Khusyuk Sable (Countdown to 2024)

To celebrate the new year, myself and other members of the QTM testing group will be trying to publish daily decklists showing off ideas we've built and explored; this was actually the deck I brought to Sovereign of Subways in New York, but that was a test for CBI (which it failed).

As someone who's been iterating on Sable since she got spoiled, this deck is less theorycrafting and more of my typical deckbuidling style: look at the ratios from a bunch of decks and try to mash them all together. But what makes the ID so delightfully frustrating is that you still can't call it solved. There are essentially two schools of thought when it comes to Sable decks:

1. Play for value

2. Deep Dive

The seasoned competitor will tell you that value wins every time; reg crim always has its place somewhere in the meta and it just so happens we're better positioned than 419 right now. I'm inclined to agree with that sentiment, but it doesn't negate the fact that triple deep dive decks have won high level tournaments and 2 of the 6 (!!) Sable worlds top 16 decks were on Swift over Hermes.

Even among those "reg value" decks the variance goes beyond numbers. Is it better to play it safe with Casts vs the high ceiling of Bankroll? Do we spend our influence on Diesel or Nuka or are we forced to play Earthrise? And Bahia's great, but we can trade 2 of them for a cute axolotl or 3 of them for the rat, and feel better about slots.

I didn't want to abandon Swift; I love using all my little click trackers in person. But I've been burned by Deep Dive whiffs way too many times to spend all my influence on that level of variance. So I found a compromise: Khusyuk.

While 2 does seem like the most obvious number, I also tested versions at 1 and 3 that more closely mirrored the "value" builds. At 1, you have solid draw and econ while at 3 you get a little more consistency.

The deciding factor was Backstitching. I was trying to wrap my head around how a triple deep dive deck managed without boomerang when I noticed a card that I hadn't given much thought to before. Turns out that "good against everything except Anansi" is still pretty good. The other cue I took from that deck was Jailbreak, a card I hadn't played for so long because Dreamnet was good enough.

This deck really tries to do it all, and when you draw everything you need in the right order, it works beautifully. I finally had a good excuse to not play Shibboleth or Curupira and being able to facecheck any ICE on your mark felt wonderful.

Unfortunately, it's a very delicate balance where you don't have the slots or influence for consistency and even when Khysyuk doesn't whiff, you won't magically manifest 5 credits or an extra click when you really need it.

Maybe I'll just go and try to make Cybernetic Sable work again.