Animal Farm Esâ (5, 47, 55, 94, 182, 188 at Worlds)

There are two type of people...

... those who add more installables to play The Price and those who cut both from their list. This deck is the result of the latter line of thinking. For the installable-heavy version look here by @pinsel. Both of the extremes are good and superior to any of the in-between versions that we have tried.

Starting our testing, we explored various Corp options against mainly Hoshiko and various Crim lists. Since we thought that Esâ with 3x Moshing and 3x of all bin breakers was a strong deck in the previous meta (despite never actually bringing the deck to any big tournaments), @testrunning brought up the idea of trying it out again in the new meta.

The first question was how to deal with ice now that you cannot just play 3x Botulus and stuff the gaps with bin breakers anymore. Their first attempt was based around Engolo, which was quickly replaced with the more inf-light Laamb to be able to play more copies of Dr. Nuka Vrolyck. Thanks to @cableCarnage for giving us the idea of playing Laamb and Legwork as a better use of our influence.

Our attempts at refining the list kept adding and removing cards like Raindrops Cut Stone, Daily Casts, DJ Fenris, and Liberated Account to provide some economic power while trying to not lose the dominating pressure provided by all the sabotage. Even Buffer Drive was considered, though it felt like it mainly banked value that you could have now for value that you can get later. But this deck does not want later. It wants now and it wants it all.

So one line of thinking in NWE was that we want all the value we can have and we want it now. So out went the Daily Casts, out went The Price and were replaced by cards like Wildcat Strike and Dirty Laundry that provide immediate value. Same with considerations of Mystic Maemi versus Ghosttongue. One point of contention was whether to count Strike Fund towards the value gained from Ghosttongue or not. (If you ask me, it should count towards credits gained from Ghosttongue, but you should acknowledge that you are including Strike Fund as an Easy Mark with upside)

Furthermore, we increased the amount of pressure, ending up on a split of 3x Chastushka, 2x Finality, 1x Legwork to pummel the Corp on all centrals and make them spread their ice thinner than they would like.

All of this pressure is supported by Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga to get into servers without paying any credit. Later on, you deploy your "breaker suite" of Laamb to have a 7-credit fall-back solution and later Begemot to land another core damage and improve your one-time breaking solution to 3 credits.

You do not expect to ever have to deal with 3 ice, but if you do earlier versions played one copy of Buzzsaw for Magnet and Enigma and one copy of Mimic mainly for Drafter, which was cut somewhere in the process.

14 > 46 q.e.d.

So we ended up with exactly this list + 1 copy of Pinhole Threading in the final round of testing after the team tournament. Faced with the impossible decision between playing a 46 card list or a 14 influence list, we went with the option of cutting the tech card in a post midnight decision while in bed trying to catch some sleep before the big event.

The result was Animal Farm Esâ. All the animals. Full-on communism and workers' rights without any price.

A big shout out to the entirety of my testing team NWE! As always, the preparation phase for the big event with you all has been amazing. Also props to @pinsel for sticking to his guns and playing the installable-heavy version instead to an amazing 14th place finish.

Finally a big shoutout to everyone I interacted with during Worlds and the entire staff team that made the event possible. It was an amazing experience!