Gooseberry MaxX - 2nd at Worlds

This is the list that a good chunk of the UK players ended up on, though the thinking behind it was occasionally dubious.

At the point that we flew out to Worlds we felt that Chip Shop Hayley might be the best runner, though I find the 'Install a bunch of cards and then lock the remote Shaper's archetype so boring to play that I would only consider it for Worlds if we couldn't find a viable alternative.

We'd thought that MaxX would also prove to be a strong deck, but we couldn't find a list that we liked at all in the run up to the event. As of the Wednesday morning we were going to play Val, and I threw the first iteration of this together in the Hampton lobby with Seamus looking over my shoulder so we'd have something to test against.

The limited evidence we had, in particular from Nordics and German Nats, suggested that Val was the correct deck to play. We wanted to include Hippo to help against the rash of Mti decks that we expected, but in a few test games Val felt pretty clunky and awkward, with some slow draws and tough econ. The MaxX deck, on the other hand, felt smooth and strong so we switched on to it after a long afternoon of testing at the brewery, which was further ratified by good results at King of Servers (and a bad day for Val at the same event, which also convinced Wilfy to switch to the same runner).

The basic premise of the deck was that a lot of games that we were winning were due to early access to Aumakua and Turning Wheel, so we should play a deck that had three of each and was good at finding them. We cut the second Levy because you never want to play it and it's a slot for cowards, which also let us include Rebirth which is great with Turning Wheel and also slows your draw down a little bit (so you won't run out of cards). We had one of each cutlery which, together with the extra economy from Patchwork, helps the glacier matchup. When we went through The Process for the final time a couple of hours before deck lists were due we decided that CtM was likely to be the best Corp, so we cut Forked for the third Hacktivist and resisted the foolish urge to remove a Stimhack.

The list ended up feeling really good; though it may just have been better to play Val anyway. The two biggest risks with the deck are that you get matched up with a rogue Skorp deck or that you get a game loss for accidentally triggering MaxX after you've rebirthed in to Omar.

Always be trashing two, drawing one.