The Compromise (3rd at Summer Showdown)

I went to my friendly local game store on a Tuesday night to pick up my Elevation preorder. I had taken all of my decks from the last meta apart and returned their cards to the binder in order to get everything ready for rotation. I asked if I could borrow a deck from another player and they handed me a Muslihat list, I believe identical to one posted here from the Sunrise tournament.

We played a game and I think I got one draw from the ID over the course of 7 or 8 turns. In hindsight, I'm pretty confident this particular build would have been better as a Zahya or a Sable deck, but it left me with a pretty cold impression of MuslihaT as an ID.

A few days later while organizing the binders it occurred to me that you could build a deck where the trigger would never fail to draw you a card. Sure you would have to give up on a lot of staples: Hermes, Class Act, etc. but a draw every turn sounds like a pretty over powered ID. So I assembled Never-Miss-Li-HaT and took it to the gore soaked arena of jnet casual. And it was... okay. (Shout out to Andrej at Metropole Grid who also played around with something like that on his show and even inspired some card choices in this deck)

The constant card draw was no doubt excellent, but you definitely felt the lack of some of those core elements of reg-crim decks that are neither ICE-breakers nor run-events.

This deck was born out of an attempt to find a compromise between the 100% hit rate decklists and the ones that missed more than I would care for.

75.5% of our cards are free draws with the ID. The cards that aren't all had to fight hard for their slot and there is no room for more copies than we would plan to install. In my opinion you shouldn't be playing any card you wouldn't be willing to click draw and install the minute you know it's on top because you have to keep it moving. The most shocking omission is probably The Class Act, but as our ID hit rate approached 100% we need less draw in the deck. It missed the cut because I was usually not happy to see it on top and have to draw it and install it.

Some people play Twinning in MuslihaT but that is so last year. Finality does basically the same thing and doesn't make you cringe when you see it on top.

And don't even get me started on Hermes 2 and 3. Reprise is just a Hermes that doesn't brick your ID.

After 9 rounds of swiss and a grueling top cut the only card in the list I would change is Docklands Pass. Almost definitely should be a Cuppelation.

Thanks to Abraham and everyone involved in running Summer Showdown. I had a blast playing and I'm stoked you guys keep running these massive events! Here's to many more Showdowns to come!