Týrs of Dee's Kingdom (6th at EMEA Conts)

This is the deck I brought to wreck your prediction models and get 6th place at continentals (In the “it’s kinda weird it happened twice” department, AoT came in 6th at Conts 2022 as well). I am very happy with how it turned out. This is where I would walk you through the decisions I made when building this deck, but I didn’t make any. I played 3 games with this deck before the event.

Why AoT?

For academic reasons, I didn’t get as much practice for continentals as I did for nationals. But I did (broadly speaking) watch both APAC and Cascadia, and I wrote down a few thoughts on the meta:

1. This tournament is going to be extremely competitive. Like, arguably the most competitive non-worlds event in NSG history.
2. There are way too many diverse corps, and corps are weakly favored in the meta.
3. Therefore, in order to have a chance of making top cut at this tournament, you need be building very generalist runners, that can deal with an extremely wide array of threats. I narrowed consideration to Sable, Hoshiko, Arissana.
4. The best chance of beating a generalist runner is to run an extremely specialized corp (hyper glacier, mill, combo kill, fast advance).

I think this is a very weak correlation, but consider that 2022 worlds, a runner favored meta, was won by a very generalist corp. 2020 and 2021, both of which were corp favored metas, where defined by very specialized corps. ICE seems good, Bran punishes cleaver and curupira, Ansel punishes echelon and carmen, Ravana really punishes shibboleth and buzzsaw. And it invigorates me when playing with decks I've never tried before. So, 2 days before conts with no plan whatsoever for what to do corp side, I decided to build AoT. I said if I won 2 of my next 3 games on jnet I’d say heck it and bring AoT to conts.

Reader, I won 3 games.

How did this deck win?

By hitting a lot of Aumakua/Hermes decks and drawing the nuts 2 of the 4 times it didn’t.

Any considerations?

Border Control hit well below its weight. When it felt like it was defending a big enough server, the game was already on lock for one side or the other. I would add the meh Bioroids and 2x Anoetic Void if I were to do this again. I was clicking for credits more than I’d like, but then I’d have to lose ICE and if I do that I’m basically running PD. Vitruvius is better than CFC, but not by very much. I still think the right number is between 1-2 for both, just to make sure you have the tempo positive agendas when you need them.

Anyone to thank?

Nah.