44 card PD - 1st Worlds 2021

This is a tweaked PD list for what I thought the Worlds meta would look like. The basic shell has been written up several times before, so some comments on the changes I made from Euros:

1) Since Reg Maxx and a few other Anarchs seemed likely to be everywhere, I changed 1x Bran 1x Ansel into 2 Ansel, which is far more annoying for the Anarch rig to deal with. This was a change I was very happy with.

2) I went to 2 Spin Doctor, 1 Crisium. This is a meta guessing game - if you're confident in not facing Apocalypse, 3 Spin Doctor is best for the Reg Maxx matchup, with Crisium being near useless, or even a liability if it provides an easy Maw/Aeneas target. If Apocalypse exists, Crisium is needed in order to have a reasonable matchup against it. Crisium is also quite good against Steve, doing double duty protecting against DoF and his ID ability. In the end I kept 1 Crisium and didn't face any Apoc, though I believe there were a couple in the cut. I think it was relevant in two games, once slowing down Big Maxx's stargating, once on HQ against Steve.

3) I ditched Tithe, which is annoying for the anarch rig but worse in a meta full of Pad Taps. I experimented with Vanilla but opted for Hagen so as not to be too soft to Turtle. I did for a while play Ark Lockdown over CVS, which provided some interesting lockouts against Maxx, but I ended up putting CVS back in after losing a brutal playtesting game to Steve.

4) I experimented with Red Level Clearance, which some people prefer over Assembly lines in PD, but decided to stick to the latter. I often felt too poor with Red Level and missed dragging runners into the remote to see just an AAL. I'm sure there'll be at least one writeup explaining why they prefer Red Level, so it's down to personal preference.

Over both days the deck went 10-1, beating Sunny, Reg Hoshiko, the same Steve twice, Reg Zayha, Adam and 4 Big Maxx. It lost to Engolo Spoons Maxx in round 3, piloted by RTCA. I got the usual mixture of nut draws and awkward zero tempo starts, but managed to play out of most of the poor ones and close quickly on the good ones. As with Euros, my R&D was good to me, most notably fading a Mad Dash dig in the lower bracket finals against Janktivist, where he was favoured to win.

Big thanks to everyone who made this Worlds happen, it was a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing you all in person next year.