Cuphead's Funhouse 👑 King of Swiss @ Vancouver Megacity

Look at the art on the front page of this ID and tell me the art style's not straight out of Cuphead...

Welcome to the Devil's HQ: (pitch)Fork City.

Heading into Vancouver Megacity, I wanted to play the best NBN deck I could find (because top of faction pins, and NBN is historically bae), and since I’m clearly a False Lead enthusiast (read: sicko), this seems like the best place for it.

I’d seen a couple End of the Line Nebulas around, but when I brought a version very close to this one to meetup, a friend thought it was The King’s, which I hadn’t seen (great minds and all that; hi, Brandon!). After looking at his list, I altered my ice suite a bit, as I was not on Funhouses, more on sentries like Doomscrolls, and then played a couple dozen games to a satisfying winrate of about 82%.

The deck went undefeated in Swiss, along with my Sable, with flatlines against Sable, Seb, and Magdalene, so one runner of each faction. In the cut, it had a rematch against the same Magdalene in which two False Leads were sacked at different times when the runner had a tag, with only one kill combo piece in hand, and trying to draw for the other didn’t pan out. Sometimes risks pay off, sometimes they don’t.

In the quarterfinals, Hoshiko was dead next turn, kill cards in hand, but they top-decked the winning agenda on their last remaining click, which I had karmically coming after the win my Sable got off Ob the game before (in which I stole the 1 in 18 agenda I needed to win the game off R&D at time, definitely dead next turn).

In all of my games with this deck, I have scored out only once or twice, hence...

The Kill Plan:

Ice HQ and R&D as soon as humanly possible, ideally on turn 1, and play an econ operation to flip your ID and gain a credit. Why does Nebula also give you a free credit in addition to its already very powerful ability? Who can say.

If the runner makes you rez ice, that’s typically okay due to the magnitude of bounceback operations here you can play from low credits, like YDL, Planogram, and Petty Cash, as the ultimate goal is to keep them from running your two main centrals at all with disincentivizing pieces of ice like Funhouse and Unsmiling Tsarevna so you can get four-click turns all game.

The Importance of Four-Click Turns...

With four-click turns from the Gemilang Arena side of the ID, you can fast advance False Leads, which is your main priority, as well as the four 3/2s. You can also do kill combos through nine cards in the runner’s grip with Touch Ups, double End of the Line, if they have two tags from an Oppo. Sacking False Leads helps you do this, and sacking two just gives you two turns in a row, which is often the play after you land even a small Oppo for two tags.

Four-click enabling cards are Business as Usual, which is a 1-influence fast advance piece, that also lets you advance a Mest, and after threat three, remove all counters from a Fermenter, Audrey, Conduit, or some other thing that’s oppressing you. I even once played it at this tournament just for a one-click value purge against a Fermenter, to get the credit and flip the ID.

Petty Cash from Archives also gives you a four-click turn, and discarding them facedown in the bin when the runner thinks they’re maybe safe from a score can be a good surprise. Touch Ups also fast advances these cards, with the added bonus of forcing the runner to shuffle powerful events back into the stack, such as Deep Dive, Transfer of Wealth, etc. I shuffled probably four Deep Dives back in Maggie’s stack between our two games.

Sticking a Mest on the board early is important because it’s a target for Touch Ups when they are tagged and you have End of the Line in hand, since it’s advanceable. Mest is also great because it’s usually taxing to facecheck and break, especially when advanced. The jig is obviously up that they know where they are on the board though if advanced and facedown, but that's typically fine.

A Note on Whiffing Touch Ups: One Big Mozza Ball Hanging Out There...

Whiffing Touch Ups calls does happen, and it is brutal, which happened to me in the game that knocked me out of the cut. Hoshiko had five cards in hand and a tag after a False Lead sack, and I took time to count the relative number of cards in the heap between Event and Resource (though should have crunched more numbers more closely alongside the open decklist), I called Event, cause that’s the usual best call, and they had just one Event and three Resources, and I ended up losing that game. Smart players will often intentionally try to get Events out of their hands when they smell a Touch Ups coming, and I’m sure this is what my very wise opponent did, and I should have read that. I haven't been psychically self-flaggelating myself about this moment at all since my tournament ended.

Other Lines...

In rare cases, you can bluff out a Tomorrow's Headline as a Spin Doctor, then Touch Ups it into End of the Line, but that's dream-city. Another fantasy scenario you can do is to install double advance a Next Big Thing if you're at six points with two False Leads scored, then sack both False Leads going down to four points, then triple advancing out for three points and a win. I got one 3/2 score away from being able to do this at the tournament. In one game ever, the Shipment from Vlad won me the game, scoring a Next Big Thing from hand to get to seven points. It's a good safety valve for winning against a runner that's teched to the nines with Stoneships and feels unkillable.

Overall, the deck went 3-0 in Swiss and 0-2 in the cut, but corps have been flailing in cuts lately, and I feel like I made some sub-optimal, risky plays, not based on pure certainty.

I want to thank Sindarin for running an amazing tournament this weekend with unreal prize support, the judges, streamers, volunteers, my opponents, and friends for a hilariously fun weekend.

My runner deck from the event is here.