Imp-erfect Hoshiko - 3-2 Ntscape Store Champs

This is the Hoshiko deck I took to NtscapeNavigator's Store Champ on 8th May 2021.

It is based on Limes' Worlds-winning list, updated for the current meta.

I published our thinking behind the deck in advance on The Process blog - essentially, we were looking for something that can handle Red Planet Couriers BtL decks and Spombo, while also being robust enough to handle the rest of the field and being more resistant to hate than Maxx. The combination of Patchwork, Zer0, and paladin poemu gives you fantastic acceleration, both to find and install breakers and to set up your imp/consume/friday chip engine. Once these are set up, you can hammer hq, with docklands pass and the turning wheel enabling you to find the exact combo pieces you want to trash. You can often get two imps and two friday chips going for two hq imps per turn, or for imping two agendas off the board against spombo. Hippo and Gatekeeper enable you to keep pressure on while also regaining friday chip counters after a purge. The econ is very solid, with almost all your installs being free with patchwork and poemu (including liberated accounts), with excellent late-game econ from consume. Playing sure gambles for 3 credits with patchwork gives you a nice smug glow too, would recommend.

Although we hadn't actually been able to do much testing of this deck vs BtL or Spombo prior to the event, the theory behind it seemed decent on the day. In the first three rounds it beat two BtL (jpsaxby and Vesper, jpsaxby's list being fairly different to the standard list from what I saw) and a Spombo (SimplyTheOnion). In round 4 it lost to Pinsel's slightly different BtL, and in round 5 it lost to Heinzel on PD. It then lost to Pinsel again in the tiebreaker - it was a tough afternoon. The PD game was a slow start for me and a good start for Heinzel, followed by a brutal click 4 Ansel 1.0 facecheck with no MK in the bin - in theory I think it should have reasonable game against PD generally, but it could do with more testing. I think the games against Vesper and Heinzel were both on NtscapeNavigator's Twitch stream.

Overall I was pretty happy with Hoshiko's performance, and glad that the theory-crafting prior to the event seemed to pay off in the first few rounds. If there was another tournament tomorrow I'd be torn between staying with this list and playing Maxx, and I think more testing is needed, especially against PD and Pinsel's BtL.

For corp I played spombo (based on Havvy's Spombo Lite but with news teams and Boom!). I'm sorry. It went 4-1, somehow beating jpsaxby's Very Teched Tao (with clot, embezzle, and 2x Artist Colony), Vesper's 419, SimplyTheOnion's Tao, and Pinsel's Maxx, and losing to Heinzel's Maxx.

Thanks so much to all my opponents for very fun games and nice chat, and to Aki and ClusterFox for organising such a great day.