The Metric Octopus - 11th at Worlds 2023

ExtraC 796

The Duality Of Ika

It's been one hell of a journey to arrive at this form, originally beginning as Ysengrin's excellent Cascadia list we were fairly convinced at Pigeon Labs that Arisanna's late-game wincon had the highest potential strength both in terms of being able to contest big ice servers late game and sustainably R&D locking the corp to prevent sneakout wins, especially with Aeneas to fund the whole thing once the conduit digs started.

Gameplan pattern is generally to get the pieces (urban, lily and a trojan) in place and start building from there to realise value from the installs. This list wants to pressure the corp frequently with a "either you rez this Kyuban-ed ice or I get a run plus mopus click" both to slow the corp down and to present targets for later takobi farming. Then once you've established board you can turn your attention to R&D to close out. The corp cannot let you start farming off conduit digs as even a single aeneas can recoup costs once there's a couple counters on it, and with kyuban plus efficient set up breakers it's not rare to end credit positive every run on R&D.

Card Choices

Mimic & Ika

The sentry breaker posed the longest challenge for us, we were running Carmen for a fair while to try and shore up the outfit matchup but we kept encountering the same issue: even with takobi and kyuban breaking drafter sustainably was untenable. Echelon is better for drafter but not a promising option for dealing with Ansel, anansi or any other big sentries until fully set up with breakers and takobi. We opted for the mimic + ika combination to allow you to deal with these bigger sentries early game and then fall back to solely mimic for later game once takobi was ticking. Ika being unpreventable UAV triggers is also a massive plus versus the likes of Ob who will happily extract ice to attempt to deny you.

0 Slap Vandals

Slap is a real feel good card...until you encounter an ice that has more than one sub you can't let fire. We found that with 7 trojans you could get UAV triggers relatively consistently even without slap and SMCing for it was often not the correct call. The common ice that slap does excel at (cheap barriers and Funhouse) often had other workable solutions (cleaver and kyuban + hush to effectively make it break 2 respectively) so we went down to 0 to free up slots for draw and other pieces.

Aeneas

This pulls double duty in this list, shoring up your asset matchup to give you value from running + Ari install to give you the tempo to check new facedowns whilst also fueling your mid/late game conduit digs. Vs asa when you've identified your takobi farm target it can easily net you sure gamble money per click with kyuban if there's an asset behind a spent Gatekeeper, ablative or magnet.

Takobi over Turbine

Cheaper to install (helps with Environmental counters) and allows you to leverage a cheap server run into an expensive server run vs Ob, PD or Asa. Bran becomes a lot less threatening when it's 2 to break.

3 Bahia Bands

Run events are just really good in Arissana as you can combo it with your ID ability to set up a UAV trigger and draw plus install is almost always correct here for value. You need to get your engine pieces in place asap or the corp will get to a dangerous position so this should smooth out your setup.

3 Simulchip and SMC

We tested going 2+3 in various combinations but either it slowed us down or left us vulnerable to rigshooter or just overinstalled ice. 3x3 lets us set up quickly whilst allowing us to maintain a clot threat.

Overclock

The slot for influence 15 went through a fair few iterations as well, it's been DJ Fenris (too slow to realise value, didn't get installed half of the time), pinhole (great in certain matchups and just dead draw in others) and finally overclock, despite putting us at 14 inf. This is probably a flex slot that you can place whatever 1 inf card you want in but overclock definitely won a few games on the day so would recommend.


Big thanks to PSK and all of the judges & volunteers at Casa Rius, 260 people is a lot of players to manage and they did an excellent job at organising us. Had an absolute blast at the tournament and the hangouts in the evenings 😸

8 comments
17 Oct 2023 RoRo

love this deck, congrats on the placement!

17 Oct 2023 ayyyliens

Based 3x Bahia bands enjoyer

17 Oct 2023 pspacekitten

one game at a time!

18 Oct 2023 mr_pelle

So happy to see someone else playing Mimic in Arissana! I had the same epiphany some weeks ago and brought a similar list with great results!

Congrats on the top!

18 Oct 2023 maninthemoon

Cool list!

26 Oct 2023 Sixtyten

Excellent deck name 😉

13 Nov 2023 PhedraZodiac

Thanks for watching, what a great klingelton.

28 Feb 2024 sarahlly

Efforts have created resounding success bob the robber