EA Sports Sends Their Regards (2nd Mar AMT)

(you can find my runner side writeup here)

In my initial corp exploration for RWR's release, I assembled a few premises regarding the state of Weyland scoring decks going into the new meta:

• The Basalt Spire is an absolutely cracked agenda to FA (with Big Deal) or NA (with The Holo Man or otherwise). Its score effect lets you effectively bounceback from the tempo hit that pushing a 5/3 would usually cost, and even having an effect on steal takes a bit of the sting out of losing it.

• Oaktown Renovation my beloved; but with the number of new ways that runners can punish early pushes with Window of Opportunity, Arruaceiras Crew, even going elsewhere with Burner and Cataloguer - it's really difficult to justify the hybrid rush Ob agenda suite in this meta.

• The FOTM runners going into the first weekend of RWR release, in my head, were: 'Reg' Seb, whalewolf shaper, and assorted knife decks. None of which are Clot decks! Thus, any kind of Weyland FA brew should take advantage of this momentary lapse in Virus Anarch representation to maybe get some solid results before we return to the iron grip of our Hoshiko and Loup overlords.

(Note: NANPC and AMT were won by Loup and Hoshiko respectively. Death, Taxes, and Knobkierie, I suppose.)

To that end, I identified Circle of Life-style Rush Ob (ft. Holoman) and Big Deal Outfit as reasonable starting points in my experimentation. After my initial hours of stress testing, I came to the following interim conclusions:

• Holo Rush Ob, when it works, works; however I personally felt that the econ was far too feast-or-famine for my liking between losing Oaktown and having to pay for Holoman activations on top of that. My TAIB comrade AugustusCaesar took a version of this archetype to a very respectable 4th at the AMT!

• BD Outfit makes excellent use of Basalt counters to push through TBTFs after the BD FA; however this does lead to extremely awkward scoring patterns where Hostile Takeover doesn't really fit in because it leaves you at 4 points. In addition, trying to play more than 1 Basalt in the normal Outfit agenda suite leads to some very awkward numbers where you're either playing only 1 Atlas or have to make the concession to go to 21 points.

There was definitely something to both these ideas, but I didn't really have the time or energy to really follow up on either to address their issues. Enter kikai, who in between intermittent bursts of gardening (god bless UK weather, fr) very graciously provided the list you see above, courtesy of his testing group EA Sports. Thanks a lot, friendos!

Nuvem SA: Law of the Land is the happy middle ground between the 2 IDs we've already talked about. It's richer than Ob by virtue of dripping 2c/turn, and any 2 of Seamless/Slash/Audacity simulates a Holoman effect without having to actually risk agenda points (by virtue of Basalt letting you pick up the agenda immediately).

It's still possible that Holoman is better than Seamless here, card is busted as hell, but Seamless is a perfectly cromulent card in its own right and getting your Nuvem trigger on the scoring turn is pretty cool. Plus, it's really funny when you get to do a PD cosplay and pick it back up from Archives whenever.

min. deck size is just a number

Nuvem isn't as good as Outfit at bouncing back from a Big Deal, but the option is there if you want it, and at least in this case you can actually trust centrals to hold somewhat if you've already rezzed ice there, instead of getting absolutely ravaged by runners who are gonna be able to take full advantage of the opportunity with all the bad pub you've given them. In general the deck is incentivised to ice centrals early anyway; the value that a single Subliminal Messaging return provides to the deck is so great that many runners are put under immense pressure to keep the tempo up against you.

That's it; really. NA/FA a Basalt and let it carry you through FAing the last 4 points. Slash and Burn Agriculture looks like a pretty derpy agenda, but it honestly gets FA'ed more often than you think; the 2nd/3rd place match in the AMT was ended by a triple Slash FA! (timestamp to come later)

I've gone over most of the shoutouts in my runner writeup already, but once again a HUGE thank you to kikai and the EAS crew for trusting me with the list and letting me publish it; I'm sure we can find things to work on and improve in the future. Official TAIB collab when? 👀

As always, SHAABR friendos

Jai out