I am carried. (2nd, 11th, 21st, 37th @ ACC24)

I love deckbuilding. The decks that I've taken to competitive tournaments in the past year have mostly been my work, tuned by playing a lot of games in internal testing and refined and practiced to the point where I know everything I'm doing no matter how complex they can be. But recently I haven't been sure of what I was doing on the Runner side, so I had to turn to others for help and be ready to step out of my comfort zone.

I knew Paillu had been smurfing this on jnet casual for month and refining it, but I just thought it wasn't for me: I had never played Esa, and imagined it wouldn't "click" for some reason. But as soon as I picked up the deck its power was immediately evident to me, and I felt sure that this would be the one. It was only a matter of getting a bunch of reps in and tuning slots to my personal preference.

What I took to ACC is entirely based on frogs' list. We all ended up taking very similar decklists, with the few differences between our lists (Cupellation vs Legwork, Light the Fire! vs 3rd Running Hot, Buzzsaw vs 2nd Botulus) coming down to personal playstyle and how worried we were about Sports and Reeducation Azmari being very big in the ACC meta as anti-Hoshiko picks.

There's not much to explain here, the deck is powerful yet straightforward to understand - as much as actual planning during play can get intricate. Kitty + sex robot breaks anything for 3, which when combined with Bankhar and Botulus gets into most servers - and if the Corp finds the tempo to really lock something up, you just move elsewhere! The deck can pressure every server handily, being really scary even when just rolling for singles. Ashen Epilogue allows us to use Labor Rights very aggressively to recur whatever speeds us up or exploits a weakness. Simulchip is better in the Cupellation version, but still rocks in this one. The Price will miss sometimes, but really helps with getting our hardware down consistently in the early game. Dr. Nuka Vrolyck is generally amazing and makes sure we can still use Bankhar after we've cored ourselves down to 2.

The deck went 17-10 for the four of us over the weekend, a great record for a tournament where runners had a 47% winrate. It doesn't feel like any matchup is really bad - we wrecked AgInfusion decks despite being very worried about them - and some, like most rush Ob lists, feel like a free win.

Replays

• vs Rush Ob
• vs Facet Ob
• vs Rush Asa
• vs PD

• vs BtL Glacier

• vs Sports

• vs Tatu Asa
• vs Aginfusion
• vs Tatu Asa
• vs Louder PE