The Devil's Mawmakua [1st Place | AMT-02]

In proper Jinteki fashion, having brought you the poison, let me now sell you on the cure.

now we sippin' the spicy meta

Personal Evolution of the Idea

When Boat was banned, I figured 419 might be pretty great. With a lot of inf to spend, I wanted to try out Maw, leading to an exploration of Maw19 builds which was spurred on by me finding a bunch of excellent NY-based scam rap, which in turn fuelled my motivation to find a powerful build.

Maw19 was strong, the lategame shell of Cezve, Crim breakers (Amina my love), Twinning, Wake Implant, Maw and 3 Aeneas Informants able to handle almost anything, but it was also slow in the setup. While 419 slows the corp down a little bit, you could still get rushed out.

Cue me discovering that the key cards of the deck were Anarch cards or Crim cards with 1 inf cost. Running three Aumakua means you usually find one quickly, and with Moshing having spares isn't usually a big problem. You also get to Hippo, which is very powerful since an open server is a massive liability for the corp against this deck.

My initial influence spend went towards Boomerangs, that is, until my friend Matuszczak remarked that Devil Charm might be worth trying here. This was a critical observation, as Devil Charm in many ways is as good or better than Boomerang in this build. While it does need Aumakua (or at least some breaker) to be installed, the flexibility it offers in not committing to any given ice on the board means that even a surprise Mavirus purge on encounter can't stop you from breaking ice. Together with Hippo this means that locking you out is nigh impossible, and getting gearchecked is also managable.

The final change was the ditching of Twinning and Trickster Taka in favor of Wake-Implant after seeing RTsa use Wake-Implant to great effect in Hoshiko. Twinning was alright, but Taka felt suboptimal in practice and since you tend to clear out HQ, R&D is the place you want to multiaccess more often, while also meaning that corps can't leave HQ empty and undefended.

Strategy and Praxis

The early turns of this deck play like a regular Hoshiko build, finding accesses, installing Paladin, playing your econ, ditching your bin breakers, etc.

Once you begin building your engine, however, you are out for blood. Every window that the corp gives you to access a card with a trash cost becomes mercilessly exploited, whether that be on the remote or on the top of R&D (woe betide a corp that installs Crisium Grid on HQ). This could also be seen in the finals, where I made 15 credits in a turn running a 2-card remote three times giving me 18 Aeneas triggers. This is actually a relatively common occurence, in practice about half of the games were absolute crushes where the corp was essentially unable to get back into the game once a lock is established.

What we have then, is a deck that is adept at beating corps relying on stacking trashable cards in the remote, while also crushing any asset-based matchup you might face, all while retaining a decent matchup against glacier builds.

There is only one player, and one deck, that I am genuinely afraid of facing, and that player is Odol on his Hostile Magnetism build. In practice I have about a 45% winrate against it, and while it is absolutely winnable, it is about the only unfavored matchup this deck has.

Performance

On the day the deck went 5-1;
R1: Win against rubenpieters on PD
R2: Win against furmire on Loki AG (HG ftw)
R3: Win against ReinaMorada on Sports
R4: Loss against Dr. Krystal on Outfit
Cut Game 1: Win against ReinaMorada on Sports
Cut Game 2: Win against rubenpieters on PD

Random Trivia

For the longest time I thought Aenea was a person, only to find out that 'Aeneas' is actually one of the ruling Martian Clans specialising in espionage and political intrigue. The more you know. :)

Thanks

Beyond the people I've already thanked in my other writeup, I'd also like to thank Unband members Shadowdancer, Camilla, npklepter and November for testing this deck and other versions of it.

You make it happen.

/Jinsei