Wraparound: Only one real gearcheck ice ( Lotus Field is far too expensive to count in that role) in a rush deck, what? (JUST DRAW into IT) Nonetheless 99% of the time this is my scoring ice (as early as T2 even) and that catches people offguard ( Eli 1.0 can work in a pinch). Lastly a brief overview of some of the more important pieces: It also helps that there are generally multiple solutions to a problem. I found that between Daily Business Show's filtering, Jackson Howard's draw and my new-found tendency to almost always draw first click, I generally got what I needed. Since my ICE was now situational, I decided to play more of a toolbox getup, with mostly one-ofs and two-ofs.
The second was a natural response to the first. Runners have become so rich and flexible, that often by the time you can rez the more expensive, more general ICE, and do something useful like score an agenda, they just don't care anymore.
Much like with programs ( Cyber-Cypher anyone?), FFG has been giving us lots of cheap, powerful ICE, whose supposed downsides are either being situational ( Cortex Lock vs Neural Katana) or being non-hard ETR ( Eli 1.0, Crick into Crisium Grid heh). Really it was just embracing netrunner's power creep. The first, mentioned in the background, involved aggressively cutting down on ICE costs (and the corollary: eliminating non-ice, non-agenda costs as much as possible, sorry Snare!). Two accidental revelations on the ICE front made this deck possible. Though seeming bizzare, enough so Ve thought I was a new RP player (a benefit as we'll see in #4), it works: the runner needs those clicks, especially earlier game, way more than you need the money. Hence my notorious tendency to play out Sundew naked, on turn one, with little central server protection. When playing RP rush my focus however, is always on time. Historically this kind of strategy focused on either an expensive trash cost ( SanSan, Eve Campaign) or an unspoken punishment ( Snare!, Jinteki: Personal Evolution). We've known that throwing out must-trash assets slows the runner down since SanSan City Grid in core. The Rush Life relies on four core tenets:
And then around the time of the regional it crystallized: I was rushing! And in hindsight that made perfect sense, what else does RP's ability do other than blowing teeny-tiny scoring windows wide open? When playing I found myself clicking to draw first more often than not.
With each tweak I just found myself cutting down the ice costs a little bit more. While that list looks worlds apart from this one (it ran two archers and two susanoos, heh) the transition was really more of a gradual change than a clean break. I returned to it in a big way shortly after H&P dropped (long before it swept worlds), with a pretty neat glacier list.
I've been playing RP since Trace Amounts (those were dark terrible days full of clicking for credits), as I'm sure everyone who went to the FL regional knows by now. You too can be winning games with RP in 15 minutes or less, guaranteed! All you have to do is unlearn everything you've known to be true about RP so far. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the SMC finals due to obligations, and ceded my spot. I've had great success with it at FL's regional (2nd seed, 5th place), and ANRPC Qualifier (1st place). Seriously, the deck plays faster than my runner, and I'm a born-to-run Crim. My fastest score out in a tournament setting was within 9 minutes.