Classic Man (1st at Winnipeg Regional)

Shout out to Inniscor and Ion fox for workshopping and building this list, and letting me publish this writeup!

Hi. I had been practicing Val for a month or so on and off, and was settled on it for my local regional. The night before Inniscor posted this list in slack. I had been testing a small amount of 419, and I knew pad tap was insane, so I sleeved his deck up with no experience and played it. I went 4-1 on the day, and won the regional with it!

I beat Sol, Palana and CTM in swiss, and lost to Titan. I beat the same Titan later in the first round of the cut.

I’m just going to go over some broad strokes of strategy, and then talk about changes I might make.

Firstly, Turtle is insane in this deck. It’s your breaker for low str sentries and code gates, and 419 synergizes great with it. I broke probably 80% of ice on the day with Turtle, using a combo of falsified credentials, 419’s ability and turning wheel runs to power him. I tried to always special order for a turtle early if I didn’t draw it, and leaned on it hard to break ice.

Secondly, you click to draw a ton in this deck. That’s fine. You should be slowing the corp down 419 ability, pad taps and diversion of funds, which should give you some clicks to draw. Don’t be afraid to draw a ton, it’s okay.

Thirdly, your centrals pressure is basically just turning wheel and turtle and that’s ok, because it’s still good. You want to land an early mining accident by fishing with a dirty laundry or a turning wheel counter. Bad pub is crazy good in this deck.

Fourthly, your remote pressure isn’t constant, it comes in swells and then leaves. Your three pieces of remote pressure is Inside Job, Maxwell James and Diversion of Funds. Inside job is obvious, as is Maxwell. Playing DoF on the first two clicks, installing a Maxwell and then running the remote is real good value. If you’re pressuring centrals and the corp is scrambling for cash, it’s worth running the remote to smoke out upgrades. You can’t really deal with batty efficiently because your remote pressure comes in big runs which get stopped.

What are you good against? Mostly glacier and midrangey stuff. Pad Tap is insane econ value and Turtle hurts a lot of their ice suites right now, with some big boy breakers for the bad stuff.

What are you bad against? Fast Advance, and Asset Spam. You can beat Titan if you get a nut draw of early estrikes + Turning wheel but it’s very hard. I need to play more against Asset Spam, but I think your matchup is going to be bad due to a lack of infinite econ, you stall out eventually. I’d mull hard for mining accidents.

Potential Changes:

Amina is meant for big boy codegates while turtle dude handles the small stuff, but I found it really hard to install in a lot of close games. If you install a 7 cost breaker against Azmari, that’s tempo suicide by your own hand. I’d also think about swapping the Na’no’tek out for a copy of Mongoose and putting the influence somewhere else, but again, more testing.

Thanks for reading, and hit me up on slack (Whiteblade111) if you wanna talk shop about the list.