Jukebox Asa (8th-10th At Worlds 2024)

This deck is the first creation of the Unnamed West Coast Testing Group, and although we were all confident in the deck we're also hyped that it did so well at Worlds 2024, right here in our back yard in SF. Currently our group consists of myself, @Tak, @Nykride, @tmoiy, @StephenE, @pj20, @pengguin, @Thomas Haas, and @dezigerator. The deck consistently performed well for most of us, and of the three of us on the deck in the top 16 we went a combined 21-4 with wins against Sokka, jan tuno, rubenpieters, and sebk (and sadly some team kills including over @tmoiy and @Tak). @StephenE, who made day 2 but sadly not the top cut, went 6-1 with victories over Hams and Augustus Caesar. All of which is to say, this deck is legit! For examples of it in play, see my games on stream - round 8 against another Bay Area player @iherdn3rfz where it did exactly what it was supposed to do, and cut round 5 against Sokka, where I made several mistakes starting from turn 1 but still managed to have decent chances to win. (I blame exhaustion).

It was fairly clear going into the season that the meta highly favored Shapers with lots of really good green cards. However, Shapers really want to stick to their gameplan, get in for cheap accesses, and Deep Dive to finish you off. Runners in general have a lot that they need to do quickly, drawing to get through their deck, playing money cards and breakers/breaker equivalents, and actually making runs. Asa excels at gaining tempo and going fast ourselves, and the Asa ability means that runners need to get down breakers or deal with facechecking ice that could push our board further ahead. Even then, though, four clicks is a lot of time in a runner's turn to get things done. But what if they had less than that?

PJ had the breakthrough idea of including MCA Austerity Policy to really tax the runner clicks. Even that one click less a turn is one less chance to develop the runner's board, especially if they have to actually contest remotes. It also has the side benefit of making it impossible to fully click through Bran 1.0, making Manegarm Skunkworks even more annoying to deal with, and increases the difficulty of pulling off a Deep Dive even with Sable, Swift, or Hannah clicks, especially if they were hoping to access more than one card. And of course, if MCA is allowed to fire off, it's not difficult to get turns where you can take the equivalent of three turns in a row, especially when combined with Luminal Transubstantiation and Wage Workers. I think the best we were able to do in the tournament was a 13-click turn.

Pulse and Active Policing are other key click compression cards that are more situational, but absolutely can lock down a win when they fire. Often, knowing that you play Ikawah Project, runners will run with a click left to pay to steal it, or perhaps even more than that to click through a Manegarm on the remote, only for a Pulse rez to sap the spare click and make the run completely ineffective. Sick plays during the tournament also included clicking MCA, scoring an agenda, putting MCA back with The Powers That Be, clicking MCA again, and then playing Active Policing to completely eliminate the runner's turn. Who even needs False Lead?

The agenda suite is designed to take advantage of this click tax, and an 8-agenda spread also makes it less vulnerable to random R&D accesses and subsequent Hermes bounces. Maximizing Ikawah Project means also maximizing the click compression inherent in the deck, and the deck doesn't often find it hard to score a NA 5/3 from the board or even from hand. Luminal is obviously good/broken. Project Vitruvius here is superior to Offworld Office for multiple reasons - being able to score it as a 3/2 is fine in itself, but getting counters and bringing back key cards like Seamless Launch, Fully Operational, or MCA Austerity Policy is how the deck keeps pushing tempo forward. Send a Message is a 3-point agenda that fills out the requirement and occasionally has a positive effect.

Offworld Office is just seven credits, but a Vitruvius can be anything. It can even be seven credits! - cranked, 2024

The deck plays most of the good Asa and HB staples, including Bran, Gatekeeper, Ablative Barrier, Drafter, Seamless, Fully Operational, Spin Doctor, Rashida, and at least one copy of The Powers That Be. We included a copy of Hagen and a Mavirus to improve the matchup against Criminals and Aumakua-based Anarch decks, and these did work throughout the day. Audacity is expensive influence-wise but a great way to unexpectedly close out the game - nobody is playing Clot at the moment, and being able to score even a 5/3 off the table with Seamless and Audacity from 2 credits is sometimes crucial. We tested The Holo Man, but here his cost is simply too prohibitive without running Offworld.

The rest of the deck varied slightly between us, allowing for personal preference and playstyle.

• Some of us (@Tak and @Nykride) are more Tatu-Bola-pilled and play two. It compresses card slots for econ and ice, which is critical in a deck like this which is starved for slots. @Nykride however only has a single Bran as a good target for Send a Message, which is objectively wrong :D
• @Tak and @Nykride also decided to include a Magnet, whereas I preferred M.I.C. for the additional click tax and SAM target. It can stress money and I don’t currently rate the special ability of Magnet too high, but Magnet is probably better against Arissana builds and MIC became a mostly dead card against Sokka with Turbine and Buzzsaw.
• @StephenE and @pj20 decided multiple Harmonics were right for them. A third Pulse is not a bad include, but you certainly could take it even further with Echo and/or Bloop.
• I’m extremely fond of Cohort Guidance Program because it increases my draw speed and provides minor filtering from my hand of less useful cards, and if the runner doesn't bother to check Archives it's quite easy to get multiple advancements on a NA agenda. Seeing it early often felt important in my games, so I wanted two copies. In contrast @Nykride plays 0 as sometimes needing to throw away cards isn't great - this deck wants to use almost everything it draws, and can easily draw a lot.
• Greasing the Palm helps get cards out of a crowded hand but also is there as a subtle anti-tag punishment card that allows us to score one of our agendas from hand.
• I personally favor Tranquility Home Grid but others in our group like Nico Campaign more for reliable money and some card draw - to an extent it can take the Cohort slot.
• A second copy of Powers That Be is a common variation, and we even tested Gaslight as essentially a 4th Fully Op and generally flexible card to have.

Worlds 2024 felt like a grand coming out party for our testing group. We've all been playing for various amounts of time (PJ and I being the oldheads in the group, back to FFG Core Set days, and obviously Timmy Wong needs no introduction) and some of us have done decently well at the regionals-level tournaments like Cascadia and Off the Grid, but I feel like Worlds was an opportunity to get our name recognition and really recognize the hard work and effort we put into building and playtesting this deck and honing our skills with each other.

We had an agreement in our group that whomever placed highest at Worlds would get to name the team. Which happens to be me! While I do appreciate the inherent je ne sais quoi of Unnamed West Coast Testing Group, we also have a strong fondness in our group for the FFG minifactions. So on that note, you can refer to us in the future as…

Logic Bomb

See you at the next big tournament!