Mummy Long Legs - 6th & 18th NtscapeNavigator SC

aka It’s Always Sunny in Bristol

INTRODUCTION

Mendax (War of the Worlds, 2021) began experimenting with Sunny after the Stevenage SC, but he could not escape his Criminal background, even including Security Testing and Tread Lightly is his earliest builds. After some random jinteki.net games, he was getting a good enough win rate to get the rest of the Bristol meta interested in improving the deck. Looking back there was a strong hint of groupthink and we all talked ourselves into playing the list. Thanks to them from stopping me jumping ship the morning of the event!

There were four Sunny players in the event, all from Bristol (Mendax, Baa Ram Wu, Drago and myself). A few people spotted this pattern so we hope it got them wondering what we found that was so special! The slightly different versions of the deck went 9-9 across the day, which is probably the best you can hope for in the current meta.

BUILD NOTES

Sunny has a representation of being the Queen of Durdletown, but new cards allow her to threaten in the early game while maintaining the strong late game. 3 Mayfly, 3 Overclock and 3 Boomerang means that Sunny can compete with early remotes, while the drip from 3 Rezeki, 2 Data Folding plus the Jak Sinclair/DreamNet sustains the mid-to-late game, many of which can be found quickly with 3 Gachapon.

The main appeal for playing Sunny in this meta is combo disruption with 3 White Hat, that would see a whole lot more play if it wasn’t a whopping 5 influence. It’s a lot trickier for the corp to defend all three central servers well and it is often worth playing without a credit lead to see if the corp will Vamp away a large chunk of their credits to stop you shuffling away combo pieces. Either way, it slows them down a lot.

The deck actually manages without the Sunny breakers, they are rarely needed so don’t worry about having one of each. However, the Boomerangs, Security Nexus and Mayflies can at times be overstretched so something extra is required. GS Sherman M3 gives you a chance to rerun the remote protected by Border Control, and GS Shrike M2 is as good as any non-Bukhgalter killer at breaking Anansi. Resources are limited so it’s best to only use Falsified Credentials when the extra money is needed to challenge the agenda score.

MATCHUPS

We largely focussed our testing against three decks: Red Planet Courier decks scoring Government Takeover, Sportsmetal combo decks and the rapid Seamless Launch decks in Precision Design.

Against (normal) RPC decks, you attempt to outdurdle them preparing to remove combo pieces with White Hat when they have 9 credits and 9 advancement tokens. Security Nexus lets you gain Turning Wheel tokens and Globalsec Security Clearance allows you to keep track of the location of the Government Takeover. Even without the Nexus it is often worth running with Jak Sinclair to force some money to be spent.

Against Spombo decks, it’s all about finding an early Project Vacheron and was the other reason a Globalsec Security Clearance was included as tech. This lets you check the top of R&D without the awful possibility of scoring some agendas. Once a Vacheron is scored, it’s all about building up Turning Wheel tokens for a big dig where Jak Sinclair helps build them up faster.

Against Seamless PD decks, you have to be aggressive very early on, but then take your foot off the gas and build up your board. The first score is key and it is quite easy to overpress, and personally the hardest matchup for me to judge. An early Aumakua is very helpful and this was the main result one was added to the deck. However, the deck can’t fast advance from hand so you want to be in a position to challenge the 2-3 ICE remote with an upgrade. Again, Jak Sinclair lets you Turning Wheel for a lot of tokens and you at least have one last deep dig for the win if you can’t keep up elsewhere.

Glacier decks, in general, are a good matchup as the late game drip will usually win out. Rush decks with Hard-Hitting News are tricky, as the tools included to contest early scores will put you within Economic Warfare range but you drip often lets you remove enough tags to avoid High Profile Target or Boom!

CONCLUSIONS

Say what you like about the current meta, but I have really enjoyed the puzzle of a meta pulling you in many directions and working together as a team to best solve it. You can get away with it somewhat in a heavily Corp favoured meta as there isn’t really all that much to lose. Finally, if you have actually lived in Bristol, then you will know the microclimate there means it actually rains quite a lot, but online it’s always Sunny.