R+ Toolbox

Been toying with this deck for a while (since before the Drago ban, since drago-locks are snoozefest boring to play with or against). It's extremely versatile, with solutions for most situations, and usually wins by scoring out. I'm happy enough with it at this point to poast, and now's probably the time since D&D rotates soon.

Idea is to rush agendas (preferably Bellona, which is busted) behind Ping while threatening HHN/BOOM! if the runner slips up. It's absolutely a tempo game, and I have regularly played one or both of the kill combo against e.g. shapers purely for value.

Ping/Keegan is a hilarious and underrated remote, since Ping's tag occurs in the approach paid ability window, thus (as far as I understand) unlike an on encounter tag the runner cannot:

1) break the ice with their icebreaker before it gets yeeted

2) NFL the tag to prevent Keegan (since the runner already passed priority for the corp to rez the approached ice)

3) crack e.g. SMC for the same above reason

(See 9.2.7f and 6.9.2b in the v22.12 rules)

Against everyone's favorite Clippy it's at worst an in-faction Econ Warfare, (which is not bad) and Ark Lockdown with the amazing Gaslight wins games.

SanSan is the backup plan, but mostly exists to put money pressure on the runner. News Team is the best card in the deck and acts as upgrade or archives protection/asset spam trap/economy all at once. I definitely rely on it to score naked never-advanced Beales or ideally Tomorrow's Headline. On rez, Thoth is pretty much equivalent to Funhouse since most runners choose to bounce off the latter, so I like the 1-of for the extra ouch on centrals. Both ices wish they were Data Raven though :(

Overall I was 4th/13 at our standard CO, with this being the better of my two decks. It had one loss against Queen Hoshiko on the day, where I set up a lockout position on codegates, but didn't get the Magnet in time to jam before decking out. Definitely a winnable game. It smashed a tag-me Zahya (Thoth MVP) and stealth Smoke (Ping/Keegan MVP)

There are some differences in this published decklist as compared to the decklist I actually ran at the circuit opener based on my interpretation of the tournament performance:

1) +1 Border Control -1 Drafter. A hard stop would have come in handy in the lost game (and against a counter surveillance that thankfully whiffed, although the runner was already at -2) and this is the best way I can see to rejig the inf.

2) +1 Shipment from Vladisibirsk -1 Psychographics. This is the tag-me punishment slot. Psychobeale is the dream, but in practice I've never scored more than a Bellona with Psycho so Vlad is probably strictly better on average.

3) +1 NGO Front +1 DRM -1 Gaslight -1 Spin Doctor. Not sure if these are the correct cuts, but the adds I think are needed. The NGO add is with open decklist tournament cuts in mind (we didn't have one) since I absolutely install-advance-advance naked T1 Bellona against long setup runners (also there were a couple of situations where I wanted a tad more money, but going back up to 3 Rashida might be better for that). The DRM add is because in both won and lost games had situations where I was up tempo but couldn't find an agenda despite digging. Besides, 1x Fast-Track was a classic in NBN rush//fast-advance long before the cherry on top that is Gaslight.

Finally my meta call for a lot of not tag-me crims with Diversion of Funds (I got DoFed twice by Zahya during the tournament and it had almost no impact thanks to the extra tag econ) would be to swap Mavirus for Crisium.

Yeah it's basically just an old NEH deck, but R+ let's it get leaner and more toolboxy thanks to the decreased deck size and in-built economy. It's a shame Keegan rotates with Clippy or else this would smash face.