Like Mother, Like Son- Top Az at Worlds 2022 (hee-hee)

Extremely basic deck, just trying to do criminal things. +Az because you are my favorite boy.

Round 1: Win against USBconnector on PE- Mind games were afoot. A card was advanced 6 times, and after a think I decided I didn't want to have the chance of dying to clearinghouse so I ran it, got gene splicered for 6 but had enough cards in hand to not die. Stargate put in massive work.

Round 2: Loss against Banknote on Asa- could have lost this game anyway, but I made some big errors early game when I had an advantage, like trashing a bunch of assets from hand when I should have been spending my money on other things. What I thought was a void in the remote I was coming to clear out turned out to be... a ganked.

Round 3: Win against Panko on PE- Stargate put in massive work, again.

Round 4: Loss against creditz on R+- An interesting asset spam R+ deck powered by ARES, I was familiar with the deck and knew stopping that early ARES score would be important. This led me to run after a tomorrow's headline, burning my resources, and the very next turn ARES was jammed for real and I couldn't contest it. From there I may still have been able to challenge but I fell into the trap of installing and using stargate, which, when spin doctors are about and ares is scored to trigger R+ whenever you stargate, is not a good idea. This is an important lesson, don't default to play patterns that usually work. I got boomed!

Round 5: Win against bug in the system on R+. I shouldn't have won this game. I didn't play particularly well, and drago had thrown me in prison. However, I was on 3 points, and bug installed and double advanced something protected only by a magnet. I had boomerang in hand, a falsified, 6 credits 1 ppvp. Click one I falsified, naming asset: it was bellona. Stealing this would be painful, so I wanted to draw mad dash. Click to draw with class act, my deck gave me the mad dash to win.

Round 6: Win against JoeA on the Outfit. I'm not sure how good the Outfit is in general, but theoretically it should be one of Az's best matchups: free bad pub basically allows you to use masterwork on every run you make. Perhaps this made me overconfident. I trashed a rashida, and then JoeA slapped the shit out of my poor arm cannon and retired ritzie with a baseball bat. This made my draw much slower, as I had bottomed a masterwork and discarded one already. I couldn't find paperclip in time to challenge an sds, and JoeA trashed my cats cradle. Luckily, with boomerang, nothing is impossible, and JoeA actually didn't have many code gates installed. I swept the hand and found 2 points, using pan weave to keep credits low, stole a hostile from the board by finding a boomerang to get me through a hortum, and then with few cards left in the deck and finding masterwork again I established R&D lock and found 5 more points.

Round 7: "Win" against sruman on Ob- This was a super close game. Manegarm formicary had sealed off my chance of hitting the remote. I was relying on stargate-mad dash to win the game. There was a border control and a likely crisium unrezzed at the bottom of R&D. I ran to trash the crisium... it was actually an installed extract, sruman had played the wrong card. I called the judge and sruman got a game loss. There is a very good chance that if this game played out sruman would win. If this happened to me again, I would not call a judge and allow the easy swap to be made, doing so ruined a really good game that sruman deserved to have a chance of winning based on how both of us were playing.

Tiebreaker to top 16: Loss against Whiteblade on AgInfusion- Earlier in the day, when I had a 4-4 record and thought I had no shot of getting to the top cut, I was told by my friends that WhiteBlade was on AgInfusion. Given AgInfusion seemed like a very mediocre deck if it wasn't on ~the spice~ I wondered if he was playing a similar deck to me, so I approached him about it and, sure enough, he was. That was exciting, and he agreed to share the list after the top cut was over. I did not expect that several hours later we would be facing each other to get into the top 16. However, my Az deck has very little game against that deck even with the knowledge of what its up to, and while looking for my paperclip I dug so many cards deep that I didn't have enough HP left to face Whiteblade's board. The Blade put me to the sword.

Thanks to all my opponents for some really good games. Meeting all of you was amazing. Buginthesystem, you are a top bloke. Sruman, next time we play each other on jnet you get a scum bag counter you can use in any paid ability window.