The Red Queen - Undefeated at Irish Nationals. 4.5 wins!

La Reina Roja, Mi Amor.

I've always loved this character. My first play mat was a Spanish language version of Deep Red. I still remember taking her to tournaments and making NEH too poor to rez their Popup windows. Ah, Rook I miss you! So I was delighted to see she was still around when I got back into the game last Summer. I had a lot of fun the last year with Reina in Startup running Xanadu and Emergency Shutdown.

Jump forward, we are all stepping up to Standard for Nationals and I see Bridgeman's Hoshiko deck tear through the EMEA Continentals, and I thought, "Why don't I take that shell and make it slightly worse?"

I really enjoy this list, it just sung for me on the day taking me to second in the swiss, just off first on SoS. My corp crapped out on me in the cut, losing two on the bounce to see me finish a respectable 3rd, and claiming the top Anarch pin! (Thought that was because Augustus took the top Jinteki pin given the choice between the two! Hashtag: Ban Hoshiko, Ban Keeling!)

The deck plays a bit like Maxx of old, were you burn through your deck and fish things out of the bin with Labor Rights and DJ Steve. Labor Rights is a great card for getting your tech cards back to use a silly amount of times. (Shout out to my fellow country man Mike Sheehan for that design. Where are you Mikey? We need you back in the game!) It handles most of the corp archetypes relatively well.

1st game was against a trappy Thule deck. Early remote pressure with Tread Lightly kept them too poor and a transition to Stargazing R&D allowed me to avoid the Snare!s and Nightmare Archives to close out

2nd game against an R+ Pigeon Fighters was an interesting one. They forgot to account for Reina's tax, allowing me to run the remote turn one, trash Rashida and then En Passant the ice. :) I also drew my Networking early which made them sadder! With that in hand I burned though my deck to race out my breakers and camped the remote to lock them out. All my deck's economy doesn't require runs so you are able to money up when they are not pushing and just tank the Economic Warfares. I didn't run a central that entire game! No point giving them tempo from their ice if you don't have to.

3rd game was a tie against Aginfusion. The corp game before went long (all these anarchs bringing clot!, *shakes head) meaning we only had 16 mins. The plan against Ag-keeling is to fork them with En Passant and Pinhole Threading. They want to keep unrezzed ice to redirect the pinholes, but if they don't rez their ice when you run archives you can trash it with En Passant and then are free to pinhole trash the Keeling. In the end it didn't matter for this game as they didn't see a keeling early and were force to try and score out. A first click Tread Lightly saw me click through a 10 cost Bran to steal a Bacterial Programming and give me hope for the timed win, but they got the one piece of ice that gear checked me to score a 2nd Bacterial behind to tie the game and then bury the remaining agendas for a timed draw.

final game of swiss was against the Outfit. Not sure if it was big deal outfit or not. Tried to keep them below 3 bad pub and above 10 credits by selectively running while rushing to get set up. Maw and Hippo were the key, first trashing the ice on HQ and disrupting the hand, forcing them to over commit to hq defence allowing a pivot to R&D, trashing that Ice and ripping two Regulatory Captures of the top! The poor corp had to spent their altas token to go get Ice to shore up that line of attack, which left them broke and they could not rez the ice protecting HQ for the winning run! Reina made the Outfit, the fricking Outfit! too poor to rez ice!

First game of the top cut against a Rongedoge's NEH asset kill deck. I saw all my econ in the first 10 cards. I had a Fermenter stewing for 11 turns! I finally clicked it for 12 credits. The plan was simple. Make money. Run early. Always have the clicks to clear Behold! tags. Only trash Reaper Function and SIU. Never steal agendas until you have too. Once I got Maw down and found Hannah "Wheels" Pilintra (who was my 46th card, that I just added on the night before) it was over as a contest. They ended up decking out for the win.

So yeah, the anarch card pool is broken to the point you no longer even need to play Hoshika to do well! Shout out to Anarchomushroom for running the event. It went prefectly as always. My opponents Augusto, Craig, Carl, Matt, Conn, and Jonnie, youse were all a joy to play against. And the Belfast meta for the car pool karaoke on the way back.