Accidental Esa (1st and undefeated at NANPC SF)

This list is tuno’s EMEA Esa with some intentional changes and some accidental. The tournament did not require a deck list, so I didn’t check my deck beforehand, and had made a few changes I didn’t quite intend! This version is still quite good though…

Intentional changes: I switched the two pinholes to Bahia Bands, as I liked the flexibility to trash assets against asset spam, remove tags against NBN, and draw cards in all matchups. I also liked that it cost 2 credits, as I often struggled to spend Mystic Maemi credits and had to trash random cards. I was quite happy with this change! With light the fire, you don’t need pinhole for skunkvoid.

Semi-intentional: I tested swapping buzzsaw for botulus, but didn’t have a strong opinion on it. I probably would’ve switched back to Buzzsaw if I had looked through my deck, but honestly the Botulus was not bad, except for the time that I installed it on a tatu bola against Big Deal PD. Not sure which I will play next time!

Totally accidental: I couldn’t find my copy of retrieval run when building this deck for a casual meetup, and had totally forgot about it when it came time for the tourney. Luckily the deck had been 47 cards, so it’s still totally legal at 46. I don’t endorse this change, but it didn’t give me any problems on the day, possibly because I never played against SDS.

Esa is the runner I recommend to anyone who isn’t big brained enough to play World Tree Arisanna. It has a good-to-great matchup with just about every corp, and doesn’t require you to learn the ins and outs of every matchup.

Tournament Recap

I beat two different players on Reeducation Azmari in Swiss, and the same player twice on Big Deal PD (Swiss and first round of cut) to win the tournament. Both decks I beat once by points and once by mill. Those Azmaris are 40 cards, and the PDs draw a lot, so mill is a great way to avoid punitive counterstrike or an Ablative on archives allowing some shenigans.

The highlight of the tournament was the cut game against Limes’ PD. I had gotten Begemot up to 6 strength to make Bran a cakewalk, but he was at 4 points and installed a card behind Bran and some other ice, then played NEXT Activation Command to give his ice 2 more strength. I was worried of losing to a double Seamless-ed Ikawah, so I played Labor Rights to shuffle 2 Running Jot into a 9 card deck, then installed Dr Nuka, drew 3 cards on my 3rd click and found a Tunning Hot. I played that, Nuka-ed again to find the other Running Hot, and played that to get up to 6 core damage and 8 strength. I then ran the server, which turned out to be just a 2 pointer anyway. I now had such a small deck that I could labor rights some more Chastuskas in though, so I milled him out.

My corp was also tuno-based, Ob.