Awoof! (2nd @ ACC 2024)

When Business As Usual was shown during the RwR spoiler season, QtM got really excited. The card promised fun combo applications and everyone wanted to dream about it. Everyone was talking about BAU this BAU that, so I thought I'd tell all the echolalic puppies in the server that "bau" is Italian for "bark". The following two weeks went more or less like this:

As we started actually making decks, we more or less forgot about the card. The synergy with Vladisibirsk City Grid didn't feel like it had a good deck to host it, and theoretical Combo Asa decks needed a lot more work than we were willing to put in when we still had obvious staples like The Holo Man, Tributary and Working Prototype to learn to play.

Flash-forward by a couple months, I built a great Facet Ob list just as I was banning a card from it. The Recoco ban slows down the deck significantly by removing an amazing forward tempo card that also disincentivizes trashes. We have the luxury of being able to cut a Mavirus or two with Loup going, but the obvious spend there (Cohort Guidance Program) doesn't feel like it nearly makes up for the lost speed. The deck is fine but unexciting. We need something that can enable real power plays.

Vladisibirsk City Grid has rarely actually been good since its release, and it doesn't look likely for it to be worth the influence here, but it is. Anything that can help you score an Eminent Domain to get a The Powers That Be trigger on top is amazing. It turns BAU into a better Audacity, it allows you to fast advance with Hearts and Minds if you just excavate it to the board when your turn begins. There's so much weird stuff you can do with it.

The resulting deck was powerful, versatile, rushing like hell or turtling up or going impossibly wide depending on circumstances, but overall still felt quite fragile. We had to cut the three copies of The Basalt Spire for SDS Drone Deployment because the steal effect felt almost worthless and we were losing too many games to early R&D rips. The deck still feels fragile on R&D, and probably benefits a lot from Tree decks cutting Conduit. You have to win the temptation of putting all your Archers on the remote and actually dedicate some strong defenses to centrals (using Border Control as a force multiplier for your Archer on the remote instead).

As you might expect, the list is also very difficult to play. While we don't have to think about all the subtleties that Reconstruction Contract affords, there are still so many strange lines you have to take to improve your winrate that can be very difficult to see in a big stressful tournament. I made many mistakes in the top cut, although the deck is complex enough that they may not be evident to most outside observers. Something that wasn't clear to me during practice (QtM is very used to my bullshit) and I only noticed during the tournament is that the tilt potential for your opponents is very high. Just leaving a single asset unchecked can give you a massive tempo swing by providing two advancement counters, free recursion, a big resource trash (thanks Eli for suggesting Corporate Town!) or more. Having to play around the threat of Archer is immensely stressful. Opponents will make mistakes, and more importantly believing that they are - while crucially not spotting your own unavoidable mistakes. You can't see hope being drained from your opponent's eyes when playing online, but I still felt it in a very real way. When playing for the highest stakes, capitalize on this feeling.

This is my baby like all the cool Asset Ob lists that I've been playing at tournaments in the last year. I love it very much. Thanks to friends who helped me get a bunch of testing games with it, especially krysdreavus and Ezbior who played crim against me a lot, leading to a few late decisions that helped the deck's resilience against central pressure. Thanks to all the cool people in twitch chat who got hyped about the sick lines! The games that I played on stream were probably the ones where the deck did its thing rather than getting its assets trashed and having to play a scrappier gameplan, and I'm very happy I got to show off some kickflips.

Congratulations to QtM for doing this well at ACC. We put four people in the cut, and Styx came very close too, only dropping a crucial game near the end. We're so good!

Also congratulations and thank you to the Turin meta. I, koga and wowarlok have been playing all sorts of games together for more than twenty years, and krysdreavus joined us for Netrunner three years ago. Us storming a big tournament like this and all getting into the cut felt like a coronation of a lifetime spent getting good at this. With more people like Silent Arbiter spiking up we can hopefully make our city one of the most feared places to travel to, in the same way that I'd be scared to go play in Seattle/Vancouver or NY/Toronto.

This was an amazing tournament, with Aksu killing it on the commentary and Kror doing a great job TOing. Every single person I played against was very cool, and I hope to meet as many of you as I can at EMEA in a few weeks. ABR!

Replays

Swiss:

• vs Reg Lat
• vs Imp Keikoshiko
• vs Crewshiko
• vs Arissana

Top cut

• vs Tree Ari
• vs Reg Sable
• vs Reg Lat
• vs Kit