Tempo NEH : 19-2 Belgian and Dutch nationals

3rd place Belgian Nats (Laurie Poulter), 3rd place Dutch Nats (me).

This dropped 2 games for me at the start in Antwerp while nerves were settling then didn't lose another game across both tournaments for either of us for a combined record of 19-2 + some IDs, in both cases only being let down in the cut by slightly less incredible runners.

"So what's the NEH?" "Oh, you know, no win condition asset spam"

After the Museum of History ban killed the Gagarin deck we both piloted to the cut at UK nationals we went back to the drawing board looking for a deck for the upcoming European nationals we'd decided to rush to before the end of the license and the start of the NISEI era. This deck was born from a list Laurie put together during the mad rush for lists before worlds where it was more or less ignored (along with my other suggestion of Mushin Brain Rewiring combo which, admittedly, was quite delirious until someone else did it and was king of swiss in Belgium), coming in from a long break he'd missed the original wave of discussions around Amani Senai before Euros and decided to go looking for the deck that most completely abused it.

The list underwent quite a few revisions including versions which played more like Comrades CTM with ravens and cats, kill combo and pretty much every powerful asset in the card pool, the main thing that was clear from the start was that the core of the deck was far more powerful than it initially appeared. From the start I was convinced (and most people I've played against for the first time have said similarly) that surely Val just trashes everything but after testing over and over again she would consistently end up with either no money and a pile of tags, 10 remotes and a tour guide to deal with or 0 board state to steal Degree Mills with after spending all her clicks running, clicking for credits and a pile of Amani triggers and Archangels.

The gameplan for the deck has to adapt quite rapidly depending on what comes out of the deck and on the runner, particularly on how they are choosing to deal with the hard hittings and on how efficiently they are likely to be able to break tour guide but broadly speaking I'd say about 50% of games end up with the winning agenda being scored behind a Tour Guide (especially against anarch who have an extremely bad time breaking Archangel > Guide, losing 2 cards to Degree Mill, a 3rd card to Amani Senai and having another Mill go straight into the remote) and the other 50% off Psychographics based fast advance.

Building towards that end game is all about developing a board of assets that enable you to rapidly filter through your deck, threaten a tempo hard hitting news and start pushing out agendas / Lady Liberty as soon as possible. If the runner refuses to interact then start never advancing Beales and be prepared to dump high amounts of money into Amani traces to trip them up (if they're not trashing your assets you should be ungodly rich anyway and bouncing something like a liberated or casts then following it up with a HHN when they come to deal with the next agenda you Team into the remote can be game over). If they get a faster economic start and try and contest everything then try and queue up assets to install and Hard Hitting them, the fork usually buys you enough time to pull significantly ahead on econ or to win off Psycho.

If r&d is unprotected, especially against shaper, try and keep an Assembly Lines open to beat indexing, especially if you have a Marilyn or DBS on the table to get rid of the agenda entirely.

Some other random thoughts

• Thanks to all the members of the Belgian and Dutch communities for being so welcoming to a bunch of Brits turning up at your nationals, both events were excellent and I'd be very happy to return and see you all again (or see you here)

• Thanks to NISEI for giving me hope that this game is going to still be here a year from now with just as great a community, I can't think of any other way I'd rather spend my time than hanging out with all of you and prepping for / playing in tournaments

• Thanks to Laurie for coming up with most of this list, the dozens of testing games we put into it and the inspiration over the years to keep trying to be better at this game, and to the Brighton meta as a whole for not complaining too, too much when we kept playing it at casual nights as well as being great travelling and playing companions for the last 2 years