SPARK45 [0-0 at ICC]

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.