M3PD:YDL [2-2 at NYC SoS]

I've been playing for around 4 months now and Sovereign of Subways was my first tournament. I need to give a huge thanks to my teammates Al and Colin, and to @Kysra for organizing a great event!

And so,... prepare for lift-off.

I'm writing this because I wanted to,

1. write a recap like all the real pros do, and
2. leave a note to Future Me about the lessons I learned before this event, but may have forgotten to implement when they mattered.

--

This list is based on @DoomRat and @NetDad's Yodel Riot from Worlds.

The only changes are:

• -2 Enigma
• +1 Hagen
• +1 Eli 1.0

In my testing (read: jamming jnet games in an effort to see every runner ID by way of entropy) I encountered A LOT of Buzzsaw and that thing's pretty good huh? If the runner installed it before I'd put together either 4 points or 30+ credits then I was toast.

Maybe tight play can solve that gamestate, but I'm not there yet. The Enigmas were pretty clearly the cut and I didn't have a ton of influence kicking around.

I considered,

• Palisade: same issue, but with Cleaver.
• Rototurret: Aumakua and Audrey v2 combined are I think less common than Buzzsaw, but it still breaks to a light breeze.
• Ablative Barrier: this almost made it! it can ETR on turn 1, and its bad late game, but reusing M.I.C. seemed expensive, but maybe relevant.
• Harmonic Ice: after this event I might start noodling on a version of this deck with the entire Harmonic ice package and see how that goes. Given that I've only been playing a few months and I didn't have all that much time to test I wanted to stick closer to the the list that had already been proven.

I ended up going with one each of Eli 1.0 and Hagen. Two Eli would probably have been more correct, but I wanted to try and shoot some rig.

Round 1

Loss against Neal on Zahya.

The game felt like it was going OK until I lost three 4/2s off a single WAKE breach.

Lesson: respect multi access.

Round 2

I played against... wait hang on.

Re-pairing...

Ok so, in round 2 I played against... sorry what's that?

Re-pairing (part II)...

I played against... nobody. Our team had a bye this round.

Jokes aside, this was the lone hiccup in the entire day. Shoutout to @Kysra for running a great event!!

Round 3

Win against Mike on Lat (Pantograph + Engolo).

I flooded out, but my opponent's deck was executing flawlessly on the Shaper Special (drew their cards in the complete wrong order). Once we both stabilized my opponent whiffed on not one but two Deep Dives (the second resolved against an 11 card deck containing 0 agendas). With a fair bit of luck, I was able to put together a win.

Lesson: sometimes agendas are safest in HQ

Round 4

Loss against Dan on Hoshiko.

It was a very normal list and it setup at light-speed.

Lesson learned: idk. I was tired during that game and I am tired again now as I type this. Drink more water and get more sleep, I guess.

Round 5

Win against Seba on Sable.

At the time I remember feeling like this match featured my best play of the entire day. I was able to sneak out 2 of my 3 Rashidas unguarded by pretending they were Spin Doctors at opportune moments. I had to do a little shell game action to move around agendas when I didn't have the space to score. And on the final turn I had to get lucky when the runner missed on a 4-in-6 chance twice in a row.

Lesson learned: don't get discouraged when you feel like you're in a hole. Play to your outs!