Ambush Journalism

This is the 'Slow Fast Advance' deck I took to a store championship last weekend where I lost in the final :(. This deck only lost one game (against the champion - shout out to Zaq who thrashed me in the final! Read his full tourney breakdown: http://boardgamegeek.com/article/15210836#15210836).

In the loss I top-decked two astros on R&D and only had 2 pop-ups to protect, Zaq ran twice on turn 1 and scored them both...downhill from there :(. He then broke my bank and proceeded to own me.

Otherwise, it played very well and I was able to control both mid- and late-game. With the meta so obsessed with Account Siphon, this deck was a meta-call. Hunters and Data Ravens on HQ make Account Siphon suck...they don't want to knight either and can't just take 4-5 tags to siphon you for fear of Closed Accounts and Scorched.

Strategy: Make that money and get those tags to stick. This deck is 49-card, with two-point agendas so the runner needs to steal 4 to win...the corp on the other hand will only need 3 to win with Beale over-adv or Market Research. In every win with this deck I've only needed to score 3 agendas. Several games I have scored Beale for 4+ points.

Get them to slosh through taggers on your centrals while you stack that cash and bait remote runs with Econ assets. Snare ambushes deter digging and can be used as remote bait (I flatlined a Gabe in the tourney by playing it in a well-protected remote as if it was the winning astro). Your eventual tags will give you either 1) Big scores with Market Research and PsychoBeale or 2) Time to score Astros the hard way so that the last agenda is an easy-to-score winner.

Drip Econ, burst Econ...and you'll need to play smart with traces. Against HQ heavy attackers put 2 or more tagging ice and pop-ups to make life sad. It's not worth it for them to Emergency Shutdown your Data Ravens and Hunters and you'll have enough money to re-rez everything anyway.

I know the influence on Eve is hefty, but she was rockin' in this deck. Gets hit in R&D and HQ but is rarely trashed and they don't want to waste runs to go get her in a remote once she gets going. I find the drip money is often forgotten by runners after a little while...but good runners will run and trash at the opportune moments so if you know they will trash PAD/Eve throw a hunter in front to make it more difficult.

Hunter/Data Raven are the deck's best ice and Uroboros is a new ice that I have yet had to rez. It replaced Muckraker and Flare (which I also didn't rez often).

Updated versions will probably switch Bernice for San San (I wanted to use San San-less NBN...but I think that is a mistake). Bernice was usually used as a fake San San anyway to get them to run remotes. Also I need to find a way to get Eli in there.