mtithonium

This deck went 5-0 and took 1st out of 15 in the first Downfall SC in NYC. It beat sanjay on the sanjay-special Stealth Jesminder, limnrix on Tech Trader/Khusyuk Az, tcody616 aka poltergeistIV on reg 419, internet on Paragon Smoke, and groenkaaf on reg Leela.

Downfall was a huge boost to Criminal, giving them some much needed draw and a viable in-faction sentry breaker, and I anticipated mostly Crim and Stabby Foxx anarchs going into the tournament, and I was right at least about the Crim part. I had found rigshooter awkward in testing as Crim (usually out of Weyland), but also frequently quite fragile and high variance. Thus, I had resolved to keep playing good ol' Mti for this tournament even though in testing with groenkaaf we had found the matchup with the Leela deck was pretty close to 50-50.

However, I had been thinking a lot about Tithonium in the days leading up to the tournament, especially since Paperclip is seeing the least play since its printing. Tithonium is both taxing for Corroder at 6, and the Batty trash can be devastating without immediate recursion. Even the top anarch deck is on Laamb instead of Paperclip.

Thus, I resolved the morning of the tournament to play "reg-shooter," a mostly-reg Mti with a couple of slots swapped to give some rigshooting options without sacrificing the power and flexibility of the overall reg Mti shell. I hastily messaged analyzechris on the way to the tournament to make sure I wasn't totally off the deep end.

Card Choices

• Agenda suite: I prefer the 8-suite over the 9-suite, and think I prefer it even more now that crim and especially Leela is viable, because of density + soft-ensuring only needing to score 3 agendas.
• 1 Tithonium + 2 Rototurret + 3 Marcus Batty: this is your rigshooting suite. You want 1 of the ice on the remote and a Batty and pesky Crims are forced to think twice about contesting because of how brutal a blowout a successful Batty fire can be. I got to live the meme/dream in the winner's finals game against internet, Batty trashing his fracter with no instant recursion on the board and getting to trash his whole breaker suite + loaded Net Mercur. The suite also opened a huge scoring window in the grand finals game against groenkaaf.
• Slot Machine: yes, yes, we all know by now that this card is amazing, but I need to put it here so I can include the following poem about the game with internet:

======================

live the meme

live the dream

triple advance ssl off of slot machine

======================

thank you Slot Machine for your service in helping to score that SSL

• no Sadaka: I wish I had space for this card, but you now have another mechanism for blowing up resources in batty + tithonium 3rd sub, so I dropped it to make space for the 2nd Rototurret.
• the cost curve on the ice is too high, but I didn't have time the morning of the tournament to figure it out. If you play this deck, you may want to fix the cost curve.

Final Thoughts

I think this deck is well positioned in a meta dominated by Crims of all varieties, Anarchs without Paperclip, and the occasional Stealth Shaper. This deck may make too many sacrifices in the cost curve + losing the 3rd Border Control to be worth playing if Crim falls off a bit or Paperclip makes a resurgence. In the meantime, force Crims to slot recursion or be sad.

Giddyup partner, let's shoot some rigs 🔫🔫