Fully dedicated to efficiency! - 1st at 2019 NISEI Worlds

This is my Asa deck with which i won worlds 2019. It is a tempo deck that has different ways to score 7 points, usually by finishing with reconstruction contract+ dedication ceremony for vitruvius counter and a food later. However, it also has other strong ways to score agendas depending on what you draw.

The heart of the deck is the ridiculously efficient econ engine of rashida/VLC/fully operational. This allows you to outpace any runner. On top of that, Asa basically gives you 4 click turns (5 with beth jeeves) and hedgefund is there to complement it with some reliable credits.

What makes the deck hard to deal is that you can/want to ICE your assets. This makes it very hard for a runner to contest assets, because it is not enough to just have asset hate like paricia, you also need to be able to beat ICE to actually use it. Because all ICE except vanilla is painful to facecheck, this allows you to also never advance agendas. The runner has to be careful which remotes he runs, because you don't want to waste clicks/tools breaking ICE just to find another asset that is also expensive to trash. As a bonus, astrolabe doesn't give much cards due to ICEing your remotes and in principle, you don't need any board to win.

My package to then score out and win is fast advance and lakshmi. The reconstruction contract and lakshmi pair well with executive bootcamp, giving you effectivly 3 copies of each to find depending on the situation and being excellent apoc/ddos tech. It is also very hard for a runner to include both lakshmi hate and clot! And you can deal with clot by purging with effcomm counters, or CVS, which can be conveniently installed during a score with an Asa trigger. At last, because the deck is so fast and gets money quickly, it can also rush out a few points early by using multiple ICE. With Asa, you can turn an empty remote into a scoring remote by installing the agenda, getting a second ICE and still have 2 clicks left to pressure the runner in another way. This is very potent against anarchs and crims.

Even though the agenda suite is designed to be used for reconstruction contract fast advance, vitruvius and efficiency committee's counters are also both very strong to just make value plays. An example would be to install a card against 419 with turtle, take a click with effcomm, purge with jeeves, and then do stuff. It is like a three click turn, but you also reset turtle. Or just play more fully operational with vitruvius counters.

What i really like about this deck that is is very flexible and allows you to do a lot of different plays. But this also makes it hard to play, because seeing the best line in a given situation can be quite hard. Misusing agenda counters can be backbreaking.

In preparation of worlds, i refined my inital list and threw out cute cards like malia for film critic or team sponsorship. The last last minute change i made and which was great was cutting some lakshmi and team sponsorships for hedgefunds, which is a good card. Who could have known that! In the end i ended up with this list which only plays one true one-of. Some cuts had to be made, but basically almost every card is a playset, which i think is very neat.

I had a blast playing at worlds this year, and asa carried me hard. In the end it lost twice, once in swiss and in the winner bracket final after 12 games. Both losses were against freedom and a little bit unlucky, but they were still both great games.

The other matches were against apoc anarchs, 419 and hayley. 419 couldn't deny enough economy or contest assests. Hayley usually couldn't beat lakshmi, and was struggling to contest the board and keep the clot threat alive. Apoc anarchs were quite hard and i actually lost my entire board 3 times. But in the end, apoc did nothing against eff comm counters and i fast advanced to victory.

At last, i want to thank NISEI for an amazing event and keeping the game alive.