Decklist of the week

Jungle: Off Wiv Ya Headz (1st & Undefeated @ Sydney Megacity

Description by the author: HaverOfFun 1535

Back with another Jungle banger!

The accompanying jungle song is a remix of an old song that sets the banging vibes whether a runner accesses a Byte! or Ganked! from a central!

And a cheeky bonus track is this fitting gem to celebrate having two cloud eaters in the list (but i couldn't find a jungle version which is why it couldn't be the title lol)

Card Choices

Cloud Eater on encounter end triggers are the most busted thing you can do so I thought it would be worth it to add a second one. This was a great call cause it is by far the most common surprise flatline method of the deck, especially if you just put one on archives and a criminal plays Bravado early or when they are recovering their credits and are only expecting one of your slouch pieces of ice. The 2nd copy came at the cost of the 3rd Anemone but imo this is absolutely the right call cause the Mitra Aman can let u transition to the grinder win later in the game if you need that almost unavoidable 2 net damage from an already rezzed Anemone.

There are only 2 copies of Tatu-Bola because criminal decks on Curupira are very popular at the moment which actively make Tatu-Bola save the runner 7 credits on their way to bypassing a Brân 1.0. Boto has a much better rate for us in that scenario. The money that we would have gained from the Tatu-Bola is more than made up for in the other card I have been very high on: Regolith Mining License. Most other Jungle decks are on 2 copies of Hansei Review instead but the fact that Jungle does not need to dump agendas into archives like the Regenesis decks need to do, and the fact that we already start off most games by icing up all three centrals before putting anything into a remote server has resulted in Regoliths being incredibly tough to challenge for runners, even if they have Pinhole Threading - even if they might be facing an open archives, the thought of giving us a free Méliès trigger to get back an earlier Hedge Fund or a card they may have trashed from an earlier central run means the counterarguments to the Regolith over Hansei choice are not too convincing imo.

Otherwise it's just your standard Jungle list, meaning a Méliès deck that wins by scoring out a Lotus Haze and afterwards flatlining the runner when they commit to accessing any server and you rez and move three Ganked! to that server, either: - flatlining them directly, or - costing them so many credits on breaking one of the defending ICE that they can never really challenge any of your servers for the rest of the game, or - making them lose so many cards from their grip that they flatline the next time they see a Byte or Anemone.

If this deck idea excites you then I highly recommend looking at Rohit's original deck writeup or Spidz' superb deck analysis video that goes into some more of the specifics of the deck!

Tournament run

This deck won a game against a MuslihaT: Multifarious Marketeer in swiss and got two Intentional Draws (IDs). I'm being so fr when I say that this ID got me those IDs cause the first was in round 4 out of 7 rounds of swiss between me and my opponent who were both 3-0. The second ID also only really happened when my opponent saw what sides we were going to play. The one and only win in swiss against MuslihaT was due to them installing a Revolver early that allowed them to make runs but they essentially lost the game when a Byte access from HQ trashed their only other killer, a Carmen, leaving them without a way to break sentries for the rest of the game. They may have still been able to win by just drawing up a lot and taking a lot of damage on their way into multiaccessing R&D with Twinning but the Cloud Eater 'trash 1 installed runner card' in combination with Méliès U: Only the Brightest on R&D meant that even singles were highly unlikely to win the game. Eventually they flatlined.

Finishing top of swiss, in the top cut I played my Jungle deck three more times, beating a Zahya Sadeghi: Versatile Smuggler and the same MuslihaT deck twice. The win against Zahya came when I scored up to 5 points and time in the round was coming up, forcing the runner to go digging in one of my centrals for some points. When they cracked HQ they got slimed by seeing a bunch of ice from hand and 3 Gankeds that the Lotus Haze moved over.

The win against MuslihaT was a close one with the runner getting up on points but when they took what would have been the winning access of my remote server, the advanced card they accessed was a Ganked that had been advanced by a La Costa Grid and they flatlined because they didn't take a 1 in 3 of accessing one of the other unadvanced cards in the root of that remote.

The finals win against the same MuslihaT deck was a much cleaner affair, with the runner not getting any hits on centrals early on. As the game progressed and they accessed Byte twice and the big ice started taxing through their credits, their stack started to get really low. One of the biggest strengths of jungle against MuslihaT is that they have to play their run events more than normally if they are on Sang Kancil and want any hope of breaking an Attini for less than 9c which goes through their hitpoints even faster. The runner ended up burning through their credits and every single card in their grip and stack after I taxed everything out of them with a Lotus Haze moving two Gankeds to R&D, at which point I could safely score the last agenda to get to 7 points. This was probably the cleanest game with jungle I've ever played before and I am keen as for the recorded top cut games to come out and rewatch these killer moments!

Impending banlist

Despite how much of a big fan of this deck I am, I do recognise that Ganked! is a wildly strong card because of how much money it stands to drain from the runner with sometimes absolutely no set up costs from the corp. Unlike threats like Measured Response, this card is a threat when accessed in R&D and HQ as long as there is a sentry or code gate (or even a big barrier when the runner is multiaccessing and they hit Ganked first). Also, unlike Measured Response, it costs the corp absolutely nothing to activate, meaning there is no tension between them paying to rez ICE to keep a runner out of servers and their ability to land the kill. The former drawback of having to call your shot if you want to install it being removed by Lotus Haze is also powerful beyond what I think is reasonable for a single card. Each copy usually costs the runner 5-9 credits when accessed and often multiples just end the game on the spot through a flatline. I agree that a big part of the problem here is the Méliès U: Only the Brightest ID itself because being able to make the runner pay this tax more than 3x a game is quite powerful. I would be very surprised if Ganked does not get banned with the next banlist update so this may be the final outing of Jungle but in the case that this does not happen, I can highly recommend you take this to a continental championship near you as a very reliable and consistent strong corp deck.

Thanks!

Thanks a bunch to i am the gull for organising such an incredible Megacity event! The venue was a dream with generous space and the most incredible interactive giant pendulum art installation right next to the tables that made even downtime between rounds a blast! (feel free to dm/ping me on discord if you wanna see what the hell im talking about lol) Thanks also to Inactivist and iamtom for being a stellar judge team and managing to deck check the entire player field during swiss! Special shoutouts to RJorb for the challenging games and the great banter. It was also super to travel up and be surrounded by the crew that came up from Victoria and of course to meet new people from other Australian metas. Finally, thanks to the TAI Breakers for the deck brewing fun, the practice games and presenting different evaluations of cards to challenge my judgement of the game. It was always very energising to see people cheering me on throughout the weekend, whether from the Melbourne, the ANZ, the Microbrewers or the TAI Breakers servers - you all really kept me going!