There’s been a renaissance in glacier play of late and, while Replicating Perfection is weaving drunkenly around the top tables while high on Sundew, as always your weekly serving of jank is here to provide you with a sub-optimal but potentially entertaining alternative.

Tennin Institute! I love Tennin. I feel like, if you get it rolling, tennin kind of fits the same mold as Building a Better World, Engineering the Future and Near Earth Hub. Easily met conditional acceleration. Of course, that ‘easily met’ is somewhat subjective based on meta, but I feel like Tennin is moving towards being in a good place right now. With more and more runners dedicating slots (or their ID- looking at you Whizzard) to taking on horizontal heavy Replicating Perfection and Near Earth Hub, a more vertically focused glacier deck can shine.

Recently Tennin has also gotten some really excellent ICE in the form of Crick and Quicksand. While Crick does let the runner get their successful run, you can always do the hilarious play of re-installing a trashed Crisium Grid onto archives, rezzing it and looking the runner in the eye.

Here we go then: Tennin Glacier

Identity: Jinteki: Tennin Institute: The Secrets Within

Cards: 49 / 45

Agenda points: 20 / 20

Influence: 15 / 15

Agenda (8)

3x NAPD Contract

1x Nisei MK II

3x The Future Perfect

1x Utopia Fragment

Asset (7)

1x Adonis Campaign ●●

3x Jackson Howard ●●●

1x Melange Mining Corp.

2x Tech Startup

ICE (17)

2x Crick

2x Fire Wall ●●●●

3x Ice Wall ●●●

2x Inazuma

2x Komainu

3x Quandary

3x Quicksand

Operation (12)

3x Celebrity Gift

1x Commercialization ●

3x Interns

3x Subliminal Messaging

2x Trick of Light

Upgrade (5)

3x Caprice Nisei

2x Crisium Grid ●●

Decklist Courtesy of Little Chiba

The advantage of playing a glacier deck is you can run an extremely low agenda count, forcing the runner to make fruitless runs or let you get your powerful ID ability running. In this case we’re going for mostly taxing agendas in The Future Perfect and NAPD contract, with a singleton of Utopia fragment and Nisei MkII to aim to score at the ideal time to snowball the game further. With only 8 Agendas in the deck, the runner is going to spend a lot of time whiffing on those runs they have to keep making to keep you down.

One of the key abilities of Tennin is the ability to never-advance a 4/2 if the runner has a runless turn. You can also bluff doing this with a 5/3 using trick of light, or use it to score an unadvanced 4/2 even if the runner has successfully run somewhere else. A pair of Trick of Light let you mix up your agenda installs even more, allowing you to even score out an unadvanced 5/3 off the board in a pinch

Few agendas let you stock up on ICE. Ice Wall and Fire Wall give you some strong, cost efficient barriers to lock the runner out and provide parasite-resistant targets for your inevitable free advancements. Quicksand is an ideal third barrier, providing a strong disincentive to keep running whichever server you install it on (probably R&D and/or Archives). Quandary gives you some additional tools to lock the runner out early, while Inazuma and Crick provide Yog.0 resistant code gates for the mid/late game. Finally, a pair of Komainu provide some real annoyance to runners who’ve found themselves without a parasite or switchblade. With 8 ICE at 1 credit to rez and 5 at 3, you should have little difficulty setting up an early wall that demands the runner go get their breakers as quickly as possible, leaving you time to build up.

Economy in this deck is keyed to fit the low running costs. Celebrity Gift is a safe bet with very few agendas and I’m opting for Subliminal Messaging over hedge fund to get economy rolling from a low start. Tech Startup is a really fun card to play with as it lets you install assets like Melange Mining Corp (or Eliza’s Toolbox for all of you who want to get that card working) and still have 3 clicks to spend during the turn, ensuring you get at least one hit off them. Alternatively you can go grab your Adonis Campaign and get some more clickless economy going while you set up. Interns can let you recover either of these key assets if they get trashed, or install a deep piece of ICE later in the game for free. A single Commercialization can sit waiting in your hand until the critical moment where you need to burst ahead or recover from a vamp or siphon.

Finally, to shore up servers that are looking a little shaky, Crisium Grid and Caprice Nisei make getting those successful runs that much harder, while Caprice doubles as premium remote protection.

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With a high number of Atman-proof barriers, you should be able to leverage Kate’s reliance on Lady to get some traction in the Shaper matchup. Try and keep a Crisium Grid on R&D and then play the never-advance game with a taxing remote. Avoid using your trick of lights if you can help it, since having two will let you fast-advance a 4/2 to get a surprise win when she switches to banking up enough to always be able to get into your remote.

Against Andromeda, turtle up on your centrals and wear her out. Be careful not to build your remote to early lest you give her an easy target for security testing and bank job. Don’t be afraid to straight up advance your ice walls to really make the runs take a toll. You’ll hopefully get it back with Commercialization later in the game!

Leela is a fairly straight forward matchup as she’s very unlikely to get her tempo machine rolling against you. Leela decks can rarely run consistently so you’re going to get your advanceable ICE snowballing quickly, just be careful not to over-invest in one, particularly one that is unrezzed in case she gets a lucky steal and bounces it. Ouch.

Whizzard is making a resurgence and can be a pain, but you should be able to find scoring windows and force him into bad decisions. Control his Datasucker count and try and prevent him building up infinite money on Kati Jones by forcing him to check your remote fairly regularly with unadvanced assets or NAPD Contracts.

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