Lunch Lat - 13th at Worlds, 2nd after Swiss

The name comes from just about the only card in the deck that I don't imagine anyone else included =P

Anyway, I took this Lat to 13th at Worlds 2024, which by the way was an excellently run event. Having tested my Lat play in-person at the North Regional, I was about 75% sure I would take Lat to Worlds, and nothing really happened to deter me - it's a powerful and well rounded deck, with still plenty of room for tinkering.

I did test Lat with Snarebears a bit more dilligently into some key matchups - Aginfusion, PD, R+, and the changes were informed by that.

I found the previous rig a little too lightweight for my liking into really taxing decks, and I did expect Aginfusion to see a fair bit of play, even though I did correctly call Sokka pivoting away from it. Turbine seemed an obvious addition to improve longevity, it plays nicely with Revolver, Echelon and does a good job keeping Propeller live, but other parts of the rig, like Unity and Pressure Spike, were underperforming. Pressure Spike has always felt like a weakpoint to me when playing this deck, and so with the Turbine in, moving to Cleaver seemed logical. I found I was rarely installing Pressure Spike and paying 5 to break a Bran isn't some kind of miracle, so I was happy to ditch it. Unity is good late, but doesn't benefit a lot from Turbine, and a common problem against PD was dealing with a turn 1-3 Gatekeeper, as even Trick Shot money was often not enough to sweeten the pill of paying 7 credits to break it. I settled on Euler after some testing; it's a nice cheap install and a great breaker on the turn it comes out, and you have the option of blinking it with Simulchip on a turn when you plan to run through a bunch of codegates, perhaps to Deep dive, or to run through PDs remote of MICs and Gatekeepers several times. Buzzsaw is an option, giving the best lategame strength in return for not being able to deal with Gatekeeper at all early. It might be possible to play both of these, as the influence would be there, but slots get a little tough.

I think cutting the Clot and keeping Fermenter and Cuppulation was the right move for this meta, and in the tournement Fermenter was great, as I faced a lot of Aginfusion.

I like Telework a lot for Lat, as it weaves in nicely into meeting the Lat draw requirement, without having to take mediocre last click take a credit actions, but I suspect most people will prefer the second Overclock. File it away as similar to me being weird and liking my 1x Regolith in PD.

I tried Bahia Bands and Build Script as the last influence, and found both uninspiring in this list, so put in NFL relatively late. I don't think it's crucial to the deck, but kill R+ is a chunk of the meta, and I wouldn't change that choice if I had to go again.

The only other decision point that I can recall is sticking to Aniccam over Swift. I think if you want to beat up on decks like PD, Swift makes a fair amount of sense to ease click compression and lean slightly harder into landing Deep Dives. However, Aniccam triggers off of more of your events, costs no influence, and gives you more equity into a range of decks that might be trying to kill you. Definitely one to pick based on your meta, but I like Aniccam more.

Thanks once again to everyone who worked so hard to make this Worlds what it was. Truly a great time!