[ETERNAL] Tucanium (defeated ESL P1)

My corp side cook for Phase 1 of the Eternal Super League (watch it live every Sunday at 7pm UTC!), going a somewhat disappointing 0-2 (I had a bye R3), but giving me a decent amount of confidence in future development of the archetype.

Runner side was my trusty old girl Andy, with a couple of minor tech slot tweaks, and went 2-0, carrying this deck's ass across the finish line. We'll see how we do in Phase 2!

But enough about that, let's talk Skorp theory...

In most of my Eternal deck cooks, I ask myself the following question: "What cards defined the deck when it was a powerhouse in Standard, and what cards did it miss then that I can slot now?" To that end, I applied that metric to the main sources of inspiration for this deck: the Skorp rush dex that came out in the 2017-2018 competitive season, as well as Bridgeman's Rain of Arrows BTL that he debuted at CBI'25.

1a) Marcus Batty+destroyers is a good way to instantly end games, even against the bin breaker suites of that era, due to your ID having text. More on that later.

The liability of the the agenda suites you're forced to build around due to slotting Archer can be mitigated by playing the other notorious Skorp card, Hunter Seeker.

1b) The Terminal Directive legality era was characterized by not having access to perhaps the most defining corp card of the FFG era: Jackson Howard. To be clear, it's not obvious that these rush-style dex would play Jackson if they could, but in the style of deck that I ended up with it seemed a natural fit.

Astute readers will note that Jacksons take up the only 2 Eternal Points that I spent in the list - I'd be the first to admit that this deck was kinda undercooked, and there are certain other cards that definitely fit in this category. We will get to that in the Phase 2 writeup, but in the meantime if anyone has any slot suggestions feel free to boost my viewer engagement by commenting below!

2a) Tucana BTL can conjure massive servers out of nowhere just by scoring an Eminent Domain, and while this deck isn't quite as explosive, it can certainly do some nasty things chaining small agendas turn on turn. The deck is certainly fairly poor, even more so when changing out the ID ability, and while I certainly tried to compensate by jamming a Too Big to Fail in there it definitely wasn't enough.

The hidden upside of playing so many small agendas is that even in a deck with 9 unique assets/upgrades, you're not overly scared of Rumor Mill; and because of your ID text you only need to worry about it 3 times per game at most!

2b) In terms of possible deck upgrades, I could really only find one real one: quite possibly the spookiest barrier in Netrunner history, and an amazing one to fetch off a Tucana fire: Tithonium. Pulling one of these bad boys off a Hostile score, getting the Tucana discount from installation, but choosing not to pay the rez cost to threaten forfeit-rezzes on the rest of the board feels amazing.

Oh, having another Standard-banned ice that trashes cards felt pretty good as well.

The deck lost to Silent Arbiter's Heartbeat Andy and YsengrinSC's Breakerless Esa - both extremely tight games that could have gone either way if I'd a) paid more attention to influence counts, and b) been more conscientious about triggering the Skorp ability. My loss vs Andy was partly due to forgetting that Bukhgalter wasn't RFG'ed, allowing Arbiter to pull a Siphon off post-Levy! (I will not be taking questions about how there were still Siphons left in the deck post-Levy)

A word to the wise: Skorp is quite possibly the most annoying ID in the game to resolve, especially against cards like Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga. I found myself having to resolve ice subs manually to see if the card trashed was the one I wanted to spend my 1/turn trigger on. Moral of the story: voice communication is key when playing this deck, rather than having to spam the 'indicate action' button whenever the runner plays a Sure Gamble or whatever.

This one went pretty long, but hopefully I've given people some insight into Eternal deck construction! All my games in the ESL so far have been a blast, and I definitely hope it spurs more interest in Eternal as a format amongst the general population. I have utmost confidence in our new Eternal Format Lead waowalog in shaping a format that will be seen as more than the turn 3 rocket tag fiesta that it's (not unfairly) gotten a reputation for.

ABS friendos (alwaysbsiphoning)

Jai out