Tibetan Dance | 1st & Undefeated at Vienna GNK

'I awoke this morning, feeling as an ant. It was as though a great calamity was about to unfold...'

-- Franz Kafka, I hope

—

This is my Personal Evolution.

I built it for the last meta, after watching the worlds finals, as an answer to the question ‘How does PE defeat Trick Shot Lat consistently?’

Looking at potential attack surfaces, several sprung up:

• Lat relies on Revolver to break ice, a very efficient but finite breaker
• Lat’s money is finite. The more runs your force out of him, the more he will be urged to use his cards for credits rather than as hitpoints
• Lat doesn’t have drip. To make money he will be forced to play his cards

This means that cards like Hokusai Grid are quite good, especially because Lat’s preferred answer to assets is Paricia, which only funds asset trashes, but not upgrades. Well, Grids don’t work on me..

Finally, in this deck I chose not to attack Revolver’s finitude, but its efficiency. Otoroshi is one of the last few vestiges of ice that costs a lot more to break / deal with than it does to rez. It has a hidden cost of use of requiring something on the board to interact with. Hence, we play 3 copies of Urtica Cipher, which runners intuitively do not trash, because, well, if I know it’s there, why would I run it? And once Otoroshi has plonked down 3 advancement counters on one, trashing it (and accessing it) becomes a much rougher proposition.

Insofar this is a grinder deck. I am trying to run you (Lat) out of cards. But that doesn’t mean we don’t score agendas to achieve this goal. Quite the contrary - Viral Weaponization is often a whopping 5 damage to the dome, and when you get to combine this with Holo Man, Prana Condenser and Amani Senai, oh, you have a chi drain sequence going that the old jiāngshī Vampires can only dream about.

Lat would like to listen to DJ Fenris's music to calm his nerves, but we can’t have that - hence, Sadaka. My favourite trick would also be to put a Tatu-Bola on R&D so that when the Trick Shot comes they have to give you the 4c if they really want the full power.

—

And that’s enough strategy, because what I really want to talk about is the idea of PE. It’s my favourite corp, and it shall leave us soon, as nothing lasts forever. And PE is nothing if not the ephemeral beauty of the temporal nature of our existence.

If my favourite PE deck is Thousand Knives, this one is Tibetan Dance - a unpredictable hitting of black and white keys on the piano creating an ecstatic melody my opponent has to try to contend with, at any moment sound could come out of nowhere, then it’s Quiet again, then suddenly Loud, echoes of net damage cascading up and down the runner’s spinal cord.

I’ve compiled a playlist to try to express how PE makes me feel. Funny how all the piano pieces start on a G note...

Well, that’s all from me for now.

Don’t let me detain you,

Your Council