Birthday Ob (3rd US EC Nats, 1st NYC CO)

This is the list that I brought to EC Nats, which happened to be held on my birthday 🙂. It went 4-0 in swiss (with 1 ID) and 2-1 in the cut. I also brought this deck to the 12-person NYC CO a few weeks earlier and went 4-0 with it there. One of my testing partners, Chris (Icecreamcollege), brought the same list to EC Nats and went 4-1 with it in swiss, but ended up missing the cut.

Our other testing partner in the tournament, Fa (Wikignometry), played Outfit instead and won the whole thing! She convinced me that Outfit was very good by beating me a lot with it, and I was extremely close to swapping onto Outfit myself the morning of the tournament. I ended up staying the course with Ob, which turned out alright as well.

The main changes we made from the other versions of this deck are:

• 3x Azef + Audacity: This opens up a lot of extra kill options (particularly against Steelskin), making it a lot more threatening to let an Urban fire. Azef and AtL can both be scored off the table as well, either for a kill or to threaten scoring out. In our testing, the SDS were rarely an issue for Hoshiko to steal and were a liability to Mad Dash.

• Ice Walls over BCs: We found that holding 4 credits for BC was usually too awkward when you need to be hitting your opponent with Bladder damage, and generally didn't think that using BC to force through Urbans against Hoshikos with Aumakua/Bankhar/Pinhole was a consistent enough plan. Ice Wall is nice for stopping free singles on centrals and as a cheaper gearcheck for an Urban. Rarely, it's useful to click for -1 credit. I also somehow ended up clicking NASX to get Ice Wall twice on-stream, despite having never done that before.

• 3x Rashida: Firing Rashida turn 1/2 really increases the probability that you can set up your board before the runner, which is the main way to beat a good Hoshiko player.

Big thanks to my testing group: Bryce (rip netrunner aka KOA), Chris, and Fa; and of course congratulations to Fa for the deserved win. You can see her giving this deck the only tournament loss I had with it here. Thanks as well to our friend Brenda for coming with us to support (and to play in her first Startup tournament), to the Pittsburgh meta for cheering us on, and to the TOs for a great tournament! It’s been almost 5 years since the last major tournament I played in, and it really reminded me why this game is so great.