SPARK45 [0-0 at ICC]

jan tuno 3969

A single Spark is all it takes...

This is the Esa deck I brought to ICC. Because I played two awful Ob games (sometimes you just aren't in the zone), I didn't get to show off its power. I'm experimenting with other stuff now, but if I really cared about winning a tournament tomorrow, this is the exact list I'd be taking. (If I was better at Lat or Hoshiko I'd take those, but I'm better at Esa).

This is similar to my EMEA list. As it often happens with deckbuilding, a lot of wild changes were tested (including By Any Means!) but then in a roundabout way, we ended up in a similar spot to where we started.

The biggest achievement here was going down to 45 cards, which I don't think is absolutely necessary but is also a definite improvement to the deck's consistency.

The big realizations that led to that were that with Mystic Maemi, we're happy enough to play the Ashen Epilogue proactively that we don't particularly want the 3rd Labor Rights, and that Finality is a bad card actually. It's conditional enough that you will often be holding it until you lose it to damage before you can play it, and then you can only play it by Laboring it back, but then playing it would be jeopardizing your recursion plans. So why not just skip it? You're entirely able to win by sabotage and singles alone (in this deck, running for singles is an important skill to master). You can spend your core damage budget to recurring more copies of Running Hot, a card that unconditionally wins you the game every time you play it.

NWE have been doing very interesting things, but as far as I'm concerned this is the best Esa list in its own style. Skip the EMEA one and jam this.

8 comments
27 Jul 2024 Council

Wow this is next level Esa. I will be ready soon

28 Jul 2024 somefish

Yay you made the write up! I can claim my spots now! ^^ Thank you for brewing and fine tuning!

28 Jul 2024 somefish

Going down to 45 really helped me maximize my Chastushka's! I was wondering what were your thoughts on single accesses? Do you try and get into the central that has the most porous ICE, or do you try and pressure HQ, and only swing to R&D on game-ending turns?

In the 7 games that I played with this deck, I often found myself not having the credits to really use Laamb to its full potential, and I never did the Laamb + Begemot 3c combo. In which match-ups do you try to prioritize setting that up?

28 Jul 2024 jan tuno

@somefish: whether you build begemot+laamb is very matchup dependent, but you should generally be able to have the money for it if you need to do it. Spark and Retrieval both help. Laamb by itself does very little and you shouldn't really install it on its own and expect a lot from it.

Singles: do them when there are many agendas in the server. Read the corp to find out when that's the case :)

29 Jul 2024 Rhahi

A well polished deck!

30 Jul 2024 tzeentchling

Are you not really needing to Light the Fire! very much then? It feels like a nice out to have sometimes.

30 Jul 2024 Wenjong

We're blessed with being able to learn Esa with this gem already polished ... has been jamming some Esa on jnet and this has been incredibly smooth and fun.

Thanks for the deck and write-up ... amazing as always. 😇

12 Aug 2024 RayS

Have y'all ever tried Fencer Fueno in this list as a "Miss Bones at home"? I find myself struggling to keep up on some of the asset-heavy matchups but I really don't want to find the influence for Bones.