Fiery Informant - 1st/2nd Place Brighton BABW

leachrode 1235

1st/2nd as in we didn't play out the final, not that both top decks were identical, runner deck here

Played this at a couple of babw events with pretty good success, less to say about it than my runner because barring some minor tweaks it's basically Ben Ni’s great worlds deck Fiery Info. This has felt like a pretty good meta call at the moment because it's pretty resistant to most hate and the best tech card (Aaron) is now only playable in crim and has an answer in MCA.

Round one - MaxX: this was a good, close game until my opponent realised they had a decklist error (levy still in their deckbox) and got a game loss. Prior to that it could have gone both ways depending on whether they found enough agendas before I drew a 24/7 or found a HHN window.

Round two - Smoke: this was a fast one, two breaking news came out by turn 3 then 24/7 boom by turn 5 before my opponent could find a plascrete. If you're playing a slow runner I think it's important to have a corp that can bullshit out the odd win in five minutes like this.

Round three - Johno on Andy: I got two agendas scored fast here before Aaron came out then just had to stick one mca. Aaron could make this problematic but with a fast start the matchup is pretty winnable.

Round four - Alex White on reg Whizz: this matchup, I think, comes down to who gets their win con online first, 2 agendas + 24/7 or medium and econ. Alex, however, identified that faster than me and got the lock going hard.

Round five, round one of the cut and the loser’s final - Laurie Poulter on cams Hayley: this matchup was ridiculous and we ended up playing it three times. I thought SYNC was favoured hence picking it round one of the cut and went 3-0 so I think that is true but all three games were ridiculous, coming down to time twice, all three levys every time, one flatline and two score outs. The pinnacle of the matchup definitely came when I fired off a boom with 2 levy in the bin and the last 8 cards in the deck in Laurie’s grip and I missed the levy, extending the game by 30 more minutes.

Deck’s still good, Ben’s agenda suite is still super degenerate, would boom again.

4 comments
5 May 2017 Pilgrim

Love it. MCA Informant seems like a nice counter to Aaron Marrón. Any thoughts on The All-Seeing I, once MCA is down you can blast all there resources in one go. Or does MCA normally get trashed ASAP by the runner?

5 May 2017 leachrode

ASI is definitely one of the 45th-49th cards that I wish I could find slots for, along with a second Closed Accounts and a second EOI, but it'd be more a tech slot for resource heavy decks and those aren't usually the ones where you want to spend time playing MCA (they don't usually have Aaron in my experience, if they have a tag answer it'll be NACH and that's a bigger problem generally). Those decks you usually just have to rush out a kill threat as fast as possible then try and land a Hard Hitting News or something.

That said, I don't think I've ever seen an MCA target last more than one turn, most people know how much tag punishment the list is packing by now and it immediately dies, unless it's a Kati with a ton of money they need to liberate.

5 May 2017 Pilgrim

@leachrodethanks for your thoughts. I can see how although ASI is nice the deck space is hard. Any thoughts if a replacement for Pop-up Window. I'm trying to avoid buying the cards that will cycle soon. Or should I just borrow some?

5 May 2017 leachrode

@PilgrimNo problem, we've got a local player who's trying to work out how to build out the deck without any rotating cards as well actually so we were talking about it earlier. The deck generally runs very poor because you don't really have any room to breathe and get money, even rezzing a raven can be a big hit so if you replace the Sweeps Week and the Pop Ups you'll really want to replace them with econ cards. The obvious choices are Special Offer and IPO. They don't quite fit the same purpose unfortunately (IPO, in particular, doesn't enable HHN plays because it's a terminal and popup is a 1 off hit but they're the obvious immediate swaps.

Your other option is that soon they'll release the full bleed versions of Chris Dyer's world championship winning decks including Snekbite which has enough of both as well as a load of other useful things (Jackson Howards in particular)