Legality (show more) |
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Standard Ban List 23.09 (latest) |
Standard Ban List 23.08 (active) |
Rotation |
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Deck valid after Sixth Rotation |
Thanks to NSG for keeping the game alive and for making Worlds happen. Thanks to psk especially for putting so much care and love into making it work for everyone. Thanks so much for having fixed seating as an option, which made the tournament much more accessible with chronic fatigue.
Thanks to my opponents in both days for the tight plays, kind words, and for being lenient with missed triggers (this deck is difficult!).
Thanks to judges for being great literally any time they were needed.
Thanks for QtM for being exceptionally good kissers, great at Netrunner, and my friends, lovers, favorites.
Thanks to Jai, our token cishet collaborator, who provided invaluable testing help and kept helping me with matchup advice and cut maths during the event.
Thanks to all the people who I had never talked with before this weekend but came to me with words of encouragement and admiration: The King, jaypumpkin, awildturtok, sauc3, and more I cannot remember. Thanks to theo for giving us the biggest confidence boost. Oh it's so cute!
Thanks to people who supported me emotionally while I tested positive for COVID, especially Ams, Council and swearyprincess. Thanks to krys for keeping me alive.
While I didn't get to properly play into the tournament until the end, and I would have likely ended up in a very rewarding spot, I feel really good about what I got to do. This was my first time playing in a big IRL event, and I thought it was quite likely that the sensory overstimulation from being packed in a room with hundreds of people would have made me crack. I underslept a lot, I felt very overwhelmed at the venue, my chronic pain acted up, and yet when I sit down at the table for my first round I got a big adrenaline rush and everything I knew about my lists came together, and then I played tight lines for hours. I have always considered myself a "mostly online" player, and finding out that I could do this was such a big confidence boost. I really hope I get the opportunity to repeat it next year, and to play to the end that time.
Mulch was QtM's main Runner for Worlds 2023. Going into Worlds, we saw this as very clearly one of the best runners, if not the single best. While some new Corps have come up during the event that we're not exactly sure how good this can be against, we are still confident that this has a great place in the meta and might very well be a tier 1 deck, even if it's a brainpower-intensive and time-consuming list that definitely requires ample practice.
mondegreensleeves brought this to the cut and ended up 15th; Paillu went 4-1 with it and came 24th, also carried by eir amazing PE deck. I went 5-1 into ID into positive COVID test, dropping out of a guaranteed cut.
The deck had a long growth arc. Like many QtM decks, it started from crowphie musing about something that didn't sound practically feasible, and then we tried it and it looked better than expected, and it just kept looking better and better the more we iterated on it. We went crazy about it, and it lead to the longest thread in the history of QtM, beating the Sparrow one. It went something like this:
Essentially we thought it wouldn't work, then we noticed it worked against PD but thought it would obviously fold into Ob with 3x Mavirus, then we played that and it worked, but thought it would fold into assets, then we played it into assets and it was still good. We noticed a couple of clearly disadvantaged matchups, like PE, our own Ob list, Glacier Jinteki (which we thought wouldn't be workable anyway), a theoretical Front Company + SYNC Rerouting NBN deck, and a theoretical Maninthemoon Ob with more tech for it. Overall, the matchup spread was amazing. Brains were all mulchmulchmulch.
What follows is an adaptation of a guide I initially wrote internally for QtM. It's obviously not updated to the Corps that we didn't foresee for Worlds. In particular, I don't really know how this does against Glacier BtL and Punitive RH, and am pretty sure it has trouble against NWE's Tempo NEH. The matchup into the new NEH kill lists with False Lead is likely a little trickier than into the previous ones, but given that it was massively favored before I'm not especially worried. Kimberlite Ob is like BathtOb but easier.
The idea behind the deck is that we want a very synergistic package that allows us to compress lots of value into single slots. The cards that make this work overall are Cookbook, Knobkierie and Simulchip. Cookbook and Knobkierie ensure that many of our cards perform very strongly and give us value and versatility: Fermenter can net immense amount of money, Imp is a 1-card solution to all your trashing needs, Audrey can break pretty much anything including the moment it enters the game, Conduit is the only multiaccess card we need. Simulchip ensures that we can do all of this pretty much whenever needed without having to include many slots of any of our programs, and allows us to mill lots of cards from our stack with The Price and Lago Paranoa Shelter and then use the milled cards. Labor Rights works similarly, giving us 1x tech cards back for matchups where they're crucial.
We are happy to mill as quickly as possible, because our late game once we've done that is usually very strong. We can recur as many Simulchips as we need, and keep being versatile in the last crucial turns while having big bursts of value that help us steal a win. As long as it doesn't risk locking us out of a recursion late game, we're basically always happy to mill more to draw more. Lago basically only stops being valuable when the deck is over.
The deck is built to usually respond to the Corp's gameplan rather than act proactively: Botulus and Audrey really help us camp remotes consistently in a way that can't be taxed out economically. However, we do have the option to switch gears dramatically at any time, thanks to our ability to reposition Botuli and especially to Conduit (which synergizes with Knobkierie and Cookbook in a way that makes it way more explosive). This provides us with both a way to get out of bad games where Corp tricks made it difficult for us to interact, and with a trick to try and suddenly win games that are going to time by getting a points advantage when it matters.
Mulch is very complex when it comes to dealing with ice. Many decks have a "full rig" and "support" for that, such as Cleaversaw + Takobi supported by Botulus or Bankhar. Mulch is different in that you have multiple options that can be correct and what you end up doing depends a lot on the matchup and the draw. Everything is kind of a support breaker for everything else, and your "normal breakers" often are just supporting your holes in other areas rather than being the main way you break ice.
Botulus is an essential 3x in the list. It tends to be parked on a remote ice to make it completely irrelevant; more copies can come to clog the remote more, and promise to get Simulchipped back on new ice if the old one is overinstalled on. You will sometimes have Botulus on central servers if you have specific kinds of pressure that make it palatable (Fenris/Imp/Conduit), but the usual function, at least against decks that score behind ice, is to make that plan completely unfeasible.
Audrey deals with mostly everything else, at some cost. You usually don't have much trouble finding cards to throw away, and counters on Audrey will be more of a bottleneck for your ability to get into tall servers. You can kind of get locked in a similar way to Aumakua, but Imp and Knobkierie help a lot. In every matchup where you're not expecting to be taxed on HP and where the Corp builds some kind of iced remote, you should probably expect to install Audrey at some point.
Cleaver, Buzzsaw and Revolver have very different functions depending on the matchup. Sometimes they will act as backup to your other, better tools; but often, at least one is going to be important enough to install; some matchups require all three. Knowledge of ice suites is essential for figuring out what you should do with each of these breakers, and it's important to know that, because sometimes that makes a difference between Moshing this turn or the next!
Leech is a very important card in the list and should be thought of as another piece of your breaker suite - again, kind of irrelevant at times, very important at others (you would never mosh Leech against Jinteki!). It often gives the little bit of help that makes your normal breakers great, and it can also mean card discounts for Audrey. Audrey + Imp + Leech + Knobkierie is a whole breaker suite that can often get you through whole games with the help of a Botulus or two; its longevity (and even its ability to survive through a Mavirus and keep working!) should never be discounted.
"What do I do with this breaker" depends on both the matchup and your draw order and setup, and it's too difficult of a matter to give strict rules here. However, consider that for each of your breakers you have three main options:
... and a secret, more advanced fourth option:
Decks will tax you on chips in different amounts and ways. You can start a game knowing that you will need about N chips to have a good chance in this matchup. This is important because it tells you whether you should mosh your Labor Rights away, set up to install Fenris and run HQ, use them for more frivolous things, mosh breakers because "you can always chip them back if needed", decline to use Lago out of fear of milling your recursion, etc.
Things the Corp can do that tax your chips are:
Simulchip is the best card in the deck in terms of how much value and options it can give you, so you should always try to maximize it anyway. If you're not sure what you should be using it on, it's probably more Fermenters.
Remember, the best time to use Simulchip is right after popping a Fermenter, because that translates to an install rather than a trade. This also means that in cases where you get to choose between a Fermenter and another program with The Price, it tends to be correct to get the Fermenter, because it will "turn" into the program later if needed anyway.
Also, remember NCIGS!
Some games don't come down to Labor Rights, but most do. There are faster and slower ways to go about them, depending on what kind of help you need.
It's unlikely that it's correct to play LR before your deck has run out: it's an "extra gas" card, not an "improve my deck" card, and anyway you can probably get through the rest of that deck faster than you think you can. I believe the exceptions are pretty much the following:
There's something that you need to get back as soon as possible, maybe right now, or you will lose. That can be Simulchip, Pinhole, LtF, Fenris.
Exceptions aside, LR says "recur three cards and draw one". Let's see what we can get back:
Simulchip is the default option. It's just that good, it does what any program can do because it is any program. Most of your LRs will be triple Simulchip.
(more on the above: just generally keep in mind that a Steelskin in hand draws you your whole LR stack, so keeping one in hand until the late game doesn't make it worthless)
Your economy in this deck consists of 3x Raindrops Cut Stone, 3x Moshing, 1x Dirty Laundry, 3x Strike Fund, 2x Paladin Poemu, 3x Fermenter.
What this basically translates to is that you have some burst economy and some drip economy that lasts well into the very late game. As a consequence, you might have setup speed problems, but you partly deal with that by basically not needing credits to break ice. You really only need the money to install Knobkierie and a couple of other key cards, and maybe trash a few Corp things along the way. This translates to needing some burst but really not that much, so you can Mosh burst away, actually! Not that you should necessarily do that, but if a Moshing puts you in the place where you're happy with money, RCS is a fine card to throw away for that.
Your first Fermenter is probably going to be the card that helps you reach financial stability, and after that, Fermenters are for the longer game. You can still use them in a bursty way: if the Corp presents some threat, you can Simulchip one in immediately and click it at the start of your turn for 6c (assuming you have Cookbook), but you're trying to get some more significant payoff usually.
Managing Hoshiko flips is very important. Once you have Knobkierie down, it might be correct to try and run every turn, but before that, it's actually quite important to flip back with near-regularity. It's easy to underestimate this: the mental pitfall that many fall into is to believe that if you choose to stay flipped rather than flipping back, you are choosing to "trade 1c for a card". That's not the case, because you're not just losing a credit next turn: you're also denying yourself the 2c gain from flipping again later on! So really by choosing to stay flipped, you're trading 3c for a card, a much worse proposition, and one you'd often want to avoid if your early econ is looking sketchy.
It's easy to see Mulch as a poor deck but it's not necessarily so. While the Fermenters are few slots, they can get very big, and you also have the ability to recur them many times. This means you actually get really rich against slow decks that give you time, such as R+ Assets or Azmari Glacier, where it's common to get your Fermenters to 6 or 7 counters. Faster decks like PD require more of other sources of burst (and more reliance on Audrey over reg breakers) because you don't have as much time to grow your Fermenters or set up all the recursion you want. This burst will often include just popping the orbs early and immediately chipping them back in, them LRing the chips early because there's no time to mill your deck against PD, etc. All of these decisions are always very complicated and hinge on the contingencies of the game.
Some cards still deserve to be written about a little. I'll do some of that here.
24 comments |
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16 Oct 2023
crowphie
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16 Oct 2023
Jai
Stopped reading at ‘token cishet collaborator’ Gonna need that on a name card now, thanks 10/10 |
16 Oct 2023
mondegreensleeves
with a week left to worlds, I knew it was time to pick some decks, and people were on so much about this mulch business that I had to give it a go. izzy and I played two games so I could get the feel for it, and by the middle of game one I could only say, as I've picked up from other QTs: "this deck fucks and knows what sex is" I feel like I lucked out by knowing how to play against many of the corps I did, but my lack of practice is evident from being among the first to be removed from the cut, and from the round 2 game against testrunning's NEH that was on stream. the fact that I lasted as long as I did is purely from a cool decklist built by better players than me, and the knowledge I absorbed from them through osmosis, by which I mean hanging out on calls and skimming threads while I was supposed to be working. corporate schedules are diurnal propoganda, and time zones should be abolished. also, in my efforts to prep-and-forget, I missed the update that LtF was added to the list, so I was only on 47 cards. cut game 2, Extrac asked me why "mulk" was my deck name. if I'd thought I'd do well, I might've made a better effort to confirm the final list, but... to our nameless builder: I wish I could have done better in the cut in your absence, as these were your decks, and we'd already known you'd be in the cut before the test results came in (guarisci presto!!!). I can only be proud of how I did, and this felt like the kind of validation I needed to be more confident about practicing. I enjoyed you crushing me in the mirror during round 6 ("no 241, no ID, we play it out and see what happens"), even if it's QTMphobic that we got paired up. someone needs to fix cobra, because that's a serious bug. thank you so much for building two powerful decks that were immensely fun to pilot, thanks to the QTs who helped with the building, and to all of QTM for your love and support. thank you to NSG for all your work into making this such a phenomenal weekend - there's no top cut to make, no tournament to play, without the people who rangled it all together. I wish PSK a very You Deserve A Vacation. also shoutouts to token cishet collaborator and |
16 Oct 2023
JayPumpkin
Congratulations on your incredible (first!!) worlds performance. It was an absolute pleasure to meet you, despite my abject panic at CoS when I realized who I had just sat down in front of. I look forward to wishing you luck in future top cuts! |
16 Oct 2023
AugustusCaesar
This is an incredible deck and writeup. Even though I have money on the Hosh ban, I really hope she doesn't get the axe now so I can play this all day every day!! |
16 Oct 2023
AnOddRadish
Is the deck name a reference to the old MtG card that self mills 4 that the price acts like? |
16 Oct 2023
crowphie
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16 Oct 2023
koga
This is such great shapergeist bullshit. Will 1000% play and let my brain go mulchmulchmulchmulch |
18 Oct 2023
izzy
mulchmulchmulchmulchmulch omg this deck was so fun in testing we love hivemind maxx at home |
18 Oct 2023
maninthemoon
Mulch Mulch Mulch! :D I'm sorry we didn't get to meet. I hope you feel better soon! |
20 Oct 2023
Testrunning
Ok, looking more into this list, it is truly inspiring. Just wish I had known it before preparing for worlds, would have been fun to play. Thank you qtm for building this beautiful deck |
21 Oct 2023
maninthemoon
This deck is very fun! It feels like trying to ride a crashing train! In the best way possible! Powerful and inevitable :) I love it! I look forward to playing with slots, but I'm still trying to understand the wonderful creation of Mulch. Long Live Mulch!!! mulchmulchmulchmulch. . . |
mulchmulchmulch
I let the deck down with my play, mulch performed so well all day. This list rules and you should be so damn proud.