I'd Rather Be Drafting Fantasy Basketball

This list is drawing inspiration from the best parts of The Golden Path and Jukebox Asa. It was built by me and refined mostly through internal testing against other TAI Breakers, some of whom had faith in the list and brought it to the latest major events. Safe to say it performed really well!

The cornerstone of the deck is Cohort Guidance Program, and it's influence well spent. Both of its modes are relevant here: tossing, drawing and advancing are all part of Asa game plan. However, it was filtering in particular that won our hearts, as was witnessed by Miles in the deck's first competitive outing, helping him win the Naarm Casual Tournament:

I was skeptical about ditching Holo and Void at first, but after watching Brandon repeatedly climb out of some of the worst draws I’ve seen for a while I was sold on the power of triple Cohort. Who needs “win conditions” when you can just draw through your whole deck to find your best cards (agendas and Fully Op) and bin the weak ones (everything else). It’s an incredibly flexible and fun deck that lets you achieve a truly outrageous click-per-click ratio, every HB player’s dream.

The early versions of the list were suffering from the Anarchs we expected to overtake the meta post-Trick Shot ban: Hosh and Freedom. This was when I introduced Malia to the deck as a way to combat early Bankhar and Crew aggression, which also beefed up the Shaper matchup hurting some of their key tools at almost no cost to our own tempo.

2x Mavirus was definitely the right number to battle the same virus decks. Your Powers triggers oftentimes switch to just recovering Mavs in these matchups, and it often freezes up the Runners relying on Audrey and Aumakua. A Mav in the bin also enhances your Cohort lines facing these decks: you can often pitch extra agendas there with no further protection and expect them to stay undiscovered until you flip them at a more opportune moment.

My testing made me realize the importance and versatility of Vitruvius counters and the newfound lack of appeal of the rest of the 2-point agendas, including Offworld Office. The hack job of replacing the Luminal with an ADT was later sacked in favor of just playing 3 Ikawahs and going to unconventional 21 agenda points. This helped both the consistency of scoring to 7 points instead of 8, and the defensibility of the agendas. Honestly, if I could play 6 Vits, I would: the line I often had to take was to score the final points from hand using Vitruvius counters once the abomination of K2CP Turbine hit the board.

Figuring out the final slots was a last-minute challenge, with multiple TAIBs going over the numbers the day of the CBI decklist submission, including HaverOfFun:

The Asa deck is absolutely wicked! We went through a number of versions that tested including holo man, anoetic voids and played around with Malia, Brân and M.I.C. numbers up until the very last second. I'm usually bloody terrified of playing Asa especially in the face of fast anarch decks but having The King by my side as we played a whole bunch of games on jnet together as well as the reassuring presence of Malia to punish any overeager challenges with Bankhar early game convinced me to bring this to the CBI and a local CTK the week before and it was so much fun every step of the way!

Alex, too, felt really happy with the current influence spread going all-in on the Cohorts, as it was the card often forking the Runner between the two tempo-negative decisions of either contesting its remote or running Archives to flip up the cards.

Looking at possible things to improve, I often found myself wishing for more Seamless Launch. It's a card that does something no other card on the list does, which is threaten tempo-positive agenda scores if your other remotes are compromised or empty. Since this meta is here to stay for another 3 months, this will be one of the venues I will be exploring with this list.

The deck doesn't have particularly unfavored matchups and mostly loses to itself: get too slow of a start, one too many agendas in hand, all of your Fully Ops in the bottom half of the deck - and the Runner might just leave you in the dust by extension. That said, thoughtful play definitely elevates its winrate much further beyond even mark.

With xdg navigating the shark-infested waters of the Americas CBI pod to a 3-1 result and xiaat in a twist of fate managing to match up against 3 crims and still go 2-2 , the combined effort of The TAI Breakers did the deck justice with a total score of 13-5 and 1 timed draw across 2 tournaments. Stay tuned for more stuff from the lab!

Shoutouts to xiaat for being an amazing oracle, all of The TAI Breakers for being awesome, and all the tournament organizers for a great tournament!

the writeup was jotted down by xiaat after an audience with The King