Professional Expense 3rd @Startup GNK Montreal 2025-04-01

The deck went 2-0 at the event (out of 11 participants), allowing me to take third place, played at L'Expédition on 2025-04-01.

Round 1. Win vs Jay-Pee on Jinteki: Personal Evolution. Usual strategy of drawing a full hand then running. It got difficult when a 3x advanced Fujii Asset Retrieval was in the remote with Daniela Jorge Inácio, but 7 damages was not enough to flatline me and I survived that round.

Round 3. Win vs ant1 on NBN: Reality Plus. I never cleared the tags and ran HQ while ant1 was flooded.

Make the corp pay. Everything is expensive for the corp. This is the same deck as before.

Game plan : Derez everything, return ice to hand, and touch cards for the win.

Mulligan plan : Professional Contacts or Hermes.

Botulus allowed to not be locked out by ices like Ice Wall, which can be rezzed bacl again and again without much economic problem to the corp. It also solved having access to archive.

You do not break ices here. In Startup, there are no ice that make you lose the game. You have every tool to derez ice or make them even more expensive to rez.

In earlier iteration, I tried Fermenter and Telework Contract. But since everything is relatively cheap (we do not break ices), Professional Contacts is much easier. As you draw, you get the credits needed to play your cards.

After multiple iteration, Paricia showed load of value, being a 0 cost that help me trash assets, thus letting me deal with assets spam without breaking the bank.

Tags are the main weakness of the deck. They do not kill you, but losing Professional Contacts stings.

This is fairly easy to play, but still present the board as a puzzle to solve. Mainly, you have to be willing to facecheck ices. An earlier iteration had Forged Activation Orders, but those had to be cut in favor of Prepaid VoicePAD.

And with Steve Cambridge: Master Grifter, you get to bypass and derez again and again. Games can go a bit longer, finishing around turn 18, unless you get lucky in your accesses.

This is a different way to tackle the startup meta, where everyone has tech against Arruaceiras Crew. This bypass and derez deck deals with boosted Logjam, difficult Archer and indestructible Lotus Field in a different way.

Big thanks to Odonuvo got organizing the events. It was a blast to play. I was lucky to see the game played by Odonuvo vs Jon. It was glorious and hilarious. Cheers!