Architect is a lame duck - Ichi NEH - Oxford SC Winner

Architect is a lame duck - Ichi NEH

Winner of the Oxford Store Champ (24 players) 21/3/15

With 24 hours to go before the Oxford SC I was torn between Grail NEH and HBFA. In the end I decided neither was quite working out, so I thought I'd try and combine the best bits. A solitary test game later and a monster was born. I sleeved it up and hoped I wasn't making a foolish error. I mean, there must be a reason everyone plays Architect over Ichi right? Wrong.

Ichi 1.0 is quite simply the best ice in the game right now. It single handedly won me at least 2 games during the SC. Nothing else is close to as taxing long term while still having the potential to cause a very painful facecheck and being affordable for a fast advance deck.

The current popularity of Grail NEH plays right into your hands here because it strongly encourages setting up breakers quickly, and the go to sentry solution is still Mimic. Oxford's casualties included SMC, Torch and in one glorious 4th click incident with Leela I not only took out Corroder and Zu but managed to make the tag stick and on my turn I killed Kati too!

Lotus Field seemed like a better use of the remaining influence than Eli, it gives regular breaker MaxX decks a gigantic headache and doesn't crumble to Lady. (people brought up Cyber Cypher as a weakness a few times, but the deck has six ETR code gates. The moment you see CyCy, you rejoice and start scoring out of remotes)