the winning turn of my cut game was (with medium installed): Blackmail R&D, En Passant only ice, run, run. Good times.

Déjà Vu, Retrieval Run, Same Old Thing is your necessary recursion, that is super powerful when you mill so much of your own deck. The Retrieval Run was in there originally for a later removed Femme, though it still does work if you Inject too many Opus/Medium and want them back cheaper. Kind of a flex slot. 3x of each of the others is not though: parasite spam is good, blackmail spam is good, getting back your mediums is good, finding your 1-of events is good, etc.

Rebirth, Slums, Scrubber: Asset spam is a thing. This is how we fight it. Rebirth and Slums also do work in other match-ups (and with self milling and recursion are pretty easy to find).

Vamp and Demolition Run are flex slots. I think the latter I'd only keep if I put in the Nerve Agent I was thinking about, to clear someone's hand, otherwise I used it a couple of times and it did work, but probably not enough to justify the slot. The former is there to slow corps down if I can get a money advantage (which is generally easy) and to counter trap decks/caprice. Never got used but glad I had it.

New Angeles is a card taken out of many decks, and I can see why, it's a little unwieldy, especially without anything to keep it on the board. Plus Aaron is now a card, and a damned good one at that. But I can't help it, I end up putting at least 2 in every deck I make, and I'm always glad it's there. Sometimes, I'm upset at only 2 and go up to 3 (definitely not needed in this deck). In the match-ups where it's handy, you can devote most of your recursion to it so that it's not as much of a problem it self-trashing. Still wish I had the influence for a Film Critic. In fact, in 2 matches I used all of my recursion to bring it back after each steal, and it stopped me from becoming a fiery mess.

Progenitor shouldn't have been in there; I thought I'd taken it out, but had apparently forgot. Sure it lets you install another medium, but you keep most of your rig in the bin anyway where it's not taking up precious memory.

Levy because I'm scared of potatoes and too much self-mill. Feel free to swap out if you're less scared.

Employee Strike does so much work against so many corps. If I had more influence I'd have 3, but 2 is generally enough.