[EMEA] Simple And Clean Hosh 7-1 2nd Place

This might be my favourite Hoshiko list to come out of the pre-Intercontinentals season - thanks for sharing!

I'm curious as to the decision to exclude Pinholes, actually. Given that you identified the overall lowering of Pinhole numbers as a good reason to go back to SkunkVoid HB, was there no consideration to preempt the corp meta by slotting Pinhole against the decks that you expected to be good? (aka your own deck as well as Ag Keeling). In addition to the fact that you decided to double down on the decision and continue to bring 0 Pinholes to Inters, even after the known corp side threats had gone public.

Also might I add - I am SO MAD that you did your first livestream in over a month and I missed it!! :'(

Ey thanks, I'm very happy with it!

About pinhole, it is true on the corpside it means the skunkvoid plan is less of a sure way to seal a game however runnerside there are cons to including it:

1. It costs influence (A problem in this deck as it means cutting one of my important cards)

2. It is not a generally good card, If I add it that would mainly be to deal with skunkvoid or keeling and those were not the only decks in the meta, for example it doesnt do much against oufit, NEH or r+ assets, and would jsut wait to get moshinged in those cases, more dead draws is something to avoid.

3. Related to 2. It does not help with the main idea of the deck, which is getting a nice rig and engine set up quickly. After all, what good is getting rid of the skunkvoid if you cant break ice? My priority is to strengthen that main idea as much as possible so that we reach that state in time, and that it is strong enough once we get there.

4. Even if they are on skunkvoid pinhole is not a foolproof answer. They can install many upgrades so we dont know which one to trash, or boop us with AG.

For all of these reasons I would not include pinhole unless I absolutely have to, so the question is how we do against the specific problems you bring up:

Skunkvoid (Out of PD or ASA): In my practice with this matchups it can go either way, you have Maw as a tool to weaken and crack skunkvoid remotes so it is not a hopeless scenario. Given that there are many corps to worry about what feels like a 50/50 scenario or better is perfectly acceptable, no need to add further tech, this ties into what I said about trying to solve matchups with tech instead of piloting.

AG Keeling Prison: I might need more practice against this but in my experience this matchup is simply a coinflip, where the coinflip is how early keeling is drawn. So my judgment is that this should be about 50/50 as well. I dont like the fact that I could lose just based on a coinflip in the early game as it removes my opportunity to outpilot my opponent, but in this case given the poor performance of AG in previous top cuts and no qualified player being on it I thougt that is a risky pick and should have low prescence. As such it is not worth to weaken the entire deck to improve the matchup.

Haha sry about that :D You cant catch them all, but hope to see you in the next one!

Not to mention the fact that I would need to cut a few cards here to get pinhole in, and I dont have cuts beyond the one i made for interconts, making the ice carver a leech.

Thanks for posting your decks and for the stream!

Would you consider cutting DJ Fenris to fit in a Pinhole, or is the DJ too important for this deck?

Hey, my pleasure!

I cannot overrstate how good DJ Fenris is in this deck, the synergy of getting back pieces and valuable events that you can pay for with companions while at the same time triggering Maw and DreamNet is a big part of what makes this deck a late game monster.

So no I wouldnt consider cutting DJ for a pinhole, more details above as to why pinhole is not in this list.

Should also be mentioned at times you can start using Fenris earlier and actually get back draw pieces to speed up your setup, big punish for an underdefended HQ.

Also a neat little pro tip, vs OB you should often fenris into Los as he will trigger a ridiculous amount and will be triggering on both players turns.

With Fenris it is very hard to defend HQ enough to where it is no longer worth running there :)