A Skorpios Story 5 - Georgia and Ben, sitting in a tree

My name is PowerBunz and I love Skorpios. I've built more Skorpios decks than any other ID and It's time to share my enthusiasm and joy for the murderous and oppressive. Not all these decks will be good, not all of them will have actually been sleeved up and played; they together tell a story of learning, improvement, and, most importantly, huge remove-from-game piles.

I'll be honest for a moment. This series is secretly an excuse to discuss amazing Skorpios mini-combos. In this series we've already seen Mr. Stone and Zealous Judge, Synth DNA Modification and AP ice. They were usually bad, too expensive, too fiddly and hard to put together. Until now. This deck list shows a revelation I've had: Georgia Emelyov and Ben Musashi are a couple of the best Skorpios cards this side of Salem's Hospitality.

Ben brings the "Damned if you do" to Georgia's "Damned if you don't". Both make for a very sad runner when you're rushing out. This is why the rest of this deck is so wonderfully terrible. To maintain my standard of bad choices, I included both Bulwark and Holmegaard while disregarding the obvious rush ICE, which appear to be purposefully excluded to hinder the turn 2 Oaktown score. This is so close to a real deck. It even includes traditionally good Skorpios cards like Best Defense, Hunter Seeker, and Underway Renovation. It has plenty of transactions and economy, almost enough ICE. It's so damn close.

This deck also unfortunately surprises in that it's not tag'n'bag. It's not a real Weyland deck unless you're spending influence on good NBN cards to achieve your win condition. Looking back on it, Holmegaard makes me angry and could easily be a HHN, the ice retooled for better rush plays. Instead what we see is something that looks like a mutant Batty lock out deck. Except 3 Marcus got dropped into some toxic waste and each one split into two and crawled out looking like an angry woman yelling on a phone, a Martian clone sword man and a Norse archer.

This deck is as big a mess as that sentence.

Examining this deck retrospectively is frustrating. I can see the obvious choices that I could have gone for, and I see the exact thought processes that took me down this janky path. It's like looking at bad old photos of yourself. So familiar but so different. Longer hair, worse eyebrows, bad fashion sense. But then, you spot the patterns that make you who you are. The same eyes, a familiar smile, the sweet recognition of only playing two Jackson Howard.

The good old days are never really that far away.