The Sky is NOT Falling - 2nd place Auckland Regionals

I've been an Anarch since I started playing this game, mostly a Noise player, and like many people I was dismayed at the changes that came with the second iteration of the MWL. The sky is falling! Anarch is dead! Maybe it is, I don't know. I was the only Anarch player out of 18 people at Auckland regionals, and I was super proud to make the top cut flying the orange flag.

I still considered bringing Noise to regionals infact, but ultimately didn't have enough time to test the deck, and so went with the brutal Val Lock @tf34 posted a while back. I'd been playing Val as a sort of secret affair on the side of my main love with Noise, and I was confident enough in my play that with a deck packing this many hate cards I'd be able to do reasonably well, even if I was a better Noise pilot.

Well, first of all, I was completely wrong about the meta, ultimately choosing to go with 3 Clots at the last minute after being crushed by HB FA in testing. I faced not a single Fast Advance or asset spam deck the entire day - everyone at Auckland was playing murder (3 of the 4 players in the top cut were playing kill decks), but it didn't matter. Val got the dirt on the corp, and when she was done her friends came through to finish things off.

Seriously, I can't say enough good words about Rebirth. It did WORK - I rebirthed five times (all but one game) into Edward Kim and smashed upwards of five Scorched Earths, along with numerous other econ operations and nasties including Mushin no Shins and Midseason Replacements. I cannot even begin to say how much I am in love with this card. Rebirth 100% justified the slot and I'm very happy for it, because it's a really fun card and perfect for the Swiss Army Knife style of this deck.

Another one-off card was the other MvP. Keyhole was an absolute star, multiple games were won by early Keyhole drops with bad pub letting me Eater through cheap RnD ice and just trash the corps cards into oblivion.

Cuts I would make would be a couple of the Clots for a Daily Casts and Earthrise, and probably the 3rd scrubber for another Deja Vu, but it's all meta dependant really. I think with MWL shaking things up (our rule set was in a weird place - we were legal up to Liberated Mind with the MWL in effect) people just defaulted to the tried and true kill decks.

Either way, I had an absolute BLAST on the day. It was great playing against the best players in Auckland, and a delight to face our King in the North @Fjord in the finals, where it came down to the wire with some incredibly tense matches. Anarch is still great, and the sky is not falling. Maybe.