Philadelphia Regionals Report

Tournaments and Events
23

Yeah, my buddy brought his PE deck to our regionals and I knew I’d probably be matched up with him at some point. Also, everyone was buzzing about Hokusai and PE at the time, so bringing 1 copy of Net Shield to TR made sense to me. It completely changes the math, and I managed to win 7-2 against him even with early brain damage from a EoW. It was just a long, grinding game, keeping my hand size up and running once a turn or so. I try to get a KJ in play and don’t play any other money cards when I’m against PE… just use them as buffers to soak damage. Losing them doesn’t hurt too much, and it can protect your more important cards. I agree with Sly that the 40 card thing is overblown; having 40, 41, or 42 cards or whatever in your deck, if it even had any impact at all, is incredibly marginal.

What are your thoughts on Indexing these days after playing around with it a bit more? It seems like overkill to give Shapers Indexing, Interface and Maker’s Eye, and honestly they’re all great cards. I can’t wait to see what C&C offers to mix it up…

24

I still love Indexing. I’ve played with 3 since I started using this deck, and have never regretted it. Jinteki getting better is only helping it - a big Jinteki strength is how risky big digging is against them. Indexing completely circumvents that. It does require a bit of setup, because you want to run R&D twice in one turn, but you can often hide what you’re planning simply by taking money and only play the cards (breakers, tinkering) on the turn you play Indexing.

Corps mostly misplay it though. If I find two agendas with indexing, I’ll steal one but have to leave the other - usually not for the next turn, but the turn after. If the corp drew two extra cards he’d find the agenda, but I often see corps merely doing their mandatory draw, even after I’ve set up their top cards.

I think minimizing deck size is important when my economy is only Opus (+Construct), but one extra card doesn’t hurt that much. 41 or 42 is okay, more is stretching it.