Eurorack Maxx (1st Philly Regional/Undefeated)

Eurorack Maxx

You're MaxX, you're not some corporate pop wannabe trying to get braindead nobodies to crowdfund your album. You're make music because you want to. You do it old school and you do it open source, because the diatonic scale is your parents' scale. Modular synthesizers and cyberpunk are one and the same, so take out your Eurorack rig and get to patching.

This deck went 5-0 helping take me to King of Swiss and eventually 1st out of 27 in the Philly regional. It beat Marcus on Jinja Next, Kurt/OnTheNighttrain on Outfit rigshooter, Simon/lodger on glacier Sol, Laura/osclate on Argus (avenging NYC's honor after a series of crushing defeats at the hands of Ghost Branch), and finally Dan/mediohxcore on Mushin/Complete Image PE. No, he was not wearing sleeves.

With really only a week to test between announcement of 3.3 and the Philly regional, this list is not as tuned as I would like: it sits at a shameful 48 cards (and an even more shameful two Stimhacks). However, MaxX draw + your Eurorack rig allows some slack. I'll be trying to figure out cuts and changes moving forward and I'd love to hear your thoughts! Special thanks to analyzechris for brewing this list together (I think we ended up a couple tech cards apart).

Archetype + Card choices

After weeping sad Crowdfunded tears moving from MWL 3.2 -> 3.3, I started taking a look at number of alternative econ engines, with the expectation that the most prevalent corps would be Argus, Jinja HB, Titan, EoI or 6pt Azmari, and various flavors of horizontal decks (esp. CtM, Gaga, and Jakuza RP). While I dramatically over-predicted how many asset decks there would be at Philly, the rest was close enough to right.

I wanted a deck that could reasonably deal with all of these, and decided FTT Val, Apoc Val, Patchwork Maxx, and Aesop Hayley were all worth testing. FTT Val and Aesop Hayley proved to be a bit fiddly, especially in faster matchups, and Apoc Val was occasionally too poor to recover from HHN and kind of awkward against the Hostile Infrastructure decks (RP and IG) that we were testing, so I settled on this.

Like Aesop, Patchwork gives extra leeway on tech cards because you can always use your cards/modules as patch cables instead of including them in the active synth pipeline for that track/game.

• Three Aumakua: Often the only breaker you need to play against ice-light decks (all asset decks + Argus), don't go to two. With high likelihood to see HG early, it is very tricky for corps to punish you for playing an AI in the current environment.

• TWO Hunting Grounds: you may be asking yourself, how could TWO hunting grounds possibly be correct? And you may be right. However, in testing we found that a substantial portion of the viable decks were Data Raven decks. This + IP Block/Turtle + Slot Machine meant that the HG was doing a lot of work in a lot of different matchups. Against NBN, it was even reasonable to install both if you saw them and as always you want to see it and preferably early in the matchups where it counts.

• Ice Carver: this card does a lot of work in the current environment, making Black Orchestra in range for Slot Machine, Mausolus, Tollbooth (but don't forget this when you try to D4v1d it, as I attempted on stream), and FC3, and taking Archer and Surveyor even -> odd for MKUltra.

• D4v1d: insurance for emergencies + busting a Surveyor remote 1-2x after 3.3 freed Surveyor.

• Two Career Fair: seeing one of these early improves your Argus matchup substantially. The early turns of this matchup are extremely important (especially since this list doesn't have Turntable), so you must be able to contest the second if not the first score. An Argus on four points and an Atlas counter is an Argus we lose to. Thanks to riotprl for jamming some last minute Argus games to help us figure this out.

• Stargate: in testing I was having issues with combo matchups, Titan in particular. I experimented with this and Wanton Destruction as disruption, settling on Stargate. In the Titan matchup, the only three cards that matter are Turtle, TTW, and this. It also buffs the Argus matchup and the Spiky Jinteki matchups. You can see this card win the Grand Finals against Dan's combo PE on stream. However, this card is hard to evaluate because it is so flashy, but I think it's probably worth it for Titan matchup alone as a 1x.

Thanks again so much to Codemarvelous for somehow managing to TO a great tournament, run a stream, and commentate all at the same time. Other highlights from the event include Dan D'Argenio teaching everyone Crokinole, hanging with the Ghost Branch crew, and of course the lovely drive there and back with the NYC posse.