[Fite Club 2024] Stegodon Asa but we cut the stegos

Some decks are built on weird engines; some decks are based on trying to use cards that no one thought could be good and put them to work; some decks try to do the unprecedented and make everyone wonder how you made it all work.

This is not one of those decks, it's the opposite: the process was very much "here are the best cards from the new set, let's find the deck that makes them work the best". The original idea was:

• The Holo Man is the best Corp card in RwR.
• Tributary is the second best Corp card in RwR.
• Working Prototype is the third best Corp card in RwR.

And at that point, it was simply a matter of figuring out what shell allowed all of these cards to shine at the same time. I identified Stegodon MK IV Asa as the best archetype, because:

• Holo Man is great for fast advancing a 3/1 that notoriously has problems getting scored early enough.
• Holo Man is particularly efficient when your suite leads to you scoring a lot of agendas during a game.
• Holo Man doesn't care where you install it, which effectively negates the server restriction on your recurrable Ablative Barriers, and is great when you're icing multiple remotes and can play rushy shell games.
• Asa is weak to a lot of cards that exploit its tendency to leave central servers barely covered: Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga, Hermes, Rielle “Kit” Peddler: Transhuman, Diversion of Funds, Aumakua, and so on. Tributary provides a very strong counter to many of these.
• Tributary gets you extra Asa installs which can add up to a lot of value.
• Tributary and Stegodon stack strength buffs/nerfs to a point where even K2CP Turbine rigs can't actually reach inevitability.
• Asa is well-suited to an upgrade-heavy style of play that can give Working Prototype a lot of surprise counters for game-winning blowouts.
• Stegodon allows you to get lots of extra counters on Working Prototype, powering your economy forever.

All of this worked out amazingly well. However the deck felt a bit inconsistent, in that the money was there but it was also compressed into very few, powerful slots (most of it coming from Working Prototype and Fully Operational) and the deck was a bit too prone to agenda flood because it was often convenient to wait for Holo Man to come online before you started scoring. So we replaced the Stegodon MK IV with Offworld Office, trying Brasília Government Grid for a while as a derez effect, and ultimately decided that the deck was really strong even when it tried to be a little less fancy.

Apart from this important hiccup, the deck built itself basically immediately from these basic premises, and most of the indecision was around very specific slots. Vovô Ozetti is an absolute powerhouse here, and you will be moving it left and right constantly. Lycian Multi-Munition is a good 1x that will sometimes win you the game because players aren't thinking about that kind of gearcheck against HB. The result is a deck that isn't as fast as Asa decks built around Wage Workers and Cohort Guidance Program, but feels safe and unassailable, and will respond to the very few successful attacks that Runners can make by recurring it all and asking if they can do it again.

This won me my fite club match, and also helped me get 5th place at the last AMT (with slightly less optimized economy).

shoutouts:

• DeeR has been hyping me up a lot deckbuilding-wise, and they're the one who looked at this and told me that it was that good and I should just take it. tysm <3. Meryu also fell in love with this, and kept throwing suggestions at me until we were sure it was perfect.
• QtM keeps being a very good place for taking ideas and iterating on them again and again.
• thanks to everyone who helped me test this: DeeR, krysdreavus, Paillu, Ams, theo, AlPi. you're all great
• Unband and koga especially were worthy opponents. You're all scary, and I mean that in the best way.

fite club was an incredible time, it was a very different tournament format than what I'm used to and I also got to team up with people that I'm used to having on the other side. Everyone really brought their best game to it and it was a genuine pleasure not only to play with it but to see extremely high level of play in untimed settings being covered by a lot of captivating commentators. I really hope this stays around as an annual thing because I had a blast <3 thanks aksu and AxWill for making this happen!