Venti Matcha Latte- 41st @ Worlds 2023

The basic strategy of this deck is stack six upgrades, use Pivot and Gaslight to tutor a MAD and 2 End of the Lines, play the MAD, play the End of the Lines. We have 74 cards because you want to play as many useful upgrades as possible and have a big RnD to hide your agendas in after you Drudge them away. The card quality of money and ice doesn't drop off much, and the abundance of operation tutors means assembling the combo isn't hard. Having a larger deck also provides more fuel for Anvil.

There is surprisingly little Criminals and Shapers can do if they get MAD'd that cannot be played around by trashing more cards with MAD. Criminals have No One Home, but it sees little play. Anarchs have Steelskin Scarring (they need to hold two) and Maw. However, Steelskin can be cleared out from hand with Urban Renewals, and Hoshiko decks are pretty diverse in terms of which console they slot. I kept this deck on the backburner and focused on finding another corp that has more good matchups across the board, but that corp didn't show up, so I chose violence.

On the day, Venti went 5-2, beating two Lats, two Hoshikos, and an Arissana and then losing to a Lat and a Sable piloted by eventual runner-up CableCarnage. Against the Lat, I thought I could disrespect Conduit on my naked RnD for a turn despite having cards to defend it. They then found 2 agendas that turn, and then another at the end of the game on their last possible access. Against CableCarnage, I was behind for much of the game, with him managing his money well, pinholing my Urbans, trashing my shit, and using Twinning to pressure my centrals. Even then, the game was lost on one of the last possible accesses on RnD.

Play advice:

• Click to draw a lot. You need to install at least a couple upgrades to make running the remote threatening and more to threaten winning the game.
• For Ob: Mavirus is supposed to fetch Drudge Work or Regolith, or Warroid Tracker if the runner is about to trash your remote. Drudge Work and Regolith almost always should fetch Urban. Urban should usually tutor Gaslight, but if you're very flooded you should get Spin and if you have already have the combo pieces and need more upgrades you should get Rashida.
• Earlier in the game against Cable, he trashed a Drudge Work I installed that was either unrezzed or still had 2 counters. Later, I got flooded, which makes me wonder if maximizing Drudge Work by keeping it and one agenda in hand for longer is the move.
• If you have an Urban ticking down and not much else to do with your clicks, play Pivot to tutor the kill piece you need. The runner trashing Pivot out of HQ is a real possibility if you hold onto it for too long.

Changing Anvil to a more taxing ice may be correct- runners seem to have more fodder available to them than I thought. The trash-on-encounter is sometimes useful for Ob purposes, but other times you need to keep the particular cards you have installed. Playing more Rashidas could also be good, but remote space- for assets, at least- is precious.

Overall, I'd say the deck is a decent meta pick for metas where you expect to not see much Maw, Freedom, or Infinite Imp. You also need a fast runner or to be very good at shuffling.

Thanks Null Signal for putting on an amazing event, MulganDragon for the help building and testing the deck, and Unband for being very cool people, was great meeting most of you for the first time.