Fantastic Man 🕺 - 3rd @ Fly to EMEA #1

Tell me, Tell me, Tell me,
Please tell me how I look!

You looooook so good

Fantastic Man!

🕺

Basically every one of the many Weyland decks I've loved over the years have originated in a bblum list, and this is no different.

I had already come round to the SDS + Seamless school of rush Ob towards the end of last season, so when NSG dropped The Man🕺I was excited to try him out in the Circle of Life shell.

Can confirm: he's Him.

Seamless in Ob already felt great. Saving clicks while scoring is a huge deal in a deck which can cram so much value into a click. I also loved the agenda suite in Circle of Life - SDS gives you a powerful option for interacting with the Runner while you score out, and getting to play 9 agendas rather than 11 makes us much better against Hermes and R&D digs.

Holo Man turbocharges both of these elements of the gameplan, making it easier than ever to score the SDS while also saving us multiple clicks while scoring 3-2s. Plus it's a fast advance closer in a pinch. And it's searchable with the best card in our deck.

This deck is so much fun to play. Between all the tutors and the ability to radically transform your boardstate turn to turn, playing rush Ob is pure creativity. Spending my Saturday afternoon discovering new lines in-game with the spring sun shining in through my window and Mr Onyeabor getting funky in my headphones was an utter pleasure.

I won't try and explain all the cool skateboard tricks you can do in this deck (it would be literally impossible; the diverging lines approach infinity). Instead, I can only recommend that you pick up whichever scoring Ob deck looks most up your street and give it a spin. You'll fall off your skateboard a few times while you're learning, but once you get in the groove you'll be finding ways to win games that you'd never have imagined before. It's glorious.

A few notes on deck choices:

Fitting the Man meant cutting 2 Seamless from Circle of Life for inf, leaving a spare. I initially tried The Powers That Be, which gives us another good Ob target in the sparse 1-cost slot and enables more powerful scoring plays like recurring Border Controls, repositioning ice in tandem with Azef or just jamming Rashida back in the scoring server.

However, in testing against Arruaceiras Crew I made a discovery: Enigma is awful. We need 3-cost code gates to make our Border Controls act as double-gearchecks - I like to have at least two in the deck to keep the option - but Crew just wrecks BC into Enigma. Therefore we need to use our spare inf on the 2nd Magnet, which at 3 strength requires a Crew Runner to deploy another piece of interaction. Having two Magnet is also nice against mulch and Arissana, but really I am just playing it because it's a 3-for-3 ETR code gate. #ObLyfe.

This means we have no inf for Thimblerig, which I used to love in decks like this, but that card is also very weak to Crew, and anyway we got a new in-faction upgrade in our 2-cost ice slot. Descent is a really nice flexible piece for the deck, acting as a Mav-fetchable gearcheck, flood insurance, redeployable Bankhar and Hippo protection, and even as Audacity fuel in a pinch.

Lastly, spending our spare inf on ice gives us one more slot for a non-ice card. I ended up on Too Big To Fail as I was feeling a little too poor at times when making Holo Man plays, and it can be a nice fetch off of Malapert to recover. In testing, not_yeti had advocated for Pivot in this slot as well, primarily as a way to get SDS when you have a good window for it. TBTF was good for me in one game at Fly to EMEA, but Pivot would have been better in at least two games, so I will definitely be trying it going forward. Turning Malapert into an agenda tutor is pretty slick - as everyone knows, tutoring for another tutor is the coolest thing you can do in card games 😎

At Fly To EMEA this deck was 2-1 in swiss, beating xiaat on mulch Hoshiko and NinQT on Ken, and losing to AlPi's Deep Dive Lat. In the cut it went 1-1, narrowly beating Jai's Arissana and losing to OF15-15 on ice destruction Hosh. Big shoutouts to OF15 for taking the W, for an excellent scrappy game that had us taking chunks out of each others board states, and for achieving poetic vengeance - if memory serves, I knocked them out of the cut of a GLC startup tournament years ago playing a similar Chisel-Charm Hoshiko. Funny how things come back around!

Thanks as always to EA Sports 🏅 for making new set season so hype, and particularly to not_yeti for his work on this deck and to davz131 for keeping me company all through the tournament on Saturday.

Stay Fantastic,
Cobra x