416 APOCALYPSE FOREVER — WORLDS 2022

i wasn't going to post my runner list because it didn't actually perform that well but hey, this is the last time i'll get to play apoc at worlds (probably). feels like it deserves to be posted for posterity. also i need the deck slots

last time i took apoc to worlds, it was all terence's and mathew's influence. it did quite well that year! this year, it was my call. it didn't do nearly as well! we anticipated a lot of CTM, ob, and R+, all of which felt like very strong matchups for apoc hoshiko. and i mean, i basically stand by that. it was very effective in testing! we knew the worst matchup was sports though, so i tried to shore that matchup up a bit with botulus, mad dash, and a last-minute 46th-card imp addition (thank you mathew!). although those additions did help, it's still a tough matchup. they score most of their agendas from hand, they don't really care about apoc, and unless you find an early stargate, you're probably fucked. well, anyway, i played against sportsmetal every round except for the first one, and i didn't draw stargate in a single one. i lost 4/6 of them, always on game point, and sometimes on time, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯. what can ya do? if i had my time back, i probably would have done what i kept joking/threatening to do: drop three influence and add in an embezzle.

a note on influence: this was one of the major points of diversion across the various apoc hoshiko lists our meta brought. i was on 2-3 tread lightly for a long time, which is cute and a bit tricksy but ends up kind of getting stuck in your hand or just acts like an inside job (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). the exact combination of pinhole, career fair, deuces wild, etc., is probably not actually that important and is associated with a small amount of variance in success, but it is something you can really get stuck on. as for the exact combination i ended up with... eh. it's fine. pinhole was a completely dead card for me (see: playing against sports 6 times) so that was a bummer, but obviously it's relevant in other matchups. a singleton career fair is fine but also could have been a shitty little build script or the aforementioned cheeky tread lightly. anarchs cards are good enough (and apoc decks are impermanent enough) that a lot of card choices don't really matter too much, so long as they help you End The World.

i'm pretty disappointed in my runner performance but it was sort of a bad meta call combined with some pretty bad matchup luck. i'm quite pleased with my corp and how it performed, so that is a salve. also, my meta-mates on apoc hoshiko did actually perform better with it than i did, notably [1, 2, 3]. i would have liked to have ended apoc's tenure with a strong finish but i guess this is the way the apocalypse ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

ok i already wrote all my other nice worlds thoughts in my outfit list so you'll just have to read there if you want the dopamine hit of reading a grown man wax poetic about children's card games