Ashnikko 🎤 - 3rd @ Fly to EMEA #1

I'm back
And I'm better
I put that teddy bear you gave me in a blender

New headcanon just dropped: Hoshiko travelled back in time to the 21st century to escape the issues of her youth and grew up into badass magical girl punk rapper Ashnikko. Now she walks among us, spitting bars by day and running nets by night, and no subroutines can hurt her.

🎤

One of my big questions coming into RWR standard was how NuLevy was going to affect Runner deckbuilding. I've seen several other decklists from the first two weekends of the format describing it as a questionable include, but I'm here to tell you: if you lean all the way in, Ashen Epilogue is The Truth.

Premise: Ashen is at its best when you're reliably going through your stack, getting all your key installables set up, and then resetting all your econ cards to draw all gas for the rest of the game.

Conclusion: we go all-in on the self-trashing Anarch package: 3x Moshing, 3x Price, 3x Bankhar, 3x Steelskin, 3x Strike Fund. Stack? What stack?

This would in theory put us at risk of losing our Ashen to all this random trashing, but between 2x Labor Rights and DJ Steve, it's next to impossible to ever actually get locked out. Just make sure you install DJ from hand or with Price if you're at risk of ending up with all your other recursion in the heap, and then you can guarantee getting Ashen back with Rights.

This core engine is extremely consistent - it's pretty common to get through the stack by around turn 5-7, at which point we're fully set up and can hit the gas. But it has implications for the rest of the deck. Because we're milling a bunch of our cards, and will at some point remove 5 of them from the game at random, we can't afford to play any synergy pieces that rely on other cards to work. In short, we just have to play GoodStuffTM.

So we end up basically doing the same thing as the Mawrie Hoshiko decks from last season. Credit to KyraWNY and the other Mawrie collaborators for demonstrating the power of Turbine rig + Maw. The big remaining question there was whether playing more cards to never run out of Hoshiko value & Bankhar fuel was really better than the consistency of sticking to 45.

Ashnikko says: why not both? We have the initial consistency of 45 cards for set up, but we also get ~75 total cards worth of fuel to grind Corps into the dirt. The result is an oppressive reg Anarch deck that echoes the heyday of RegAss MaxX. If you wanna play a straightforward, powerful Runner that gives you the flexibility you need to address almost any Corp gameplan, this deck is EA Sports' gift to you.

Given how wide open the Corp meta is at the moment, we decided to bring minimal tech: Hannah and Pinhole are just good, flexible tools against a lot of Corps, and Flip Switch is a nice hedge against Holo-RecoCo shenanigans while also making it much safer to apply pressure with Bankhar against the likes of AgInfusion. You could cut the two blue cards for 3rd Diesel + 3rd Raindrops for more speed, or you could tweak the inf to play other tech such as Miss Bones if you feel the need. Just don't cut any of the self-trash suite or the recursion; that's where the real power of the deck is.

At Fly to EMEA, Ashnikko was 3-0 in swiss, beating Cohort Asa, Data Loop A Teia and MCA glacier Azmari in three dramatic games. It lost in the losers final of the top 4 to AlPi's super whack Mirrormorph prison, because damn I had no idea what I was supposed to be trashing. Sick deck. Well played to all my opponents, and also to OF15-15 for taking the thing down!

Shoutouts to EA Sports 🏅 for making new set season so hype, and particularly to not_yeti for his work on this deck and to davz131 for keeping me company all through the tournament on Saturday.

We're In The Game - Deal With It 😎

Cobra x