Trash Panda - 1st at CoL - 1st & 2nd at 2019 NISEI Worlds

So this is the story of Freedom Khumalo: Crypto-Anarchist and how almost the whole NWE team ended up on it for the World Championship 2019 including Pinsel and testrunning placing 1st and 2nd.

It all started, when our team (@Pinsel, @testrunning and myself) got a late confirmation that we could participate in the wonderful tournament that was Crown of Lasers before Worlds. Since we had to make a decision on ID's before the tournament we quickly decided that I would be playing Anarch and HB and since i already got MaxX and Valencia as lasered ID's, I went for Freedom Khumalo. A quick research on nrdb found the Dyer List ( shoutout to jamesgrey who made the original version ) that had a strong core but in my mind had issues setting up properly. So i just cut every card that was not important for the game plan and juggled a little bit with the remaining cards cutting Paperclip, Consume and even Yusuf but ended up putting them back in and just go down to the most powerful events so that 3 Street Peddlers could be justified.

Sadly we spent a lot of time testing other stuff so this deck was left on the bench until Crown of Lasers. So I was totally unprepared and the list was pretty much untested.

In the 5 rounds of Crown of Lasers Swiss I did not drop a single game, carrying my team with a 9-1 run to a convincing victory of the whole tournament. While there were lucky draws involved for sure, taking over games eventually and trashing cards left and right felt amazing and reminded me of the old Noise.

Some stuff i figured out on friday evening:

1. Most importantly, the combo of Knobkierie and Imp was already strong in Colors of Disease back at Euros 2018 and in Khumalo it is much more natural. Imp can handle so many problems that other cards can't while also being a pressure tool for HQ and R&D (see Colors of Disease description).

2. You don't need many viruses in Khumalo. Pelangi, Imp and Yusuf already create enough pressure and there are a lot of 0 costs card, that you trash with Khumalo without even having a virus installed. Pelangi and Yusuf are excellent together though, since they break ICE for so cheap and are never running out with the help of Knobkierie.

3. Consume is your lategame economy if you need it and it does very well at that. If you manage to use Knobkierie, Stargate, Imp, Freedom Khumalo: Crypto-Anarchist and Hippo in a single turn it gives you insane amount of value.

4. Pelangi speeds up your setup, since you need less breakers to be able to run. It also nicely deals with Excalibur which would be quite the problem for a lategame deck like this.

5. Stargate is amazing to finish games and control corp draws. It is probably the stronges pseudo multiaccess card in the game right now competing with The Turning Wheel.

6. Street Peddler is more important than I thought, since it synergizes with everything you want to do. You want to get to your set up as quickly as possible and you don't want to spend money and time to do it. It also has good synergy with Stimhack and the heap breakers.

At first I thought that I was just somewhat lucky, but people kept asking me about the Khumalo deck that did so well. So I told them what I experienced and my two teammates from CoL,@percomis and @terrificy picked it up as well for Worlds.

While I did not do so well with the deck in the main event, Pinsel and testrunning overperformed. Probably because of their profound experience with Noise it just felt natural to adapt a similar playstyle. I am very happy and proud of both of them doing so well. Congratulations and very well played!