Mixed-up FoodCoats (1st Place Southern California Regionals)

tzeentchling 453

I've been playing variations on this deck for the last year, really. Mid-range/glacier HB seems to be where I'm most comfortable! This deck, with minor variations, went technically undefeated at NorCal Regionals a few weeks ago (with a technical game loss thanks to @tmoiynmwg keeping one of my agendas after game 1), so I decided, why change it?

Why Caprice/Batty/Crisium Grid? Because I can't make up my mind on which one is best, and both Caprice and Batty die to Rumor Mill anyway. I did get to Batty-NEXT Gold one person on the day, and Caprice did discourage one person from running my server, but on the whole it was the ice that taxed/kept people out more. Crisium helps with Siphon, Vamp, and Indexing mainly.

Scarcity of Resources was a good call, and it seriously hampered players where I got it early enough to matter and stick, but mostly it's there because it's a free current that turns off Rumor Mill, Hacktivist Meeting, and Employee Strike.

First round of the 4-round tournament was a bye from Store Champs, so I chilled and hung out with the other SoCal guys. Second round is, of course, a rematch from a couple weeks ago against @tmoiynmwg. I made sure to count my cards after this game! He was on an interesting Adam deck with Savant and Paperclip. After he turned off my Scarcity by stealing a lucky agenda from hand, the Savant quickly got very powerful and his resources started coming down. I was able to win a Batty - NEXT Gold psi-game and trash both his breakers, but had too little money to take advantage of the window (and Always Be Running is very good against both NEXT Bronze and Seidr Adaptive Barrier). After about 58 minutes of play Timmy emerged with the win. Fortunately, my Whizzard was able to salvage a timed win against his Ag-Infusion deck.

Third round was against a young man named Steve from central California. This time my deck worked well, I gained money and gained tempo when he repeatedly facechecked my Architects. Scarcity made his asset-heavy Whizzard deck slow, and I scored out behind a pile of NEXT ice.

Fourth round was an ID against @nobo to make the cut, where I placed 6th. Byes and IDs in a 4-round tournament are stupid.

The first two games of the cut were running, while the third game against Noah I lost in about 5 minutes after drawing 7 of my 9 agendas in the first 4 turns and no ice. In the third-place game against @chih, I was facing his Frantic Whizzard. His two Frantic Coding dumped a bunch of his money and draw cards, but he was able to get his suite of trash breakers in his heap by turn 4 or so. Meanwhile, I had gambled by leaving R&D and HQ open first turn to install ice-Breaker Bay - Adonis in a remote, in order to get money up as fast as I could. I've found if you can't stick at least one Adonis against Whizzard you're probably not winning the matchup, since all of your econ in the deck is trashable. Fortunately, I wasn't punished with Siphon or Medium, and I drew enough ice in the next few turns to cover the centrals. He was eventually able to get out a Medium, but R&D was taxing enough at that point that he could only make one run a turn. On the last turn he had a chance to win if he could see two agendas in four cards, but he saw nothing, and I scored out of my 3-ice/Caprice server.

Finals rematch against Noah started with my Moon Melter Whizzard deck against his version of the Moon deck, where it did what it was designed to and won. In the corp rematch, I was thankfully not flooded with agendas and Noah was slightly less aggressive than before. This gave me some time to build up econ, and I relatively quickly got to 6 points. Unfortunately, he pulls what would have been my game-winning agenda out of my hand on a lucky 1/4 pull and then top-decks a Food to put him on 6 as well. I'm sitting on two Biotic Labors and a pile of cash and stacking R&D with as much taxing NEXT ice as I can while waiting for one of the two last 3/2s. Unfortunately, I draw the last Food instead. Noah's got a Nerve Agent and it's very easy for him to get into HQ, so I stick it in my remote (of [unrezzed]FC3/Holmegaard/FC3/FC3) and do nothing. Noah goes into the tank and tries to decide if it's an agenda or not, in the process deducing the entire contents of my deck from what he's Slums'd. He decides it's not worth the risk and two turns later goes broke getting into R&D for a single card. I take advantage of the window and double advance it, and he can't contest the server or R&D again, while my hand is empty of goodies. Crazy end to a great game!

Thanks again to all of my friends who supported me throughout the tournament! Noah was absolutely a tough final boss and made this feel like an even bigger accomplishment.

29 May 2017 tomdidiot

If you had a pile of cash, why didn't you just double biotic never advance the food?

29 May 2017 tzeentchling

The pile was a couple credits short, unfortunately. The thought did cross my mind though.

31 May 2017 nutritionalzero

How was the Holmegaard?

1 Jun 2017 tzeentchling

Pretty useful in general. In my game against Timmy a Batty made that server extremely difficult to run on (especially since I had gotten him on a Batty-Holmegaard play at the last regionals, so perhaps he was extra wary), and against Noah it made a remote server unpleasant to get into, but not terribly so, but I rezzed it for free from an ABT so I wasn't complaining.