Nero's Crazy Garden Hose! (Winner Emerald City Lockdown)

SMITTYL 284

This was my contribution to the Emerald City Lockdown Online tournament. It was Diversified Portfolio format, IDs are given point values, so naturally i decided to shop in the bargain basement which by some twist of fate was all crim IDs, which I am naturally adverse to blue cards, so I had to figure out how to make it the least blue possible. So after crusin' the ol' DB I saw Timmy Wong's excellent and groundbreaking Nero deck. I wondered if I could somehow update this thing to make it playable. His deck used Citadel Sanctuary and self tagging shanangans, which in theory are even better than 2 years ago with Rogue Trading. However, after several test games it went really clunky and had too many moving parts, and corps just don't have to time to wait for your cute set up. So I tried to make the deck as basic as possible, lots of money and draw in order to set up an insane drip econ engine which Security Nexus that can just grind the corp into oblivion. The name was given because of the massive drip econ which becomes a full garden hose. The boomerangs and DoF are there to try to prevent the corp from just rushing out while you set up your engine. With Security Nexus you can either go breakerless or just 1 most of the time. This deck may not be the best against glacier but who plays that these days! Generally you can poke a centrals once per turn with Nexus to gather Turning Wheel counters for the big dig. Nero's ability provides nice facecheck insurance against some sentries, minus Anansi.

The Tournament! RD 1 vs Justin H BoN - Only loss of the day for this deck, I was able to put on a lot of pressure early on but he was able to gradually do two things this deck is weak against, 3 layers of central ice and attrition damage with the ID ability. The fast advanced an Atlas to close out.

RD 2 vs Justin M Sync - This deck is really favorable in the yellow matchup due to the ability to create a money situation where you are really hard to tag and the multiple link invalidates some of the ice (IP Block etc) , Film Critic was also very big at allowing Bellona steals without the tempo hit. Was able to steamroll them after setting up.

RD 3 vs. Sean (Boot) Chronos Protocol - This was the matchup that I was very worried about because Crims are not a fan of net damage and Complete Image can be very bad for you. I was very lucky that he got super flooded and he was only able to get a couple ice going before I was able to snatch enough agendas to win, and not die in the process.

RD 4 vs Colin's Blue Sun - This matchup was a lot of cat and mouse as he would rez big ice and then move it around to different servers. He was able to kill Tycoon early on and played with mostly barrier ice so it became a gradual poke at whatever server had only 1 or two ice and build up Turning Wheel counters, his deck was very wild and he had to sac several agendas to keep up the pressure. He was almost to the point where he would have enough ice to somewhat lock me out. He put the winning agenda in a 4 ice remote, with falsified guaranteeing that I would win if i got in. Using Boomerang, Nexus and then throwing my rig away due to sentries sealed the win.

Thanks to all my opponents and especially Sam who made the day possible, this was the best possible way to spend a day during these times!

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