Ob-solutely Fabulous - 1st Edinburgh Winter CO

u n d e f e a t e d o n j n e t

Uhh, ahem, now that's out of the way

Here we go then, another reason to run three no free lunch in every runner for the foreseeable. A few of the elements of this list were suggested back when the cards were first spoiled, and the first version of the list in Ob I saw was from TaylorSwiftie on jnet. I've been tinkering with it for a few weeks since (going a very silly 32-0 online) and took it to the Edinburgh winter CO today where it went 3-1, finally stumbling to a cautious apoc player who knew the list well but still taking the event.

Weyland asset spam has been relying on urban renewable bait into econ warfare + hhn for a while (since judge was banned) which has always been a bit lacking in teeth. Unless you could sync up multiple renewals you were generally stuck trying to land the remaining two damage with something like Azef or Contract Killer and introducing a bunch of different points of failure, as well as dead to stoneship or steelskin, which all left the deck feeling a bit short on teeth. Enter Borealis and a few new pieces that glue everything back together into a dangerously consistent shell.

Drago in Midnight Sun and End of the Line in Parhelion give you a much tighter kill con if the runner gives you the chance. Popping a renewal fetching Drago with Ob is a kill against anyone with a normal hand size and <2 steelskins/stoneships, and if they give you the opportunity earlier than that by going to three cards you can use Svyatogor on a one cost asset. to get a Drago with no set up. The toolbox nature of Ob means this threat can be live as early as turn two and can come back up repeatedly throughout the match, forcing the runner to respect your board state and interact, opening themselves up to hard hitting more consistently than you previously made them.

Gaslight in Parhelion ups your consistency massively, constantly threatening Econ Warfare HHN through any face downs on the board and giving you access to your singleton boom and eotl. It also lets you fetch your best defences as soon as the runner plays NFL, bringing your threats back online as quickly as possible.

The list as a whole could still do with some refinement, the ice suite is definitely in question as are the numbers of some of the operations. A second boom would be handy (as that kill con is usually live in the games they're more likely to be clearing out gaslights), audacity for Azef might be a bit too cute with only a single of each (although another win con is nice) and ideally you would have an answer to apoc. An opponent on a similar list today had fit in two Overseer Matrixes, harking back to the NWE Gagarin list from worlds 2021, which might be the fit for that hole as it defends the renewals and stacks to make apoc completely untenable without taking six tags.

It's also unclear whether it actually stands up to solid tier one runners with tech - like 419s that put bones back in - and know everything that's up. It's very possible that when things shake out it won't actually look that good and it's in a slightly awkward place in that the same runners that are strong against it are good against R+ (as is banning Drago), but against an unprepared field it's deadly. It also has the upside of being extremely fun to play, between Gaslight, Ob, Wall to Wall and Excavator you often have five or six different options about how to navigate your start of turn triggers, and wombo comboing people turn two (very) occasionally is fun. Go forth and make some people unhappy/dead.