Facet Ob (15, ?? @ Worlds 2023)

The sappy stuff is in my runner writeup.

This is the Ob list that I, monde and krysdreavus brought to Worlds 2023. monde managed to get to the top cut and ended up 15th; krys went 6-3 with it and got 50th; I went 5-1 with it, IDed once, then dropped because of a positive COVID test.

When Atien organized a tournament for xir 30th birthday I decided to spike a little less than usual and bring a funny deck that suited me but didn't believe in too much. Then I went 5-0 with it, and immediately started considering whether that approach could be taken seriously and worked into a good list for Worlds. I called it "Hybrid Ob" at first, then "FA Asset Ob", which izzy then shortened to "Facet Ob". The deck went through many iterations and I seriously considered dropping it and picking up Paillu's PE pretty close to the event, but some more fiddling ultimately fixed it to a point where it just felt great (thanks Jai for making us add the 2x Marilyn Campaigns!).

This lost more and more assets and damage stuff and ultimately became all about fast scoring, except Runners have to burn an immense amount of early tempo trying to contest your early Urban Renewal, or risk dying otherwise. After they've done that you can just abuse the fact that they're so behind and score points behind your very good ice (remember Stavka is an ETR when you're scoring an SDS Drone Deployment). When you have a decent amount of points you can just FA, which you have a lot of pieces for if you can stick a Reconstruction Contract on the table to Seamless Launch it.

The deck is quite difficult to play, a lot of lines involve tricky Ob searches. Luckily you can learn how to do it, and at that point it's only tricky for your opponent. Your ability to never-advance your SDSs is scary when lists are known, and plain destructive when unknown. Some of my opponents in Swiss saw assets and simply assumed that they would be against a kill deck, and lost their Aumakua or their Cleaver to an early SDS score. Runners never know what they're being forked between, and this swiss factor helped immensely in leading opponents into bad and inefficient plays.

When the game feels difficult just keep bullshitting your opponent into a remote until you win. You don't need to preadvance anything, and a Mavirus or a Reconstruction Contract on the board mean you can always overwrite your agenda when it's about to be accessed if you have a Spin Doctor on the board (which is not too hard to keep in place when opponents have so many must-trash assets to manage).

This looked like a silly "hybrid" idea, but ultimately it proved really strong on the day for all who took it, and I would definitely consider taking it to other tournaments soon. Ob Superheavy Logistics: Extract. Export. Excel. is the most fun card NSG ever printed and it's been so fun to keep building elaborate machines with it.