Malia CtM - 7th @ Worlds 2021

leachrode 1235

I'd make a joke about this being worlds top CtM and that obviously proving that vegan Psycho CtM is clearly better than Boom! but that seems silly when I only technically beat Saja by bracket shenanigans and they were on Boom, as were both the other CtMs in the cut and actual cut standings are an rng crapshoot. Both lists are fine I think, with slightly different matchups. Psycho is a little better against stuff like counter surv and the Malias give you a better out against Liberated decks, Boom is probably much stronger against Apoc, especially if you have Archived Memories

After much, much messing about with various bad or weird corps over the testing period for this worlds, this is where I decided I wanted to be a couple of days before the deadline. It's not exactly a fountain of new ideas of hot tech to beat all the best runners but in a world where the playable crim ids don't have 1 link CtM is as strong as ever, with some bad matchups. The day after I locked in on this Whiteblade posted in #uk that he was dropping but that if he'd played he would also have been on CtM, albeit a Boom! version, which was good enough for me to at least confirm I wasn't barking up the wrong tree entirely and I decided to stop worrying about it and just play it.

In Swiss I beat Counter Surv Zahya in an extremely spicy game (I had a fine start, then lost a Psycho and an EoI to a very nasty 2 in 4 Embezzle, ducked a Counter Surveillance by Malia-ing it and just about had time to find another Psycho before the third CS came up), Hivemind MaxX, Hivemind MaxX, took an ID, lost to Apoc MaxX then won a runner 241

On day 2 I won a tiebreaker with this against reg Zahya, beat Bridgeman on the Apoc MaxX that I'd lost to the day before with some absolutely outrageous luck (my opponent was extremely gracious about milling all 3 labor rights, rebirth, a gate then losing their second gate to prisec on the apoc turn), then lost to Rustryder on another Apoc MaxX. In the last game I had some very narrow hopes if the deck stacked perfectly after the apoc, but I'd used up basically all my luck in the previous round and my opponent had me absolutely bang to rights, playing round all the punishment I could muster until I was absolutely dead.

Overall I think you could do with one more tag punishment card, maybe a market forces, because a lot of the Apoc and Hivemind games come down to the runner absolutely drenched in tags but locking r&d with Conduit or Gate. Being able to take them off Magnet/Bellona money would be a big step, but the list is pretty solid and very fun to pilot. As much as it is a meme, you do get some very interesting board states and decisions to make, it's very often correct to play a tempo hhn just to spend a bunch of both of your money, even when you only have half a Marilyn on the board and the runner has a Rezeki running just because they're running out of burst econ left and it makes it harder for them to contest your DBS deeper into the game for example, and I was glad to be on it on the day. Your bigger problem at the moment is that the Big Maxx decks with Maw and Aeneas should absolutely shred you if you don't get a much better start, I was fortunate to dodge most of those and drop out of the cut before Osclate could absolutely annihilate me as she has done on jnet a few times.

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