Hayley Lock (2nd & 6th @ 2017 Philly Regionals)

nmh 37

This is the Hayley Lock list that my friend @anachron tuned and piloted to a 10th place finish at US Nationals, updated by by adding a single Kati Jones (as a 46th card because we have no shame). I didn't drop a game with it during either portion of the event, and ended the tournament 2nd overall. @vslice, who helped testing and talking/thinking through various lines of play, placed 6th overall.

None of the cards in here should be particularly surprising if you're familiar with the archetype, and this list is set up to do well against Sync, Moons, and other fast advance silliness (also maybe CI, although we didn't have any truly great CI players to test against). The assortment of singleton credit-generating engines seems suspect on paper, but in practice they're all relatively interchangeable while you're setting up and you draw through your deck so rapidly that you can assemble Economic Voltron pretty consistently.

Some specific differences with other Hayley Lock lists I looked at:

  • No Mad Dash: Guaranteeing Mad Dash with Film Critic+Aesops is a cool and clever play, but in practice it felt finicky and MD doesn't synergize with any other part of our list. I think the second DDM does the same job (seeing 5 cards out of R&D should be worth more than a point on average) for less setup.

  • Astrolabe: Clearly correct if you expect any sort of asset spam, but even against, say, Sync I prefer the 'labe: our setup is already so slow that playing a 5 cost hardware is just too clunky for my taste, and you can't really just decide not to install a console if you draw it late or stumble economically in this deck because half our multiaccess is powered by MU.

  • Tag technology: 1x Misdirection is great as a piece of tech because it doubles as Aesops food and is a good SMC target if you need to install a program out of hand at instant speed, and in my experience lines up well vs most NBN decks' threats. Plascrete instead of a second NACH defends against the cheesiest Sync draws better, but I'm still unsure as to whether it's actually the better choice overall.

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