Adam's Happy Little Tree

Paillu 1392

Credit to JuniperTheory for mostly writing up the description and helping me test the early versions of this. We are publishing this now because I missed qualifying for the Circuit Breaker by one tournament position THREE TIMES, but I need someone to take this PLEASE. Do it for Adam

When World Tree was first revealed, I was very skeptical. Sure the effect is obviously powerful but it demands a LOT:

  1. It's a 6 cost program that you need as soon as possible. You HAVE to run tutors, but those usually make the program MORE expensive to run if anything. Maybe Spark or Rigging Up, but even then...
  2. It's a big tempo hit; you'll spend the entire first part of the game getting setup. You'd need an identity that can apply solid pressure turn one, which is rare in shaper; and outside of shaper, it costs 4 to import!
  3. It requires you to already have something installed that's worth trashing. Are you going to spend clicks putting a bad card on the board just so you can trash it later? The tempo hit of grabbing it gets worse and worse.
  4. It costs 2 memory. This means that it just isn't playable with most program heavy decks, as you'd need like. Boat memory or more to make it work.

To make the tree hit fast and hard, your deck would need a tutor that reduces the cost of a card, a way to get tons of memory, really solid early game pressure, and most of all, you'd want to start the game with cards just waiting to be trashed!

ENTER THE BIOROID

Pictured: Adam Painting his Happy Little Tree

To all the Adam fans out there; in your final hour, in the moment before rotation removes your beautiful bioroid boy from the meta forever, NSG has given you one final gift, and my god. It's beautiful. Botanist Adam is not just the most fun we've had playing Adam ever, it feels legitimately competitive, as most losses can be traced to incorrect tutor lines with our Tree or just slightly tighter resource management, which is usually tied to the tutor lines.

Stuck underwater and losing your hand? Don't worry, your brain's a computer; your hand size grows faster then they can core you out. Scared of powerful tag decks? Tutor out a No Free Lunch or Misdirection and ignore their tags completely. Grinder got you down? Tutor out Earthrise Hotel and draw more cards then Lat. Rig shot through? Your deck is full of Mayflies and Logic Bombs. Best of all, unlike most toolbox decks you aren't spending your time setting up some weird rig to protect you, this all happens while you apply fantastic pressure and have a great econ. And if they spend their time chopping down the tree, you're still a solid Adam deck that can win games!

My biggest concern when conceptualizing the deck was that it would just fizzle if you couldn’t get the “meme” play of turn 1 or 2 Emergent into Tree, but this was completely unfounded as you have the typical, uncompromised early Adam pressure to carry you and tax the corp if need be.

CARD CHOICES/PLAY ADVICE:

Unless you have a great starting hand, it's usually worth mulliganing aggressively for Emergent Creativity. Throw away a Brain Chip, a Multithreader, or a bin breaker to get the tree out turn one or two and start the fun. Use Dirty Laundry and Jailbreak to get more value out of your runs, as you'll already be usually running once a turn to get value out of your plant.

Brain Chip eats Thule Subsea alive. Expect many salty thule players who see you shrug off core damage with your +4 hand size and want to flip the table.

Daily Casts (0), Earthrise Hotel, (1), Liberated (3), and DreamNet (0) are your main econ targets; grab a casts by throwing away a Safety First or Neutralize All Threats turn one to kickstart your economy. Tutor up a NFL to get a few instant speed credits/laugh off a future Drago. Grab a Logic Bomb to get into any server at the last second, especially if you saw an agenda with Find the Truth. The Twinning wins the game with Multithreader, and DJ Fenris can be a Steve, a Sable, or maybe even Quetzal!

Engolo is your best breaker and usually the first choice to grab with the plant after forcing into a server with Mayfly. Try trashing a Paperclip or MKUltra to grab it, letting you install them again later! Mayfly is amazing; your tutor trigger comes BEFORE it's trash trigger so use it to grab any program you want after the run ends.

The deck runs 3 Multithreaders so it can throw one or two away with emergent creativity readily to Emergent in early turns. Misdirection, Paricia, and RNG Key can also be pitched to World Tree for your needed breakers if they’re not needed for a matchup or have served their purpose.

World Tree is the core of your deck; we've been given a gift and we should take care of it. With the tree, R+ can't tag us, Thule can't core us, Aginfusion can't lock us, Sports can't outpace us, PE can't grind us, and if they burn your tree down (or can't find it), use your years of experience playing normal, old fashioned Adam decks to make them PAY for their crimes against botany.

We're still tinkering with this deck but it’s mostly nitpicking over econ and whether MKUltra is really needed (I like it for critical mass of Emergent fuel and one that has potential value though), so try your own variations. Good luck, botanists. We've got one last ride before the boy rotates, let make it a good one.

6 comments
12 Dec 2022 Cliquil

I'd not considered using the directives as fodder to get other cards, that's an interesting twist.

13 Dec 2022 JuniperTheory

It turns out if you add "DAILY CASTS" and "EARTHRISE HOTEL" to the list of directives Adam can start with he gets even better

16 Dec 2022 Ebrey

@PailluI love this deck and I did qualify for Circuit Breaker, so I'm likely to play it!

18 Dec 2022 errantmage

First, some criticism:

  1. I am surprised that people would celebrate Adam as an ID that doesn't win tournaments -- Adam never did. That's why I ran him, and ripped shit up.

  2. Your entire discussion around Adam tech is weirdly tilted. For example, pitching cards to win is absurd when you get HD indexing. [[Isolation]] was designed as an Adam card, but is trivially bad if you've ever played Adam.

  3. No Free Lunch could be replaced with tutors to get you to misdirection (you'll never want for MU if you run well).
  4. Engolo wins games, and it's way better thank MK -- you can run 46 cards with 2x Engolo for Emergent fuel.

Second:

Kid, you did good. Keep repping our boy. His job is to rip shit up and go hard, and in metas where corpos expect people to play safe and search for tools, Adam does work. You're doing the hard work, and this is one of the most-fun lists I've seen out of Adam. I'd beg, borrow, and steal to reform it, but I also think it's on the right track. Great showing!

18 Dec 2022 errantmage

Er #4 was meant to be 2x Na'No'Tek...

18 Dec 2022 Paillu

Well @errantmagethank you! There was actually some discussion prior to publishing about cutting MK, although I don't think we could find the inf for a second Engolo. I think the deck could function without a killer but I'm unsure what would warrant it. I'm sure we'd find the answer if we fully tested this for competitive prep. There is some value to be had out of a cheap bin breaker with World Tree though, and it's good for breaking small sentries like Drafter, so... we'll see!

I think it's worth saying again that we're never just trashing things for value, we're trading up! There's a lot of value that can be had from Neutralize All Threats in the early turns before it's plant food but Safety First can be traded up for value ASAP.

After a few early accesses with Neutralize, the trash clause can become a liability, and hopefully we have them on the back foot already by starting to build massive tempo with Tree, at which point FTT, Logic Bomb Fetch, grab off the top becomes higher relative value, and then if you have to go longer you can set up the Multithreader Twinning Plan.

I wouldn't cut No Free Lunch because it's essential Drago tech and otherwise is a free Resource that can be fed to Tree. In those cases, you're basically using Tree to get NFL's default value of 3c, but you're also getting action compression by fetching and installing what you would spend the 3c on (or winning with Logic Bomb).

I agree this is weirdly tilted, World Tree changed the fundamental math of things in ways we were not prepared for!