Enter MAWHAMMER (Manchester Regional: 4th)

Heading back from a good showing at Euros 2019 with my friends Dave and Andy, we were trying to think of a deck name for my "pretty non-spicy" Leela deck. We then stumbled across Mawhammer by sheer luck and I loved it so much that I decided I would build a deck worthy of the name!

With Blue Sun and Gagarin in the meta, Kim (the hammer) was well placed to hit some key operations out of hand or R&D. If you don't hit them, get your pet (the Maw) to hit it or something else from hand and make them pay for having something I can't trash! If you can locate him, get Bhaghat to shout "MAWHAMMER RULES!" to trash cards from R&D and you can hit pretty much cards everywhere! Hacktivist gives you the bonus of forcing the corp to draw to Rez any additional assets.

Hippo needs to be used to make holes in the central defenses for easy Crowdfundings. This particular Kim deck is not good at remote pressure. I prefer hitting HQ for the majority of the time. One problematic ICE is Afshar, which is fantastic design and horrid for Black Orchestra. My previous version of the deck had Prey to counter it but when I added Stargate as a closer, I changed it out for a Clone Chip as corps started icing Archives due to the milling of agendas, making Retrieval Run very expensive.

Scrubber was added in as specific Gagarin tech (and to use the participation prize), but I barely used it. If you wanted to cut this deck to 45 cards, this is the card to remove (though this deck will need a lot more cuts to make it legal in future MWL's as Crowdfunding will be banned).

Making an Entrance was a classic previous night last minute include as this deck has issues with draw. I was really happy to see it in my opening hand at least twice during the day, which made first turns entertaining! I hadn't even seen the Crowdfunding trick where you can trash them and make your 3 runs to get them back. I also had a lovely setup where I had Inject ready to draw me 4 non-program cards and Crowdfunding would draw me a Corroder. Sadly, I forgot about it during that turn and messed it up.

In closing, I really like playing this deck, even though it's a bit hit and miss due to the random nature of Maw, Bhaghat and Hacktivist. I'd like to keep tinkering with it even though the loss of Crowdfunding will be a hard hit to the economy of the deck. A massive 9 influence gap to fix alongside it. I'd add Demolisher in but then I can't use the name!

Huge thanks to Andy and Dave from the Liverpool meta for providing the inspiration for this deck and for helping me refine it. Finally, a massive thanks to everyone who I played and practiced this deck on from Euros to the Manchester (UK) regional, culminating in my best ever finish (1st in Swiss, 4th overall), going unbeaten until the cut when I couldn't do the punitive maths and just took a credit to try and protect me against Blue Sun. Do your maths kids!

Event Report:

Manchester Regional: 1st in Swiss, 4th overall (4-0 in Swiss, 0-1 in Cut)

Game 1: Beat Seamus (Mirrormorph) - An unprotected and supposedly frightened R&D just passed agendas to me when I ran it. Not much else to report.

Game 2: 6-0 up against Tom Holliday (Gagarin) - Couldn't eke out the win in time but took the timed win after a full match of agendas going in and out of R&D. Tom apologised for the long and Grundy game but there is no need to. I just haven't practised against Gagarin that much and was making sure I recognised the lines better to not lose.

Game 3: Beat Paul Gillibrand (Blue Sun) - Found 6 points on the top of R&D when the game looked lost as the final agenda was in the remote.

Game 4: 4-3 up against Euan Shields (Mirrormorph) - Lost clicks to MCA but had enough to run HQ 3 times to clear out the hand and steal a Vitruvius just as time was called. Euan could have kept digging for an agenda to score with MCA but we didn't check after he failed to draw a 5/3 from the mandatory.

Cut Game 2: Lost to Mark Greenhalgh (Blue Sun) - Went 6-1 up but took a credit instead of trying to stop the Punitive from firing and lost to a double punitive hit thanks to SSL and Mauslous and a very lucky click 1 draw.