Mulch, since its breakout appearance at worlds, has had a large impact on the meta, and has underwent a lot of quick adaptation and refinement. This is a comprehensive breakdown of all of the evolution, innovations, as well as possible future avenues of experimentation. I hope to also write a more gameplay focused guide for the archetype in future, but this will focus on deckbuilding choices.

Preamble

None of this could have been possible without the absolutely massive support from so many people around me. My net-brothers, the TAI breakers, for the massive help with both this list and with figuring out the broader metagame; as well as The King for the incredibly flow of brilliant ideas on the archetype. And of course to jan tuno both for the wonderful baseline for this deck and for being the best rival I could have hoped for.

PSA: Cookbook is busted, play 3

I have spent quite a bit experimenting with the ratios of the core virus backbone, Audrey v2, Knobkierie and Cookbook. And still have no one-size fits all solution for Knobkierie and Audrey, different builds want more or less. But from all that experimentation the one that is most clear to me is that Cookbook is among the most powerful cards of the deck, up there with Lago in terms of mulligan priority. So you almost always want 3 of them.

There is a possible exception if you manage to cut down to 45. Then your odds of hitting it off the mulligan are comparable, even if still slightly lower than this 56 version's odds.

(also, if you take nothing else from this than this PSA, also try cutting Conduit for Stargate, it has been the most free 4 inf ever, will elaborate on this later on in the Endgame section)

The Big Audrey Schism

Most players can feel the raw power of Audrey v2 when they are staring one down on 3 counters, but the best shell to exploit this power is still a hot topic. Should one go with the old reliable consistency of Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist, or the on-trash synergy and smaller decksize of René "Loup" Arcemont: Party Animal. As I see it, both IDs have very good niches and can shine in the right metagame conditions.

In my CBI preparation, I had both a Hoshiko and Loup deck ready to go, and the final choice hinged on the specific meta read I had. The pro's and con's of Loup as I see them are:

• ID Value - Higher Ceiling, Lower Floor: Even though the IDs have a slightly different trigger, their value output is very similar. The one key difference is that Hoshiko is limited to extracting 1&1 card every other turn, while Loup gets to extract that value on consecutive turns as long as it can keep trashing (assuming you flip back and forth, which is my default strategy). This means that Loup is most impressive if it can get into servers to trash stuff more than every other turn. But if you build your deck to maximize the odds of that happening, you can quickly snowball games.

• Playstyle - Aggression and Momentum: Related to the above point, since Loup wants to maximize the turns it trashes, it leans a lot more heavily on punching holes in centrals with Botulus, Hippo and even Chisel. This aggression can easily overwhelm a lot of corps on slow hands, and quickly establish a complete lock of both remote and centrals. This leaves you however, weak to tempo agendas that can shore up central weaknesses on score. Notably Architect Deployment Test and Tucana, can stop your momentum and generate safe windows for the corp to snowball.

• Lack of Busted Draw: Lago Paranoá Shelter is one of the best cards in Hoshiko, but I have not seen any successful attempts to use it in Loup. I suspect this mostly comes down to your recursion plan. With DJ Fenris, you dont mind trashing your 2 Labor Rights. Meanwhile, with Buffer Drive, if you already have a Labor Rights in the bin, using Lago is much riskier, since a trashing the second copy robs you of 3 Simulchips. This is something I have spent plenty of time trying to fix, but so far without concrete results.

I here only tangentially mention the difference in the deck's endgame. Because it is still very much an open topic to tease apart the exact practical difference. Both decks are very capable of assembling board states that blows through most corp defenses, but the path to those endgames is different enough that it is hard to compare.

(The rest of this treatise will focus mainly on Hoshiko variants, since that is what I have most actual tournament experience.)

Influence - a Mountain of Choices

There are a lot of mulch lists out there, and they only have 6 influence fixed among all of them. The rest is incredibly flexible. Your choices on this front will heavily depend on what axis of the deck you want to strengthen:

Acceleration

With as powerful of an endgame as mulch decks have, it is a no brainer to aim to get to it as fast as possible. The shell of the deck already includes plenty of help in this regard, with Moshing, Lago Paranoá Shelter. But for rush based matchups, it is a massive help to have more. You still have a lot of choices along this angle without influence, with all stars like Gachapon and Raindrops Cut Stone.

Diesel is far and away the most efficient in this slot. It does incredible work for finding you the right setup tools for the turns where you want to flip hoshiko back to its base side. And it is crucially a monster as a part of your Moshing turns, letting you find more so many more candidates for the moshing trash. And I have found that when combined with 3 copies of another in-faction piece of acceleration, it almost completely eliminates your bad hands, even at high decksizes.

Ice-cheating Tricks

Since you are a deck that is almost never looking to break ice the fair way, increasing the ways you have to ignore ice without paying credits is a great way to build consistency.

Your choice of including Gachapon or not will have an impact on this, since the increased access to instant speed Botulus/Audrey v2 is very useful, specially in the realm of making your lines more Mavirus-proof.

Self-modifying Code is a great, multi-purpose choice, whose main purpose is to help in dealing with ice. It's default mode is fetching a Botulus at exactly the time you need it. Though its versatility is not to be underrated, it can be used to fetch Audrey if you dont have it yet, or get a Leech beside it if your opponent is spamming 4 strength ice. It also gets better the more tech programs you have, and is particularly strong if you expect to have early and frequent need of Hush's services (e.g. against Ob that are prepared for you with 3xEnvelopment). But even with all of that versatility, it is a lot of influence, so it did not find a slot in this specific list.

Boomerang, old reliable. It helps along multiple important axes. Most importantly it increases your resiliency to Mavirus, since it can combine with a Simulchip to break into most 2 ice servers that have Mavirus backup, which is one of the more common patterns to be safe in an early push against the deck. And is also really important to many lategame states, where the amount of Botulus you can use to ignore ice is limited by memory.

If you dont want to devote any influence to this category. It is also relatively safe to just play the 3rd Audrey v2 and expect that do a lot of this work in most board states.

An interesting angle worth future experimentation is Bankhar in this slot. We have most of the cards that are needed to abuse bankhar, specially if you are on Diesel and Raindrops Cut Stone.

The Killer Slot

I have written on this aspect of the deck before. And I will admit that sometimes the lengths I went to find a replacement to the original Revolver bordered on unhelpful tunnel-vision. Specially when in retrospect, Conduit is the much more obvious place to make influence space with (more on that in the next section).

Revolver is the solid most efficient choice. it shines particularly against 4 strength ice. If PD decks start playing more than one Ansel 1.0 to compliment their other nasty 6-cost ice, revolver could very well become a must include. Even though Winchester is a nice breakpoint, I dont think its a strong argument for revolver. You can very comfortably put a Botulus on an HQ Winchester and get in every 3 turns rather than be limited to get in twice per Simulchip spent. If you are not on Hush, Revolver becomes very nice for dealing with Anansi in a consistent fashion.

Carmen or Na'Not'K are both solid. Mostly if you are not on Leech for some reason, though I heavily recommend against that. Carmen is particularly useful if you main concern is Jinteki (they are the sentry faction, so its a reasonable concernreasonable). Na'Not'K has a small niche if you expect at lot of Ansel 1.0 but don't have the 3 influence to deal with it through Revolver. Num is by far the most situational. Paying 6 to break Anansi still feels horrible a lot of the time, so the only ice it deals with uniquely well is Hydra, which is usually high priority for Botulus anyway.

Engolo is great at consolidating deckslots. Though in practice 4 influence is often too much, and it is usually better to be on Mimic+Buzzsaw+2xDiesel will usually make your deck more consistent than the equivalent deck that is 3 cards slimmer.

Mimic can be a scary card, but in practice it does everything it needs to. Other icebreakers might have the theoretical ability to deal with ice of higher strength, but you are so rarely in positions where paying credits to actually break high strength ice is the right thing to do, so the inability to boost rarely comes up (except for Ansel 1.0, where you want to be on Revolver as above). So Mimic ends up doing exactly what you need of this slot, it and Revolver end up being very close in terms of work and the choice will depend on your influence choices for the other categories and your meta read.

Your Endgame

The endgame of Mulch decks is a very complex and flexible thing, it usually involved getting a load of Simulchips, but what you do with them varies a lot. A source of extra cards to feed Audrey v2 is a nice feature, which is why most decks play DJ for Steve, or Buffer Drive. But this is far from mandatory, DJ is included in this list because the influence worked out so that we have 1 spare for him, but 3x Labor Rights with nothing else is perfectly fine. There are plenty of endgames where you get by with regular breakers and Botulus. DJ has the advantage of being more useful than Buffer in the mid game, though it is a less consistent at getting you endgame cards.

Multiaccess

One very important part of your endgame is making sure to have a better method of closing the game than single accesses. With Cookbook&Knobkierie, Conduit seems like a menace, but it has some very significant drawbacks, which leads me to recommend playing Stargate over it every time, unless you have some very specific meta reason to not.

For one, the deck is not great at running a lot of times in one turn because we only get the Knobkierie refund once. So Conduit ends up being slow going after the initial burst from Cookbook. Additionally, on its first turn if you want to look at the 3 cards that is Stargate's default, you need to give up your Knobkierie counter, which can, depending on board state, leave you unable to use imp, or leave you in a much worse shape for breaking ice the turn after.

Furthermore, the meta is very heavily hostile to Conduit, with how many Mavirus are in people's decks, Conduits theoretical ability to access more cards after it gets going is almost never a thing, and when it is, that is a game you probably would have eventually won with Stargate either way. Stargate is even great for defusing Mavirus in RnD without firing it. And even beyond Mavirus, Conduit does significantly increases your susceptibility to manual purges in spots where the corp can get away with them.

One theoretical drawback of Stargate is that it is one more MU, however, this does not cause many problems in practice. The worst that this will do is force you to trash your imp. But this is almost never a reduction in capabilities, you still have the ability to see 3 cards in RnD and trash one, and you even get to see all 3 at once, rather than having to guess if the first is worth. And while Imp is usually a fine middleman to you getting your Audrey v2 counters, it is far from necessary, Audrey gets charged just as well directly with Knobkierie. And this is all assuming that you are max MU, if you still havent had to install your regular breakers, you can totally still keep Stargate alongside Imp.

Other endgame options

I am personally of the mindset that your lategame is almost always enough, I have not seen any decks that significantly threaten to out-resource you without being very weak to early botulus pressure. Which is why you'll note the extremely low endgame investment besides the necessary. If someone somehow figures out some version of jinteki glacier that beats the rest of the field, this might change, but for now I recomend minimum investment in this category.

If you are looking to shore this aspect of the deck up, a second Boomerang probably helps. Beyond that, there is one card that has some nice features, even slots often makes it hard to see:

Reclaim is the most obvious way to increase the amount of silly end-game program recursion tricks you can pull. It isn't instant speed, so it is less desirable than simulchip, but slightly less desirable than the best card in the deck is still pretty good. Its most attractive feature is that it lets you easily go up on programs in a lategame, compared to Simulchip which can leave you in situations where you have to trash important pieces of your rig to get back a tactically necessary Botulus. Because it isn't instant speed, it shines at getting back your breakers and or multi access, leaving your chips for actual tricks that require the faster reaction. As a bonus, if you suspect that tuno will be at your tournament to beat everyone up with Grudge Work, reclaim can get back hardware, which gives you more flexibility to tank Wake Up Calls.

On completely untested grounds, you can also consider a single Contaminate, it outperforms Simulchip in some endgames where you need to recover from, or be resilient to a manual/baited purge (e.g. if you force Mavirus before you run with LtF). Whether that is enough to justify its slot is left as an exercise for the reader.

To Tech or Not To Tech

A hard question that will rarely have a single answer, I have personally been very tech happy, starting even in my early days of Misdirection Hoshiko. In rough order of impact, follows a list of all the non-essential tech cards I would consider:

• Clot: Is undoubtedly the card the most impact when relevant. While other tech cards might increase your efficiency, Clot radically alters the options the Corp has. For that, I wouldn't leave home without it unless I am extremely confident in a meta read where I don't face to face any fast advance at all. Even in the low-Weyland landscape of the CBI where Clot was useless most matches, the impact it had on the one Weyland match was enough to justify its inclusion.

• Solidarity Badge/Hannah "Wheels" Pilintra: I have found that in practice, Badge is by far the biggest reason that Loup variants crush R+, so as a hedge for the small chance I faced an R+, I included a single copy. Of course, with just a single tech include in 56, the matchup isn't as good as Loup that happily runs multiples. But the option to get a free win if you do draw it is a very nice safety net. The card is also more generically useful than Hannah, since it helps you keep Audrey v2 fed in the midgame, and gets installed for free with a Paladin out. If we somehow returned to UK nats meta of R+ dominance, I would consider something like 2x Badge and 1x Hannah, but that seemed unlikely for CBI given the recent rise popularity of Loup.

• Light the Fire!/Pinhole Threading: With the natural level one threat of most metas being some form of PD, every deck needs a way to deal with a potential Anoetic remote. With the recent trend of PD splitting their ETRs between Anoetic and Border Control, it hasn't felt necessary to overload on this effect. In mulch specifically I will almost always choose the first Ltf over the first pinhole, as your biggest enemy is Mavirus, which gets conveniently turned off by ltf, forcing the Corp into much more akward lines of preemtive purging, which leave you open the posibilty to run a central for Knobkierie counters, then barging into the remote. In the post CBI meta, I would likely want to go back up to more than 1 one this effect, for the utility of Pinholing remote assets.

  -Avgustina Ivanovskaya/Takobi/Mad Dash: You have many options out there if you want to shore up your matchup versus slower glacier decks. Depending on your willingness to spend influence on this task and the synergies available to you. Takobi is great for letting you turn easy Audrey/Botulus breaks into future cheap breaks that persist through a purge. Mad Dash is most attractive if you are on Stargate (and ideally Buffer Drive, but fitting both is hard). Avgustina is a brand new innovation that is very versatile, being able to carry its weight even against faster decks given the right circumstances, and costing you little in terms of deck construction.

• Hush does a great number of small things. It is an ideal parner for Light the Fire!, to ensure you dont get walled out by a combination of Anoetic Void and Border Control out of PD. It is your only comfortable way the deck to break an Envelopment and a way to solve the VSA problem if you dont draw your Buzzsaw. It can even softens your weakness to Anansi if your chosen killer doesn't deal with it well. But all of these uses are much more tactical in nature, rather than being an essential part of an endgame, so the decision to include this or not will depend more on your preferred playstyle rather than a specific meta call.

• Hedge Fund/Liberated Account: What a world to live in where these two are down here. Both serve a similar purpose of granting you a strong infusion of money in matchups that directly tax your money through tags rather than ice. They have the significant upside of being still very useful in normal matchups. Hedge has the advantage of being incredibly turn 1, whereas Liberated Account concentrates the same power in less deck slots and is a hit off The Price, at the cost of being harder to extract value out of incidentally.

• Hippo: is a generically good card, that hedges against any beefy ice you encounter. Whether that be out of a glacier deck, or the assortment of 6-cost ice that PD runs to try to make your life harder.

It is ultimately up to the reader to decide where the line is with each of these helping versus slowing you down. Except for some answer to anoetic, a list without any of the above can still deal with almost anything thrown at it.