It's what it says on the tin. I renounce H&M and all its ways. Replace it with Hedge Fund and the deck is going to just get better. W2W can go too, though it's solid value over time and a pain to trash without help.
Tucana is solid here and can speed up your game a lot, worth using the Cali testing just to save the click and tutor the ice. Didn't have a lot of opportunities to do that on the day of but it came up in practice. Also, getting two archers at once feels great, but is largely impractical and unnecessary.
Went 3-3 overall, with wins against Lob kit and Tao in swiss and Sable in the cut. Losses against WT Ari, Steve, and Esa in the cut.
Wins were due to effective use of SDS threat, speed, and R&D holding up until we get an archer on it. Losses were more varied. I needed to finish scoring my first SDS to stabilize vs WT Ari on turn 4, but conduit digs fast. Not a throw on my part but I definitely had poor threat assessment. Steve loss was in part due to slightly unlucky HQ accesses but mostly due to excellent runner play, keeping my credits down and the board clear. The lack of threatening ice here was the biggest deckbuilding problem, a Stavka or Winchester would have gone a long way. Thimblerig as well would have been great here, though keeping the Descent would have been fine to save the inf. The loss against TheKing's Esa was a solid ass-kicking on his part, double icing centrals in the right order and in a timely manner while also rushing out just isn't happening with such a low ice count. It was a very educational game from my end and I was glad to finally meet such a cool player in person.
Overall the deck performed reasonably well, but the whole weekend I was wishing I was playing something more like bblum's list that I was more comfortable with as I had played a lot of rush Ob during the previous meta. (Also, watching them play in finals was a spectacle. Getting to see the plan come together while they protected the board perfectly was just awesome.) I'm not quite used to creating actually threatening asset forks the way that more skilled pilots of this style of deck are, and so I would have rather been rushing behind 5 more ice. Play what you know, folks.
Huge thanks to metamates bblum, Marcus, and London for the tournament prep and and discussion. We may not have a testing group but we are a group that can do testing. It was great to see DeeR again and to meet TheKing and Dan D. Great tournament, super smoothly run. Thanks to the TO and NANPC for giving us all a great time!
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