This Asa can kill you - undefeated As Continentals Winner

https://imgur.com/12WKGQx

This is the Asa deck that carried me to first place in the Americas continentals tournament. I’ve written a pretty detailed write up for it before, so I’ll leave most of the card choice explanations there. The main changes between old lists and the current one is: going to 3x Marilyns to ensure you never run out of cash, +1 Jeeves to assist with scoring and tempo, and +1 preemptive action to recur crucial cards. Feel free to ask about specific match-ups/card choices if you like, they’re all super interesting and I love talking them over, but they’re not worth listing exhaustively here.

The central plan of the deck is to build a remote defended by Helheim servers, which you can boost with your 9-card cybernetics court hand. To prevent this, the runner must aggressively steal agendas and trash assets early, which leaves them open to a surprise punitive kill. I think I benefited greatly from the rise of the Lakshmi Asa decks from the Europe-Africa tournament the week before, since it looks similar, up until Mr. Punitive shows up to ask about those Vacherons you stole last turn.

Even in the cut, with known decklists, the punitive threat remains relevant. Despite not getting any punitive kills on the second day, forcing runners to respect it means they have to slow down while you play Fully Operationals and Violet Level Clearances.

This was the first time I’d made it into the top cut of a large tournament, and I’d really like to say thanks to the NISEI organizers who had to explain to me how double elimination works and what an ID was. Thanks to Akira andmanveruppd and pspacekitten and Vesper and anyone else behind the scenes that I was too dense to recognize.

As I said on stream, I wouldn’t have gotten this far without the advice and testing done with the local Vancouver players, including Alpha/RunningParallel, Adumbbrick, Thike, Solomir, and most-importantly Aruzan, who had to wake me up on Saturday when I almost overslept the check-in. They basically spent the last 3 years teaching me the game, and I'm incredibly thankful.