Do Not Put Down Your Deck (5/9/10/17/18th ACC)

Do not put down your deck.

Do not shuffle it, or offer your opponent to cut. You're gonna have to search it again 2 more times this click. Yes, it's still turn 1. Yes, this is perfectly normal.

Do not put down your deck.

Pedigree

AugustusCaesar, sebastiank, wowarlok, ArminFirecracker, and Gathzen all brought variations of this deck to ACC, all placing within the top 20. They placed better than all the WT Ari unbelievers within TAIB, including the non-WT Ari apostate xiaat (placing 19th), and the 3 Hoshiko heretics the king, coldlava, and myself (placing, you don't wanna know).

meanwhile, koga on Steve hanging out at 13th be like: 🥷

Thesis

World Tree Ari has been a known deck in the Standard format for a while now, ever since Mr. Metropole himself showed off the excellent Tech Tree back in the TAI meta. More recently, of course, tbu3k made 11th at NANPC Boston with his take on the archetype, its first showing post 24.05 banlist.

So what's changed to make WT Ari such a monster now?

• Corps are much less able to defend against value runs than they were before. The Tributary ban was meant to free Crim, but it also unshackled the archetype in the format that gets the biggest value bump out of making exactly 1 successful run per turn.

• With the Bellona ban, WT's biggest natural predator has been effectively defanged.

• the Coalescence cycling engine is an incredible way to pull out your rig or your tech programs with record efficiency, and because you're Ari you're not even sad if you draw them; you just install on-tempo and keep going.

Notables

You'll immediately notice the 10inf spent statistic at the top of the list. This isn't a meme; we're not superstitious enough to offer up 5 whole influence to [[insert deity of choice here]], but the remainder inf is extremely flex and we wildly diverged in the way we spent it at the event. For what it's worth, the 'canonical' TAIB list fills it with a second Physarum Entangler and a Clot.

The list pictured is much more of a template for the core of the list that we agreed on, with some minutiae that would probably be too tedious to fit in here. I'll let each member talk about some of their notable card choices later on, but for now let's look at some notable exclusions:

Aesop’s Pawnshop: If you've got extra programs to be selling to Aesop, you're probably not deploying your rig aggressively enough.

Urban Art Vernissage/Ika: A highly contentious cut; some Breakers are still holding on to it, but generally speaking you rarely have the correct setup early game to do the reg Ari thing and keep bouncing trojans for value. Even if you do, Daily Casts does the same thing for a sufficient number of turns, then turns into something more useful afterwards without needing to stick around.

Cyberdelia: to quote tbu3k: "We're trying to win the game, not build the biggest accounting simulator this side of Stegodon MK IV". DZMZ does more for less anyway.

Earthrise Hotel: Have you ever drawn this card?! It's bloody awful!

Tech

I now cede the floor to my fellow Breakers, who will elaborate on some of their flex influence and/or tech slots:

Armin (Burners, 2nd Turbine, Clot, Imp)

Imp is not the most impactful influence. But it is still a program to recur with WT, and definitely gives an extra edge against assets and Thule (which wasn't present at all). It almost feels evil to get out DJ Loup, Bones, Parica and Imp against assets. 

Most notable cut on my side are all 3 Airblades. I just transform the first DZMZ/Simulchip into a Lilypad.

The deck performed like a monster, only losing a close game against Sokka's Asa.

Augustus (Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga, Clot)

Bankhar and Physarum perform very similar roles, letting you get into servers. It gives the twofold benefit of consistent WT triggers on centrals, and then piles on pressure on remotes when you need to slow the Corp directly. And playing 1 of each in such a tutor focused deck seemed principled.

For corp matchups that require speed, World Tree works incredibly with Bankhar's power curve. You can use it to accelerate and pressure early, and eventually turn it into a Daily Casts when it's no longer needed.

As if that wasnt enough, the shell already plays Airblades, and with Bankhar those can give 2 cards worth of value back before getting trashed to their intended end state. I wont oversell this aspect, as Airblades most often gets trashed soon after installing, so it doesn't always hang around to combo, but when it does it is sweet.

Sebk (In the Groove, 2nd Physarum, Cupellation)

I wanted to have a slightly bigger deck to include cards like Aesops, UAV, Earthrise, and Ika. The deck needed more econ to preserve the ratio, and after trying many different econ cards, I listened to the King's suggestion to try out In the Groove. Oh baby.

In the deck, there are so many installables that the floor of the card is almost always  diesel/easy mark, but with world tree the ceiling is insane. An Ari install, a simulchip pop, and getting muse/coalescence with tree instead of just coalescence all make it not uncommon for you to have In the Groove turns where you are drawing 5 cards.

Just remember to not do careless installs just to trigger In the Groove; if you have to overwrite programs to install more things it's probably not worth it, and sometimes it's important to save Chips for future turns as well.

wowarlok (2nd Turbine, 2nd Physarum, Clot)

With Turbine Hoshiko looking like the most common runner to face at the event, it was only natural for corps to adjust their ice suites to better deal with that rig, and the most obvious way to annoy Hoshiko's breakers is to play as many 6+ strength ice as possible. Every faction has a few and they're all seeing more and more play: Gatekeeper, Bran out of both HB and Jinteki, Hydra and Piranhas, as well as Weyland advanceables and Eminent Archer.

Since efficiency is the key of this deck, we need a way to distinguish our rig from Hoshiko's to deal with these ice. My solution is to play a second Turbine to boost all the breakers to 7 strength: Turbine is quite cheap off of a Tree trigger, and MU is rarely a problem given we have access to a lot of it with ease.

I installed both Turbines in almost all of my games and every time they were pivotal at foiling the corp's attempt at building a taxing server.

Gathzen (Burners, Maw, Cupellation, Docklands Pass, -DJ and Buzzsaw)

For my version, I really wanted to include Umbrella as it is one of my favourite breakers (and favourite TAI breaker), and I think it has some potential. The two main issues are the Trojan requirement to break and the card draw for the Corp. I didn't have anything special for the Trojan slot, mainly Kyubans and Ika.

The main focus of the deck was extra HQ pressure to turn that Corp card draw to my advantage. For that reason I included Maw, Docklands Pass, Cupellation, and Burner. As I am on a different console, theoretically the card draw that I lose from LilyPAD would be compensated by the Umbrella draw.

In practice this deck did not perform as well as I wished it would. I think I can attribute a lot of that to not enough piloting experience on my end, plus not enough testing and a need to streamline the deck a bit more. I also think this version is a bit slower which did not work out well with the Corp meta at the event. These changes also prevented me of having the influence to add Clot which I really wanted.

Closing

TAI Breakers - or rather, the organization that would eventually come to be known as the TAI Breakers - was formed in the lead up to 2023's Continentals, and while it hasn't quite been a year, it's about as close to a complete season as one can get.

This decklist is also somewhat of a landmark - at least by my accounting, this marks the first true TAIB deck collab since we blatantly stole Punitive RH from sebk and called it our own, lmao. (We eventually decided that the best way to cover up our plagiarism was to kidnap sebk himself as well; welcome to the squad, friendo!)

It personally irks me that I was too cowardly to play the same deck at ACC, electing to copout with Hoshiko and getting instantly punished by going 1-3 on her. An apology letter will be forthcoming shortly EDIT: APOLOGY POSTED IN COMMENTS

That being said, I count ACC as an absolute success for the team, having successfully debuted our work and managing to put 1 member into Intercontinentals. Shoutout to Augustus, and of course congratulations to all the other qualifiers and especially to Niichan's Girl for taking down the whole thing!

As always, SHAA- wait, what? but you didn't even... sigh fine.

Ahem. Before I sign off, a word from our sponsors:

Entangler is such a hella busted card. It legit just skips a big part of the core gameplay loop of netrunner. Imagine all the boomers complaining about stuff like boomerang and botulus but then you decide to print a card that you can install out of hand or even worse out of deck if you just hapen to have any of the shaper BS enablers in hand. 

Also who allowed the control faction to get a even more busted infinite econ pice. World tree just sits there generating infinite value. “oh but its a unlikely  chance to open the nuts” yea fam explain how in some gods name how every single testing game against a TAI breaker they got it turn 1. I did check the pick your starting hand thing was NOT on.

Becouse this deck is so busted and hosiko is almost unplayable (check the results if you want to argue) I decided to stream as my option to get the promos and that seemed to work fine enough.

...thanks, aksu.

As always, SHAABR friendos

TAIB out