Combination Lock Freedom - 1st at Bristol Regional

As usual with my decks, this one involves very little original thinking on my part. The original shell comes from Jamesgrey, via Rotage and then Asger, each of whom applied their own tweaks.

I played this mostly because I couldn't face taking either the Wu or Hayley lists that I believe to be clearly stronger than this one. This deck is probably about 80% as good as the best decks but at least 150% as fun. (All numbers are entirely made up. Performance may go up as well as down).

From the list that Asger gave us Seamus and I scrabbled around for cuts to include two Hacktivist, which seemed essential to shore up the Gagarin matchup and not snap lose to turn 1 Scarcity. We'd have loved to find space for a third but there were no more tolerable cuts.

The resulting list is a hodgepodge of embarrassing one of and two ofs. The weakness of the deck is that you need to assemble a lot of pieces to get your end game rig set-up, many of which you can't find with Inject, so you have to scrabble around and improvise while you're doing that. My counter argument to those people who hold this up as a fatal flaw is that at least it leads to interesting decisions. The other benefit is that all the individual pieces are impactful and useful in their own right, so you're not just trying to assemble a combo that does nothing until it's all in place.

Your Gagarin matchup is iffy in the first few turns then great if you can get past that initial phase. Your glacier matchups should be good, but your rush matchups can be a bit tricky especially when backed up by tag punishment. In true Anarch fashion a lot of the play in this deck is identifying the correct line of attack given the pieces you have available and the board your opponent is trying to build.

Thanks as always to my opponents, collaborators and people I hung out with during the day.