UK Liberté w/ a Dash of Luck: 13th & King of Swiss @ UK Nats 22

Thanks to my opponents, TOs, and everyone I met for a great weekend.

Feels very surreal to make King of Swiss at my first proper tournament, I've set the bar pretty high for myself for future events, I hope I will make a cut again in 2023.

The Deck

It's the Liberté deck, but with a Gachapon swapped out for a second Mad Dash. I made that change because it means you are more free to hit your Zer0s, Moshings and Gachapons without worrying about losing a vital x1 card, which is especially vital into the R+ matchup. Also, if you get a good Stargate setup early, finding the Mad Dash early feels great.

Freedom is pretty much the first Anarch ID that I've played for more than a handful of games, I gravitated towards him after watching skry on stream at Worlds, knowing that learning the play style of this deck would make me a more well-rounded player. The video that Ysengrin put out also really helped me understand the deck more.

I did try out the 419 deck as an alternative to this after Whiteblade beat my R+ deck with it on Jnet, but went back to Freedom comfort, which ended being the better choice given my swiss matchups...

The Matches

• Swiss
  • Matty Addison on Asa (W)
  • swabl on Sportsmetal (W)
  • Crowphie on Azmari (L)
  • Ben Kikai on Sportsmetal (W)
• Cut
  • rotage on The Outfit (L)

Freedom was built to beat Sportsmetal, so with a bit of luck those matchups went well for me. Asa is one of the few corps I know well, so knew I had to pressure by getting some Hippos on the board and doing some click 1 runs.

Playing against Pigeon Azmari was tough, I got HHN'nd pretty early, but felt like I was recovering OK, then an unadvanced card was put down in the iced remote, I thought Artificial Cryptocrash would really ruin me here, but as its unadvanced I can leave it for a turn and carry on building up tempo and avoiding a second HHN, then next turn it got Seamless Launched and I got put back to 0 credits, ooff!

In the cut I had side selection for round 1 versus rotage, although TagMe Hoshiko would have been a great matchup for my R+, I thought it better to take the non-R+ corp matches where I could get them. In the end, rotage got off to a flying start with a massive credit pool and scary ice on the table and I couldn't get through to HQ to trash his fast advance because there was a Hortum on HQ I wasn't finding my BOs.