Rixty Minutes - Worlds 2017 Top 16

Having made CTM on a lark for our team’s testing gauntlet, I slowly came to love it, and settled on it for Worlds 2017. Props to my teammates for the help on it: aandries, dashakan, paranoid, Webster, cranked, leburgan, jake, and mmychal.

Some notes on it:

AGENDAS

There’s a divide between those that love 3x ARES (me) and those that love 3x QPM (everyone else). I understand that power of QPM late, but early ARES swings the game completely, wrecks Ed Kim, and turns MVTs into nightmares.

15 Minutes is one of the best cards in the deck, being a great EOI target or never advance (NA) tool.

ASSETS

There was a fair amount of consternation that went into the mix here. I decided to drop a Bankers for Whampoa last minute, to deal with Maw/Hacktivist/Ed Kim hand attack. It helped, but may have been better as a Bankers, and jamming a Preemptive back in. DBS is really good, and whenever it lived (most games), HQ stayed clean, and basically saved me.
Let’s talk about a severely slept upon card in the environ: Marilyn Campaign. It is my new fave card, and a NA monster. Being able to have it make its rez cost back on its first turn firing is great, and I frequently overwrote it. It can provide a lure into a deadly remote at little cost, and recurs. It also provides a shuffle, which helps when using Whamp to push tech back into R&D. At 1 INF, I find it to be an excellent include for glacier dex looking to lure runs and make money, too. It won me at least 2 games at Worlds. MVP.

UPGRADES

MVT is awesome. ‘Nuff said.

OPERATIONS

This is where CTM dex can wildly vary. We added SEA into our package late in testing, and found it was the missing link v. Misdirection Shaper. You can usually outmoney non-Opus Shaper, which turned out to be almost all of them. When you do, and they run, you can drop a SEA/Closed/HHN turn on them, which will lead to EOI and a game end, usually. Aaron Andries found an even more sick play, firing a value SEA when the Runner ran and dropped Tap. I wish I knew this, as my only Swiss loss was because the Hayley got out of the above combo with Tap money (I should’ve overpayed). When a Runner runs for the Wrm, and you’re on heavy money, fire a value SEA, for almost all of your creds. They either pay down, Vamping themselves, or let your Closed Accounts them. Then, you have turns to burn through the SacCons and Wrm while giving them little to no money.
The other tech cards win games. Psycho is great for when they go full ham on tags, and the one Biased did heavy work in a Hayley meta.

ICE

Very straight forward here. We dropped the Information Overload toy for a 2nd Tollbooth, still one of my fave ICE, and credit for credit one of the best ICE in the game six years running. The rest are cheap gear checks, and standard tag punishers.

CONCLUSION

This deck was really fun. I love Yellow dex, and really love Yellow Glacier. I so wanted to bring Sol Glacier to Worlds, but the 3x SacCon meta crushed Keegan Lane (not with Navi Mumbai Grid, though). Scarcity in Sol is so good, and fantastic now. That deck could’ve done major work at Worlds, as hardly anyone was on Opus, meaning it was a Resource meta. Instead, I played this, which punishes tags more.

This deck has two speeds: rush hard early to setup up ARES and get to near game point, and then build ICE on R&D and the remote, keeping HQ clean with DBS and Whamp. Then, you start playing the NA game in the remote, eventually breaking both the spirit and body of the Runner.
The deck performed well, defeating Smoke, Smoke, Ed Kim, and Ed Kim, tying with Hayley, and losing to Hayley on a 5 point Indexing turn, and Val in the cut. All of the Runners played Misdirection, and all still got heavily tagged at points. Yellow is not dead.