Fried Shrimp 🍤 18th @ EMEA

This is the Consume Hoshiko deck that myself, headmoths, and izzy took to 18th, 28th, and 31st respectively at EMEA. I've described this as an "incredible, shit" meta call in a couple places because our read on what we were expecting didn't really pan out.

Going into EMEA we'd seen a lot of horizontal decks that present boards which are really difficult to keep up with, and a lot of combo-adjacent Outfit decks trying to score from hand. Remind you of anything? Limes' 2020 World Champion Hoshiko deck includes this paragraph in the writeup:

"It's designed to work against combo decks like Asa and Titan, clearing out combo pieces from HQ with Imp and HQ Interface, and maintaining the ability to do that with Consume and Friday Chip. It also works great against other corp wincons like Punitive Counterstrike, Hard-Hitting News and the like, and does decently against asset spam (provided they don't score out before you find your breakers!)"

Interesting. That sounds a lot like the Cascadia meta, right? Maybe we can make this idea work again 3 years down the line. So Thursday night, 25 hours before registration closed, we started putting together a list with FRIday Chip and IMP as an anti-meta hate deck, hence the name. I suggested Prognostic Q-Loop entirely as a joke, but upon actually trying it the following day it was immediately apparent that it might be the best card in the deck. #SLOTS gets everyone though, and eventually Friday Chip was turned into Knobkierie to free up space. 2 Q-Loops were tried, but we wanted the second Consume and the influence needed to come from somewhere.

So a great meta call, right? We'd expected a high level of Mavirus thanks to Aumakua, but the massive numbers of triple Mavirus Ob wasn't on our radar nearly as much as it should be. Honestly, this list likely loses to most of the ones in top cut and if I hadn't bubbled out on strength of schedule it seems unlikely I would have gone too far.

I do want to make 2 final points though:

• This deck feels like it has legs. There's a bunch of slots that need changing, the killer situation tries to respect Stavka but frankly just sucks at being a functional deck the rest of the time, and.... yeah, that's not surprising. This list had barely a day of testing and this is absolutely not the final form of this archetype. I'm not going too deep into specific card slots because the deck needs a ton of work and we need a ton of practice with it, but I stand by my meta call - this list has a ton going for it and shouldn't be written off in the future.

• This isn't a Freedom deck we're importing into Hoshiko because card draw good. I know this will get brought up if I don't mention it so to be totally clear - this is a Hoshiko deck that plays the trashy cards as a very specific callout to a predicted metagame, not a Freedom deck that wanted more draw. We're not trying to trash everything, and we're not trying to trash things before we can install an Imp. Don't get it twisted.

Replays! I make some real fuckups in some of these games, no judgey <3

Round 1 vs Ob

Round 2 vs Ob

Round 3 vs Thule

Round 4 vs R+

Round 5 vs NEH

Round 6 vs Ob

Half the justification for bringing this was how much fun it was, and it certainly delivered. Much love, and see folks at Worlds 🍤