Go spoil it all by playing something stupid like this Hyoubu

(2-4 at Worlds, 208th overall, a terrible, terrible millstone on my results)

In the run up to Worlds I struggled to find a corp that equalled the enthusiasm I had for my runner, and whilst I had tried and appreciated several successful decks from the continentals, I foolishly wanted something to call my own to play my first worlds with.

Initially I tried to develop Flower Sermon RP but it felt like very shaky in testing - a lot of Leelas and Anarchs in the current meta made that kind of asset spam feel tough to pull off, so instead I decided to see whether I could pull off anything in Ashes' least loved child. As said, going wide with the deck seemed like a bad idea, and a shenanigans deck is better suited in several other red IDs, so instead I decided to just build up instead (because who would expect a Jinteki glacier in this meta?)

Obviously the biggest question when building this kind of deck is why you wouldn't just put it in Palana instead, so in an attempt to answer that I tried to maximise triggering the ID as much as possible, on both turns. The biggest and simplest synergy on the corp turn is Jinja City Grid, with some backup from Attitude Adjustment and Celebrity Gift.

On the runner side, the attempt was two-fold - either get them to run into your Slots or Engrams or score a Flower Sermon and use the tokens during their turn to accelerate your draw/feed your Jinja. My favourite play was often to use a token at the end of the turn, not install anything, put an ICE back on top of R&D, and then install it after the mandatory draw on my turn. Two separate reveals, two credits, and one extra card in hand, all from one token.

But the biggest problem was getting the agendas scored to be able to even do that. The deck doesn't have a lot of cheap gearchecks, so rushing doesn't really work, playing Jinja means no La Costa surprises, and the influence spend means no Border Controls. I would often have to sacrifice an agenda in the remote just to be able to tax the runner enough to open a scoring window for the next one, and there are only so many times you can do that (once, or ideally, never) before you've effectively surrendered the game.

There might be something to save here, I'm not sure. There are lots of weird synergies with the ID, but not many that fit together with each other. Although I guess Palana and AgInf will rotate eventually too?

Worlds was great though. Thanks to all my opponents for some fantastic games, and to NISEI for organising it. Much love.