Apoc MaxX (5-2 at Worlds 2021)

(Beat a hybrid Recoco/Kill Gagarin, kill CTM, NWE Gagarin, Recoco Gagarin and PD. Lost twice to kill CTM)

A fairly standard Apoc MaxX build, with a couple of card discussion points:

• 1 Stargate – It’s almost always wrong to Stargate early with this deck, because you should just be playing Apocalypse, so why have more than one when you just get it back with Labor Rights when the Corp is on their knees?
• 3 Botulus – credit to Tugtetgut, who progressively added more to the list the more we played it. Amazing for contesting early remotes, landing an Apoc, not letting the Corp recover from Apoc, and securing cheap Stargate runs
• 3 Pad Tap – in addition to all its usual benefits, resource econ that doesn’t restrict when you Apoc is good. I also expected to be facing a lot more PD than I did, and Pad Tap does a lot in that matchup
• No Deuces? – Inf is tight, Pad Taps are good, you need something like Out of the Ashes and I don’t like Amped Up 🤷‍♂️
• No Fermenter? – I thought I’d be playing against more PD, where Sandbox is a problem, and I didn’t want to cut Botulus

And a couple of meta discussion points

• This deck is not good in a meta full of kill CTM and NWE Gagarin. I was fine with losing to testing partners on the latter, but kill CTM being signal boosted right before the tournament was painful – you can’t Apoc unless they draw none of their upgrades, and you can’t float tags safely because of Boom
• On the other hand, this deck is very good against PD, especially with them reducing the number of Magnets because of the drop-off in Hivemind MaxX