Welcome Your New Overlord Takobi (1st&undefeated@irish nats)

Takobi is such a sweet card, it is a simple 2 cost solution to almost anything the corp can do to mess with our breakers. 10 Str Pharos, hah, thats a cute investement you made there, let me just break it real quick for 2 credits (in practice you usually pay 4 after boosting to 9 because breakpoints, but who's counting).

The discovery of a dormant force

To my knowledge, the first person to sight our new overlord takobi was Baa Ram Wu, famed transmuter of jank into treasure, who had been a fan of the card in metas past and revived it in the preparation for intercontinentals as a suggestion for Jai and Kyra's list (edit: since then Kyra took this deck to great success at NZ nats). Massive props to Wu for the incredible idea, to Jai and Kyra for recognizing its greatness and pioneering the inclussion, as well as to Izzy, who brought the card to Can Nats.

This deck brings the innovation of Takobi's second in command, Bankhar, who absolutely supercharges the forks that the corp is presented by the card.

Counterplay (or lack thereof)

Now, the corp does theoretically have counterplay to our ice melting strat, they can trash all of their small ice to make sure you dont get Takobi counters too easily. But this rarely works out too well in practice, for one, this is netrunner, so the corp doesnt have infinite credits, so they can't usually put multiple 7 cost ice in all of their servers, so they have to face the very unfortunate choice of letting you run some server for absolutely free, or let you get some bargain bin prices on takobi counters. the deck has great pressure on all centrals and money to contest centrals.

Busted Combination with Bankhar

Also, Takobi is rarely your lone ice solution, if you have a Bankhar out, the has to choose between letting you trivialize their ice with bankhar or takobi, a fork I would not want to be on the receiving end of. So once again I will echo the cry of @Dapperatchik from last meta, "For God's Sake Put Bankhar In Your Hoshiko". It is a busted card that lets you just walk all over corps, specially into the emerging popularity of Asa decks. You dont need to play extra cards in your deck to make bankhar work, your dont need to run bad cards to support him, he is just great in basically any pile of good cards.

The Price

The price is a great card, I have reached the point where all my anarch decks will start with 3x gachapon and 3x price and they might get cut later if the deck unfortunately cant support them. This deck has a surprisingly high amount of 1 and 2 cost cards, but the average value off the price is still 2.8 creds, with basically 0 complete whiffs. And it draw's you an extra card on average half of the time (or to be more precise 2 cards 25% of the time). That is a much better impression of old deuces wild than Bahia Bands could ever hope to consistently reach. (though i still like bands enough, i considered it over bones, but liked my slots being more concentrated)

The Tech Slots

An old favourite strat of mine is to load up my Hoshiko with all of the tech cards I can, and then for the matchups where i dont need them, im still happy to have the bankhar fodder.

-Pinhole. Dont leave home without plenty of pinholes or else the BIG BAD SCARY MONSTER will get you. I wish the influence could work out so that I could sneak a 3rd in here, but twas not to be.

-Clot and Simulchip are here for all of the nasty weyland decks. One simulchip felt important to make sure you can be more free about taking economy over breakers from Prices. It was pretty dumb of me to cut the 3rd fermenter, since that is the best you have to take value sims. Simulchip on its own is also pretty important against Stavka, I would be pretty happy to cut clot in a different meta, but i think the simulchip should stay in most situations.

-Miss Bones is here because i expected a decent uptick of asset decks after the excellent performance they had at interconts. I was sad to cut the Hannah, that I had in there alongside the bones, but slots are hard.

-Boomerang is great in a world where everyone is ready to destroy Botulus and Slap Vandal, people feel real safe behind their magnets and a boomerang really shows them. It is also very good alongside Takobi (as long as you line it up into 2 sub ice)

-Hush, NSG puts a lot of interesting and powerful text on ice, and I didnt want to have to deal with any of it. There was a memorable moment of the tournament where an outfit had randomly splashed for an anansi i had locked bankhar onto, I would have been dead if not a timely simulchip-hush. This is the most cuttable tech if you want to add your own cool stuff in, but it does honest work.

Other "Interesting" Choices

-The 1-1 The Twinning-Stargate is a classic from old meta, with all the street peddler effects we have, there is even more reason to be on the split, since you can choose whichever fits best in the current matchup as you see them on gachapons and prices and leave the other one rfg'd/in the heap.

-Trickster Taka is definitely the 45th slot in the deck, mostly here as a holdover from when i was on 2 twinning. I've had some games where it was incredibly impressive as a second rezeki, but also plenty of games where it does nothing.

Aknowledgements

A million thanks to Anarchomushroom for organizing the event, it was incredibly fun.