Aesops Hayley (Worlds Runner-Up)

Hello, my name is Greg. I'm not too active in the ANR community so far but I somehow placed second at Worlds this year. It was a very intense and amazing weekend, and I still cannot believe I got as far as I did. Some quick notes on the deck and the weekend.

This deck is really cool but tbh it's not optimized at all. It was edited to exploit a very specific meta that I only did an okay job predicting and countering. Despite us not talking Jason Deng deserves like 80% minimum for creating the list during Top Deck and I revised it with Peter McOwen to hopefully speed it up and improve its matchup against Gagarin and Rewiring CI. For those unfamiliar with Pawnshop Hayley you play a ton of redundant cards and silver bullets that cost 0, then sell them to Pawnshop if they aren't relevant for the matchup. Mash Proco so you aren't wasting clicks and use Hayley so the installs you want to sell to Aesop can come with cards that actually advance your board.

The three cards that I imagine deserve explanation are Trope, Heartbeat, and Brahman. Brahman is the real winner and the reason I got 2nd; against Hot Tubs it breaks Tour Guide and Hive for cheap so you don't need to install any other breakers, and against Rewiring CI it breaks Loki for 1 and Mogo for 3. Proco helps offset the downside of bouncing Paricias. It happened to be huge in matchups against the incredible Aginfusion deck that surprised everyone with IT Department and mythic ICE you needed to get by fast. Heartbeat was for Rewiring CI as the card that strictly shuts down the kill (Mercs and Guru can get MCA'd, Spoofing can be killed through, etc) but also gives legs against PU (it is not as good as Feedback Filter for that purpose) and means you don't have to think in Punitive or Mushin matchups. It did amazing work on stream in my CI matchup but I don't think it's anything near mandatory, I've used Maw instead of Hearbeat online in similar lists which is a lot of fun. Trope is not my technology and I didn't face matchups where it did enough work, but I believe in a less aggressively fast corp meta it is worth considering as a means of keeping Aesops/Clot lock alive; in retrospect I'd rather have played something else for this specific tournament.

My favorite game of the weekend with this list was R6 against Tristan Von Zahn on Aginfusion, where he got an IT Dept. behind Mogo with no rezzed subtype ICE, 7 counters on it and I had to figure out how to trash it with very middling economy. It's rare you intentionally faceplant a Tithonium you can't break, and it's even more rare when that is the line that allows the win. R3 against...someone else (I didn't remember your name, please let me know!) who played the Aginf deck was also amazing; in that game I lost a nailbiter that finished with me losing to a Vanilla and him scoring out with exactly 0 credits left over despite psi games being involved; I felt absolutely outplayed and it was awesome. I also had a fascinating game R1 against Justin Paro on what I belive to be TBBs CTM list; it was an insanely close game with an unfortunate end, but Justin was the sweetest guy and I'm so glad to have gotten to play him. I just really like that Aginf deck guys. Of course, my games with the World Champ were fantastic, even if the second one wasn't remotely close.

Overall I think the deck is good, but it will need to adapt a lot if there's hope for it to have a good matchup against strong glacier-style decks like Wilfy's corp list. I didn't have an incredible record with it, there was some major pilot errors, and my corp definitely carried the day.

Props to everyone I played against, and major thanks to the Cleveland ANR community for helping me test a bunch of nonsense that led to my decks. The ANR community is phenomenal and I'm so grateful for everyone being willing to put up with my anxiety and awkwardness at these events. It was the most fun I've ever had playing, and I can't wait for next year.