Umbrellaint Esa - 3rd @ London Regional/District

xccam 419

I had not played any games since Nationals so wanted a deck I was comfortable with, so I came back to my trusty Esa and whilst building the deck I decided I wanted a decoder that could deal with the MICs that I remembered having so many problems with.

I saw Umbrella and it seemed to do so much I wanted it to do

  • break 3 subroutines

  • draw me more cards

  • install for just 3

Luckily I never installed the card all day (because why would Esa do install cards?) but it turns out there’s one big drawback

  • I DON’T HAVE ANY TROJANS

Umbrella should be replaced with ANYTHING else and the deck would get better.

Anyway, this deck puts so much pressure on centrals, and all 3 central servers at that, that the corp has to spread themselves very thin and I was lucky enough to touch agendas.

Thanks to the organisers for running a great event!

Swiss

R2: Win vs The Outfit

R4: Win vs Ob (absurd access luck)

R6: Win vs Sportsmetal

Cut

R2: Loss vs Ob (rematch vs Kikai from R4)

4 comments
9 Feb 2025 jan tuno

i looked at the deck very excitedly until i realized what the issue was. but divide and conquer + cup is really cool!

9 Feb 2025 Kikai

If you're looking for a 2 inf decoder splash, Shibboleth plays very well in Esâ. It has a very low install cost, which makes it easy to get out of hand before a damage hit, and you can play around the threat text pretty easily if you want to. It doesn't deal particularly well with MIC, but it does deal well with magnet and thimblerig.

But Umbrella is much better for distracting your opponent during open decklists!

Re: R4, I would not say that was luck, I would say that was WP. I kept a hand that was banking on you playing passive in the early turns, and you punished me for it.

Congrats and WP!

9 Feb 2025 xccam

Thanks @Kikai and I have played with Shibboleth before, and maybe I should return to that.

Well done on the win! It was well deserved.

@jan tuno sorry for letting you down! If anyone can find a way to make umbrellEsa good I'd be surprised!

9 Feb 2025 cody1024d

Came for secret umbrella tech, left with ☔️ on my parade 🙁. Well done on the day though!!