Rabblemaster Games' Upcoming Win-a-Box Tournament

Strategies, deck ideas, and the like

Despite seeing some play around the store, competitive Megacorp has struggled to gain a foothold. With the largest prize support seen in the state to-date, we hope to remedy that at Rabblemaster Games this coming weekend, on Sunday August 12. So, with this large upcoming tournament, I thought we'd recap a few of the strategies that we've previously written about in this blog and see what kind of potential they have for tournament play. What deck are you considering playing, and where does it rate in terms of early-game explosiveness, defense, offense, and in playing the long game?

Let's take a look at what options we have available, and then a look at what cards we can expect to see a lot of in the tournament:

SETI - Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is a "voltron" style deck - a strategy based around attaching various power-ups to a strong central character - based around the founder Luke Seti, Memadapt. Seti is a fairly weak founder in several aspects - none of his abilities directly affects combat - but his ability to attract power-up mutations at a frightening rate (twice per turn cycle; he can search before you take a turn) has led him to a place at the top of the French metagame. A very aggressive option with an almost complete inability to play the long game (eventually the founder destroys your own business or the main strategy stops working) the deck is designed to hit fast and hit hard and almost always wants to go second, taking the first opportunity to attack with a twice-mutated Luke Seti and going straight for the founder or business

Action-based decks running either Azrielle, Independent Enforcer or Xu Huang, Gnost Monk devote a fair portion of their decks to #action cards, in order to deal huge amounts of damage through their founders and/or keep them alive for further...action? Xu Huang decks have no trouble striking down an entire board full of the opponent's cards and dodging removal, while Azrielle decks are more likely to sneak an attack in and finish with a flurry of strikes and damage multipliers straight to the business. Decks running both founders can be explosive, suddenly switching gears from defensive dodging to full-blown triple strike, but usually require a little board presence in order to do this, as most of the #action cards have a double resource cost - usually IQ/BQ - meaning at least two other cards in play.

Unethical Control is a deck that uses the card-advantage (and sometimes cash-advantage) engine of The Glass Man to keep its hand full of frequently unethical #moral #assault cards to suppress the opponent's plays. While he's a bit of an, um, glass cannon, there are plenty of ways to keep him alive and working for you in this sort of deck, and the #unethical removal cards are cheap and effective against many of the common strategies - Rampant Bribery is murder against any consumer-based deck, and Kidnapping strong against decks with expensive characters

Baby, Come and Light my (mind)Fire is a Gnost burn deck focused on removing the opponent's ability to make powerful plays, burning through their cash reserves with Disruptor cards and putting Telekinetic Slash to good use to clear lanes of attack. Players are now starting the game with their founder above/below their business, rather than left/right, in order to avoid losing both their founder AND cash reserves to the same slash, just in case the opponent is running Gnost. The deck can struggle a little when coming from behind, but closes out games quickly when ahead, and benefits from a strong financial engine - constant psionic attacks can be a drain on your resource base as well as the opponent's.

Firebombing with Raamaa is an area-of-effect damage deck, using the interlocking pieces of Dormant Volcano, Life Insurance Policy and Raamaa, Incarnate Hierarch (or Banshee, Basilisk or Siren) to gain money while wiping out large portions of the opponent's field and taking control of important permanents via Economic Hitman. A reactive deck that defeats removal by virtue of game mechanics; the controller actively wants the cards in play sent to the open market and virtually nothing kills Raamaa in any case. Despair sets in as you realise that you have to take out a key character in order to survive, but it's sitting on top of a volcano and the resulting explosion will destroy three of your consumers and cut through two network connections!

Streets Ahead is an alternative strategy that runs no consumers and instead focuses on making money through sales of property in the divest phase, using the value-multiplying Central Business District and Hypermarket and through having Streets and Highways adjacent to Automated Toll Systems, making use of main-deck defensive and stall cards - including Heracles, Senior Counsel as founder - while it sets up its engines. When they are running full steam few decks can compete with the revenue generation potential of infrastructure decks, and after a few turns of earning $30-40m, the deck simply buys all the cards off the opponent's side of the field and beats them to death with their own assets

Decks running the corp/donor core are flexible, accessing the game's best generic removal but otherwise devoting the majority of their cards to flooding the board with large numbers of cheap consumers, accelerating through the early game at a rate of 2-3 per turn and providing throwaway blockers for defense, bodies to crew mechanical suits with, and meat shields for surrounding important assets. This style of deck can out-pace opponents through sheer numbers of cards, and can quickly shift gears from money-making to using consumers in combat, taking advantage of the fact that enemy characters can only retaliate once per challenge phase in order to swarm-attack the stronger ones

Azrielle's Assassins is one of several #military based decks that take advantage of the cash generating ability of Barracks and focus on arming their characters with the awesome power of Vulcan Cannon and launching Precision attacks through the use of Guided Munitions, both of which are easily found in the decks through use of cards with the Dead Drop ability, including the signature card Battle Angel - military decks are one of the few that can afford to run this awesome card. Azrielle is a great defensive founder for a #military deck (she can hop in a first-turn Barracks and start generating cash and is very hard to get rid of) but several others are more playable in an aggressive one, including Chi, Corp Socialite

Now, keep in mind that these are just the decks that I've written about - and I'm just one man. All I've done is put a few ideas together, and while I'm pretty experienced in trading card games, I'm well aware there are other strategies out there to be discovered, including a deck archetype that Mark, the creator, has indicated is even stronger than any of the creations listed above! I hope somebody out there discovers it.

Now, to individual key cards. You can expect to see a few of these powerful cards across a fair number of deck lists; many of you readers may recognise these from previous articles where I have extolled the virtues of the cards:

Incarnate Donor

A key part of any deck that a) runs any number of Incarnate cards or b) runs a lot of cheap consumers, this Incarnate-aligned but still human sweetheart will accelerate game plans throughout the tournament while providing an excellent value-for-money body.

There's rarely a decklist I create that doesn't include this young lady - she gets you past the early turns, where you've got a lot of money but not many cards, by helping convert one into the other!

Corp Advisor

Playable in any deck that wants to be thinner and see more of its key cards throughout the game. Being the game's only raw card draw  means the Advisor will be seeing play in multiple decks at 3-4 each. It's a card I was glad to see printed at common, and in any deck that has the ability to re-deploy characters, he puts an unbelievable amount of work in. Like Incarnate Donor, the Advisor has a value for money body attached to a great on-deploy effect, and with a low trait cost, is easily splashable in a variety of decks

Dash Dingo

An absence of raw card draw in the game means that much of the card advantage is derived through searching decks via Mutation or Dead Drop abilities. A great way to take advantage of your own searching while acting as a hard counter to popular "search" founders like Luke Seti, The Glass Man and Illithis, Gnost Prophet - Anubian Tracker can take out multiple cards per turn and is a very potent card that we have difficulty keeping in stock. Expect to see high numbers of this dog turn out, either supporting main-deck strategies or in sideboards to answer these founders

Corp Executive

Dead Drop 4 from this hard-working employee is the search that provides the most value for money spent without taking too big a risk. Whether he's searching up a pair of Driverless Car Fleet, four Automated Toll Systems, or a Vulcan Cannon and Guided Munitions, Corp Executive is freaking everywhere and is expected to remain that way for the foreseeable future. Like Incarnate Donor, I rarely create a decklist without including this debonair gentleman, and in-line with his lore character, he certainly brings a lot of technical toys to the table!

Kidnapping and Assassination Contract

The game's most efficient removal and the game's most permanent, a wide variety of decks can fit these cards into their lineup, so expect to see plenty of these, and lesser amounts of cards like Natural Death, Kickback and Character Assassination

Michael Basa, Data Obfuscator

Michael Basa, yesterday

In the early stages of trading card games, hand control is frequently the strongest strategy. Early competitive Yu-Gi-Oh was dominated by the Yata-Garasu lock, which discarded the opponent's hand, then prevented them drawing any new cards. The strongest early Magic: the Gathering decks ran Hypnotic Specter, which provided a random discard from the opponent's hand when it dealt damage and was frequently played on turn one via Dark Ritual, followed by Hymn to Tourach, discarding two cards at random. Hitting your opponent's land cards was lights out as they lost the ability to play their other cards, which soon followed the first three into the graveyard.

Basa is no different. Turn one (on the draw) play Guided Munitions and Basa. Equip and attack, ignore blockers, opponent discards three - possibly all they have left after their turn one plays. Opponent didn't topdeck an answer? Next game.

Azrielle, Independent Enforcer

Megacorp players have shown a tendency to enjoy playing #unethical removal cards (they are good, dammit, and we all want to play good cards) but in an unethical-dominated metagame, Azrielle is boss. She doesn't interfere with playing your own #unethical cards to target the opponent's characters, and her immunity to the two most popular removal cards Kidnapping and Assassination Contract, plus 3/1/3/3 stats allowing her to survive most psionic attacks, make her a popular defensive choice. Heading up two different styles of deck means you may encounter Azrielle more than other founders

I'm already excited for the tournament - but I won't be playing in it! So, if anyone wants to borrow my Azrielle's Assassins list, please get in touch. I'm not sure if it's the correct choice for the tournament, but it does very nicely at ignoring whatever the opponent is doing and blasting them back to the stone age, generates money via Barracks and #military characters (including Azrielle) and if you thought she was hard to kill before, just wait until she hops inside the Barracks in response to a lethal attack!

See you this Sunday at Rabblemaster Games' Win-a-Box tournament!