Circle of Ants - 16th @ APAC 2023

There's one thing I enjoy way more than winning, and that's winning with style.

First of all: huge shoutout to @Porkobolo for the stroke of genius he had pretty much immediately after the cards were released, giving me "plenty" of time to assemble this monstrosity for APAC, with great support from the man of many names @Jinsei who really helped me give the initial list a clear direction and suggesting sick slots like Lady Liberty.

So, where to begin?

This is, clearly, a deck that has great chances of doing very well in swiss, as your opponent doesn't really know what you're up to until it's too late. I think this has a pretty good game even when your opponent knows what's happening, especially considering how many people rely on fixed strength breakers nowadays. Just so it's clear, multiple Stegodons stack and yes, icebreaker strength can go negative. This is precisely why we want to score two little 3/1s as early as possible. If we can do that, the game is often pretty fine given the amount of agenda control we have. With the sick power that Stegodon gives us, we can safely score in an ice + Skunk remote, because our little ants will keep taxing out the runner thanks to the interaction with the upgrade. In addition to that, we can reliably use strength 6 Gatekeeper (coupled with breaker strength reduction) and other great on-rez effects on ice. The only losses this deck got between testing and APAC (3 total) were due to super bad draw or all Stegodons in the bottom 20 / stolen super early.

I'm not gonna touch on specific slots, as they might change over time considering the list is now known and people should get better at playing against it. I hope the archetype survives for as long as possible, as it makes runners really think for a second before slotting their Cleaver and Buzzsaw.

Shoutout to the Unband folks for being awesome people and great testing partners, I'm sure we'll do even better next time. Thanks to everyone I had the pleasure of playing with, the games were a blast. GL @sebastiank in the top cut!