Decklist of the week

Catcophony (1st @ Vancouver MC)

Description by the author: Paillu 1697

meowmeowmewo, mewmyaomyaamewmeow. Meow. mewmeow, Meow!

-ahem-

Chastushka is a weapon for cowards and I have proof of concept. Cacophony is a strong enough Sabotage-based win condition that we can deviate from classic run event-powered Esa lists into something that maybe doesn't have the super high roll starts, but gains flexibility in important ways and creates a terrifying endgame engine that can shut down many corps ability to effectively continue the game. Daeg is so, so real here, I promise.

How did we arrive here?

I started out by just figuring that I hadn't tested Esâ yet in the new meta, I'd heard a couple of comments that xi wasn't great at the moment, but I have a large affection for the ID and figured we must have gained something in all of the new cards. I began in more of the typical Ghosttongue-Chastushka package but slotted a Cacophony and a set of Gourmands (I think Fueno might have been there too), figuring it gave a bit better asset control than the ID traditionally had and it did say "Sabotage".

I brought up some of my results in QtM, being happy with Cacophony as a card and also liking Lie Low a lot in the Ghosttongue lists alongside Running Hot. Eli mentioned something about Cacophony being worthwhile "even without the Daeg combo" and I chuckled, but something stuck.

I noticed that other anarchs seemed to be doing well running Odore-Buzzsaw-Leech as a breaker suite, and I thought, why not here, I'm already running a good number of Virtual Resources and Cacophony is good enough that I think I can start trimming back Chastushkas to have more installables and a robust rig. I tried it, played a few games, then filtered currently legal Virtuals to see what other package options were. I scrolled to Daeg, I stopped, I remembered Eli's comment, "Daeg..." I thought, sure, let's get silly on jnet for a bit. I cut Chastushkas entirely, I slot Daeg, I slot two Illumination and The Twinning, let's go! And then Daeg-Cacophony just goes so hard, in the list, I feel like I'm losing it. Surely I'm hallucinating success. I keep winning by wide margins.

I try out various econ and breaker packages with my win condition and they all performed similarly well. I tried traditional breakers, I tried Matryoshka, eventually I settled on just Bankhar, Begemot, and 2x Botulus being perfectly good enough as I developed some real theory behind playing the deck. That looks a bit fragile on paper, but the reality is quite a bit different. Between Bankhar, Gourmand, Esâ, and various events, there is enough early pressure and disruption to strain the corp's gameplan, and then once you are set up, any server where you can potentially steal and/or trash a card presents a fairly significant threat for the game to spiral out of control in a bad way for the corp. You're pressuring everywhere simultaneously, so while the corp might be able to lock you out of one server effectively, they cannot lock you out of all of then and keep their money up and prevent decking out and do what they need to do to actually win.

If you hit two agendas in archives or on a central multiaccess with Daegcophony online, it essentially guarantees that the corp will be sabotaging 3-6 cards per turn cycle for the remainder of the game. If they manage to score something for themselves, they sabo one from Marrow and you get a charge, which means even more sabotage for them or more cards for you. Nuka is the secondary charge target, this deck loves more than most to have a semi-permanent click to apply diesel button, but we are also running Twinning and Solidarity badge, which don't feel awful to eat the trigger either. Daeg has consistently earned his slot and supercharged the already good cards that we're already wanting to play.

Up until the last second, the deck was still running 1x Illumination, which I cut for Zenit, a Pinhole, and also cut a Strike Fund and the 3rd Gourmand for 2 Sure Gamble for a bit more liquid cash. This brought be from a tight 45 to 46 cards, which I was fine with. In hindsight, I'd cut the Bahia Bands for another Pinhole especially with the Zenit, but Bahia in Esâ is such a pet card for me. The illumination was good, don't get me wrong, there are so many small installables here that it was just so much gas when it landed and I had turns in practice games where I simply clicked Nuka twice and Bankhar'ed into RD click 3 with Illumination to install whatever survived the run and felt good about it.

I had a night before panic about the Illumination retaining value in open list cut games that prompted the changes. I was reasonably confident in it, but having a server-specific run event was counter to the philosophy of pressuring everything. I worried that in the cut it would prompt them to preemptively defend RD, making it harder to land Finalities, whereas in the closed list Swiss rounds, the deck definitely does benefit from (but critically, does not rely on) the corp proactively overdefending HQ anticipating a Chastushka barrage. I decided Zenit provided another unique ID trigger, doing the deck's two most favorite things, sabotaging and drawing cards and seemed more robust than Illumination.

Overall, I think there's still a lot of room for experimentation, I think the non-green influence pips could definitely change and adapt, but the overall deck is quite strong and demonstrates that we now have the tools for more diverse Esâ builds to exist. The deck's only loss over the weekend was in early swiss rounds to Hoothoot's (who went on to take 3rd overall) Nuvem that got the lightning fast Nuvem start while all of my ID trigger cards and pressure seemed buried at the bottom of the deck.

I've been somewhat down on the Elevation meta, but developing this deck and having so much fun in every single game I played over the weekend has given me a lot of energy and hope. Big thanks to all of my opponents and the organizers for the Vancouver Megacity, it was amazing.

ribbit