2nd @ EMEA: Combo Ob

First of all, if somebody from the NSG Balance Team is reading this, please don't ban Ob. I wouldn't mind if you would ban Mutually Assured Destruction. And if not that's also fine, I'll just keep abusing this deck. But please, Ob didn't do anything wrong :-)

Also my sincerest apologies to all jinteki.net players who have to play against this deck, because apparently there are some people spamming this right now.

This is the deck I played at the EMEA continentals in Bergamo. It went 6-1 in swiss and 3-1 in the top cut, with wins vs Kit, 2xEsa, Hoshiko (Maw), 2xArissana (World Tree), Hoshiko (Ice destruction), Sable and Steve. And 2 losses against Esa. One of which was against jan tuno where I did the combo with a 60% succes rate, but hit the Steelskin Scarring. But that's just part of the game if you have to play around Steelskin.

I played the same combo deck for the majority of last year's tournament, but a few things have changed since I last posted the deck list.

A change I already made at Dutch nats was changing the 2 Bass CH1R180G4 for 2 Wage Workers. Rubenpieters made me realise at worlds that the combo also worked with Wage Workers, which I originally didn't think about since it doesn't have the same synergy with double or triple operations like Jeeves Model Bioroids did, but yeah I'm still playing 3 operations so it doesn't matter. An argument could still be made for Bass CH1R180G4 because if you have one on the board and one still in the deck, you technically don't need a Biotic Labor in hand, or you could even go for the very unlikely triple End of the Line combo.

Going with Wage Workers instead frees up influence for a Mindscaping. This can either function as a fourth copy of End of the Line, or is just really good against Steelskin Scarring. For instance an anarch player with 4 cards in hand, 2 of which are Steelskin Scarring would be safe from the old list, but with Mindscaping it becomes 50%/50%. It also means swapping over to some more 3-cost ICE. Keep in mind that Border Control also functions as a 3-cost ICE.

Changing Rashida Jaheem to Regolith Mining License was definitely the right call. The extra econ really helps, and it's an extra way to get ICE rezzed by using the Ob ability against runners who think they can prevent Mutually Assured Destruction by not running. That's also why I'm now playing 3 Tithe.

I hadn't played the deck since Dutch nats, so now that RwR is out I just changed Send a Message to The Basalt Spire (great vs Maw and Esa) and added a Descent to help keeping my HQ clean. Both changes were untested, but were definitely correct.

Keep in mind that this meta is absolutely horrible for this deck. Hoshiko with Maw, World Tree Arissana or just any shaper with Stoneship Chart Room should be a terrible matchup on paper. Also Cupellation is scary, you have to play around Burner, and the Esa matchup is doable but akward. However it turns out, that if you just try hard enough, you can still kill all of them.

Because of the meta, I originally decided to just swap to PD. However huge shoutout to AlPi for beating my PD over and over again on Thursday and Friday evening, and making me realise that I'm just not made for playing fair corp decks. Luckily I brought this deck to Bergamo as well for such an emergency.

Thanks to everyone who came to the tournament, it was an absolute blast. And special thanks to all the NSG volunteers for making this possible.