Good Old Worlds Grind (3rd @ Worlds 2024)

Check out my Worlds Recap Stream Part 1 and Part 2 for a full discussion about the deck and worlds. I also posted live shorts after every round on my YouTube Channel.

I felt great about worlds this year. I think many people felt the usual corp scramble but I had a secret deck that I had been working on for the last few months.

Consistency is always the key consideration for me when looking for a deck and I knew that this BTL shell would bring the consistency I was looking for. I think I defintely could have brought this out earlier this season and done well with it but Ag was performing well for me and being able to show up to worlds with an unexpected corp is very valuable. So I kept this largely to myself, only testing and tweaking it with Wiki over the last month and a half.

I was really hoping to see more Crew Anarch as this deck has a very strong matchup against that. Turns out most people decided to go with Lat, which made my corp games more challenging than I would have liked.

I will say that I think this worlds for me was harder than previous worlds. The competition and caliber of play is always high at worlds but the specific situations that I found myself in and the decisions I had to make during games this tournament was by far the most challenging. I'm quite proud of how I played this tournament; it was a difficult path to finish where I did. As my old soccer coach liked to say: "It's not about the result, it's about the performance".

(Also it's ridiculous to be disappointed about 3rd place even tho I still am, just a little bit)

NSG ran a great event and I had a great weekend! Of course, huge congrats to Alex (aruzan), a fellow Vancouver metamate, for winning it all. He's been working on that Ari deck the whole season and has been travelling to a ton of events all over the continent. To see all of that culminate into a worlds win is just amazing.

My runner deck

Aesop's Tables Link

ABR Link

Finally, here's a bunch of notes that I took on my phone throughout my practice and testing with this deck. They are notes and reminders that are generally non-intuitive or matchup/meta specific that I wanted to remember when playing my games.

BTL notes:

• Assume all non-anarchs have 2x Pinhole
• Crisium on archives blocks Pinhole
• If they Boomerang an unrezzed ice, keep it unrezzed but keep it around
• vs Lat
  • need to open Wall to Wall. Slow hands need to be mulliganed.
  • Colossus is very good
• vs Anarch
  • Don’t allow Leech counters at all costs
  • Non-tag-me decks trying to Crew w/o leech is a pain
  • Freedom is poor w/o Hot Pursuit
  • Stack ice on Botulus’d ice
• vs Kit
  • Mad Dash (Burner Cataloguer): Border Crisium on R&D
• vs Bankhar Steve
  • Code Gates are best. Need one on HQ (Revolver breaks Winchester too efficiently)
  • Remember Sneakdoor