Ever since OAI rotated, I’ve been thinking kinda passively about Blue Sun. It’s my favorite ID, and the one I had my first real success crafting a deck around (and had that deck not suck a lot). I played it exclusively last regional season, and over 4 regionals, I lost a total of 3 games with it. So now I’ve been kinda thinking, without being able to turn OAI into free cash, what can this ID do that still feels powerful?
This ID picks up cards for a refund. Obviously this is still great with Adonis Campaign, and this still seems like a staple of what the ID should run. At least one, and ways to tutor it, and probably Preemptive to recur it. Because things like Interns and Friends don’t exist any more, it’s probably a safer idea to run 2x Adonis, because this card really helps power the ID.
In the first several Blue Sun decks, people were also experimenting with The Root. Being able to get Root value on a turn and then suck it back to hand is effectively a Beanstalk. Additional value can be obtained if you can protect it for a couple turns and use a Boot Camp and The Root to rez an ICE for 4c less than advertised, and then replay that (or another) ICE in its place. Obviously all this is a lot slower than gaining 13c in a turn, but that just means BS has to run slightly more reasonable ICE than Curtain Wall.
Because of BS’s ability to not have to keep all it’s ICE rezzed over all it’s servers at once, it is still possible to run the more punishing upper-mid-sized ICE, such as Tollbooth, DNA Tracker, and Tithonium, although you probably have to be careful about how many you can afford to run of them.
Looking at the assets I named a paragraph ago, I noticed that they both are fairly expensive assets that have a payoff. There are surprisingly few expensive assets with good payoffs, but another one that is available to Weyland is Mumbad Construction Co. This doesn’t get much value the turn you rez it, but it certainly can if you use Dedication Ceremony, in which case you can use it to FA an Old Hollywood the turn that you rez it.
The issue with all this is that you can only have one asset per server, protecting multiple servers sucks, and World’s Plaza sucks worse than making two servers. I guess the solutions to that include sucking it up and creating one server and one poorly defended server, only playing one value asset and hope it can carry you enough money wise, and trying out Full Emerson Rec Studio.
Something else I’ve seen before is using Breaker Bay Grid to rez high value assets, returning BBG to your hand the next turn in order to fix the cost of said asset, and then return said asset on a future turn for further value. This might seem pretty slow, and that’s because it is. However, if your going whole hog on the Rec Studio, BBG probably provides insane value. That being said, it still sounds super slow getting everything set up. I’m probably going to try it out for shits, but I don’t expect much to come of it. What I do hope is to get a better handle on what does feel good in Blue Sun right now, if anything.
Using choice advanceable ICE with Priority Construction and then dumping counters with RPC has been discussed a but already, but i thought I’d pitch in my 2 cents on it while I’m chatting. It seems interesting, but it has flaws in that it requires the runner to run on the server before you use the counters. The obvious downside to this is that if the runner is running the server, there’s a chance they simply get in and steal the agenda you were going to RPC the following turn. The other downside is that if your money is reliant on the runner rezzing your ICE, if they never actually run your remote, you might be too poor to finish the game while they win in centrals.
Anyhow, this made a good distraction to write on the train to Podova, Italy to complete in their SC this afternoon =). Hopefully there’s some coherent points in there somewhere, and maybe we can figure out what BS can do well enough to warrant playing again.