by Gorsh
I posted earlier my first constructed deck, and promised i'd say how it went against my friend...So, we played yesterday; three games. I totally smacked his Jinteki deck
First game, i can't remember much, but i remember i started stepping hard on a Snare played as a trap; so it could've been lost right there in the corp's second turn (no cards in hand, no credits, tagged...). But i recovered and ended up winning in the early-mid game by scoring agendas from his HQ, either from straight runs, Sneakdoor Beta's or helped by Inside Job or FAO and Infiltration to see the ICE before i hit it.
The second game i actually lost it, quite quickly. I hit him with running R&D with Medium -jumping over mild ICE-, so i had a few virus tokens on it... and next turn i was too hooked up on doing it again that i went "naked" (two cards in grip) against the new ICE he layed down: a Neural Katana that flatlined me.
So, best of three... the last game was a really long, drawn out game; form the most part, the score went 2-0 for an agenda i stole from R&D. I had little luck drawing either icrebreakers or special orders in the early game, so i had to do a lot of preparing and sentry-breaking alone. In this one he saw the whole of the "surprises" left, including being hit three times with the Account Siphon (two of them, in back-to-back turns using dejà vu). I made a few mistakes that could've won the game earlier (for example, favour discarding FF to damage to keep Medium, instead of keeping it to use on the Wall of Thorns on his HQ) and he was able to form up quite decent defenses (this time, protecting heavily all central servers). Anyway i got another two pointer out of somewhere, can't remember if HQ or R&D.
In the end, he was running three external servers, one was a PAD, the other an obvious Snare as trap (no advancing, no defending but a single ice, for a lot of turns)... and the third, in two turns had a setup of two ice and "something" + upgrade... So it was kinda obvious to me that was indeed and agenda. I used a Bank Job to get credits, and next turn i got the last Inside Job so i jumped his first ice and passed the second; scoring 2 more points.
In the end, i started using Medium again vs. his R&D (quite defended, but i had 14 credits and he had 6 to rezz two ice), and got the final Agenda. I would've won by decking the Corp's deck anyway, since he had like 4 or 5 cards left there.
I think the deck performed well: i was very lucky to draw Desperado in either the starting had or the first turns in all three games; but generally things kept flowing at the right pace and had resources to play everytime, except maybe the last game with the breakers. But then again, it might be that my opponent didn't focused on keeping a steady credit-flow, leaving only PADs and Hedge Funds in the deck; so i was able to out-spend him a lot of the times. Perhaps a more rounded deck could give me real trouble (specially with the Achilles heel this deck has against trashing programs).
So, an evening of fun and pride in my deckbuilding, what's more to ask...
