Tactical Nuclear Penguins - 1st @Eternal Shipment to Cologne

"Another uninteractive Kabonesa Wu combo deck form wowarlok?
Hide your loved ones everyone!"

Inspiration

What drives me to Eternal has always been seeing new cards interact with the old ones, finding the synergies between pieces that were never meant to interact with each other and push these interactions to the extreme.

You can imagine my sense of wonder when Silent_Arbiter, often the source of a lot of my deckbuilding endeavors, mentioned Ritual working well with Hyperdriver to draw cards twice as fast as Diesel would: I instantly knew I had to think bigger and I started engineering this list with the sole intention of abusing the new draw event with as many hyperdrivers as possible.

The next step was to figure out how quickly and consistently the set up was, so I turned to the most proficient Wu player around, Toron, who after just five minutes came back to me with the line I ended up taking in every single one of my games.
In my case I ended up going for Muse as the forth copy of Self-modifying Code, since you can tutor it with Wu, making the combo 100% agnostic to what I drew.
It's also important to note that trashing the Coalescences at every new installs saves them from getting removed from the game, which is very important.

Execution

In the four weeks that followed that conversation I went through every possible line I could think of, optimizing the execution and finding solutions to the possible roadblocks that the corp could throw at me, ultimately refining the list to the point where I had to cut the last copy of Out of the Ashes to make everything fit into 45 slots.

The line I landed on starts with 13 clicks, provided by all of our hyperdrivers, and requires a Ritual in hand.
It goes as follows:

• Play Ritual to draw 12 cards.
• Play Ritual to draw 11 cards.
• Play Ritual to draw the rest of our deck.
• Play Rigging Up to install Faust.
• Use Faust to trash all three Strike Funds, making 6 credits.
• Install DDoS and use it.
• Run HQ.
• Run Archives.
• Play Illumination number one and install all three Simulchips. This step is technically unnecessary as a simple run in R&D would suffice, however I found that the extra credits help tackle the uncertainty that follows the combo well.
• Use the chips to install Coalescence again, trashing the rest of you programs in the process and making credits.
• Play Apocalypse.
• Play Encore.
• Repeat the previous step two more times.
• Play Illumination number two and install Conduit and Equivocation.
  

Now that the set is complete and the board is clear we can send it R&D with out of the ashes as well as all the extra clicks we get in our next three turns and hopefully find enough points to win the game while overdrawing the corp like crazy.

Improvisation and Preparation

The key to piloting this deck is being comfortable with the lines and know when and how to change them. The more astute readers might have already realized that not all the parts of the combo are 100% guaranteed, after all when we mulligan explicitly for Ritual we only start with it about 50% of the times and even after a perfectly executed set up the first burst draw finds a second copy of Ritual only 2/3 times. Sometimes the deck will stumble and there's nothing we can do about it, that's where we start improvising!

Diesel is in here for this exact reason: while we ideally never need to draw with it, it's necessary to find the starting piece and give us better odds of not completely bricking after the first Ritual. Figuring out how many clicks we can spend on putting back the combo line on track is the only way to up our success rate. Moreover sometimes we won't need all the cards in our deck to win, so in times of need it's important to be able to evaluate mid combo if the content of the grip can get us to the finish line or if we have to dig more.

The other aspect of playing the deck well is that we need to have a general idea of what the corp can do to stop us and plan accordingly. The last few cards in the list are all here to save us from impossible situations:

• Pinhole Threading is our solution to nasty upgrades lying around in centrals: Crisium Grid, Caprice Nisei and Marcus Batty are all terrible to see and we want to get rid of them without having to face them.
• Our single copy of Sure Gamble is here to provide the money necessary to trash these upgrades. It's one of the most bizarre use of Gamble ever in my opinion, but it slots perfectly well between installing the Faust and installing the DDoS and gives us just enough credits to challenge most upgrades without having to click for credits a lot.
• Deep Dive is in the list for the matchups where our regular win condition wouldn't get us there. These the Mti Mwekundu:s and Industrial Genomics of the world, where running R&D multiple times might prove fatal or impossible, but it's also our solution to Architect, Kessleroid or anything else that Apocalypse can't clear. If the route to a R&D digging looks tough or impossible, dive them instead!
• CBI Raid is a clever suggestion by Toron to deal with Cerebral Imaging holding onto enough points for us not to win. It's terribly clunky to use, but can be fit in either the combo turn or the one after. To ensure we get the maximum milage from it we should also follow up with a Deep Dive to shuffle the deck, so that the top of R&D isn't empty for too long. It's quite farfetched and a little impractical, but with the correct soul read it'll save games.
• The last thing we have to play around comes from one significant flaw in the winning set up: virus counters. Ob, as well as some other fast advance corp, tend to play some amount of Cyberdex Virus Suite, which will purge conduit when we encounter it. To overcome this problem the correct play is to dig with conduit for about half of the runs we have available, trashing any CVS we encounter. After that we can just clear the top of R&D with Equivacation over and over without risking a nasty purge (since we know the top of R&D for the following several cards) and then send one last dig with conduit at the last minute, making sure to always play around defensive agendas in the process.

Replays

Here are my replays from the tournament. Most of my opponents had no clue what was about to happen, which played in my favor for sure. If you want to check the deck in action take a look and enjoy the spectacle:

Round 2 vs OF 15-15's CI

Round 4 vs Sauc3's Ob

Round 6 vs aksu's Mti

Semifinal vs eden's Ob

Shoutouts

Shoutout to the TAI Breakers, the people in the GLC Eternal league and the few players who open a random Eternal lobby on jnet casual in the hope of finding an opponent for providing great tips and just enough varied practice games to help shape the deck 🙏
Shoutout to koga and Baserton for keeping me company during the tournament while jamming Flesh and Blood games in the background. Shoutout to Pinguini Tattici Nucleari, the Italian Pop Rock band I've been listening to during almost every one of my competitive games for the past year or so. Their music is just the right amount of chill to help me focus on the game without getting me anxious. Give them a listen, if you're looking for something new.
Massive thank you to OF 15-15, l0velace and Utati for organizing, judging and streaming the event. You can watch the VOD of the whole thing with Utati's lovely commentary here or here.

Come play Eternal folks, It's fun!