[4th@EA Regional, undefeated] girl's wins

At Nottingham Regional, a bunch of EA Sports members travelled over from Cambridge, made cut and ended up winning the whole thing. For Cambridge Regional, I had a simple but unlikely to achieve goal: revenge from the Midlands players. Fortunately, ChonkySeal got revenge by winning the whole thing, but I didn't do a half-bad job getting to 4th place with this and Nuvem!

This deck went 4-0-1 at Cambridge Regional, beating nervousnightjar (A Teia), GermApple (Loud PE), AceEmpress (A Teia) and Kamikami (murder Aginfusion) cementing myself as "really quite good at girls". Is this about the deck, or gender? You decide.

(Editor's Note: I technically lost a game vs Bartimaeus (Azmari) but we ID'd the round so it doesn't count right? Right??)

I'll be honest that not a lot has changed since my 3rd place at the EMEA District. All that's changed is that Pantograph has become LilyPAD, and as such the two Stoneship Chart Room have been cut for the third Coalescence for more LilyPAD targets. Here is a quote from the previous writeup:

I found LilyPAD to be far too expensive to rely on: it might work as auxiliary draw rather than a main draw engine, but I expect that it would be rarely installed.

Let's just say that the alternative name for this list was "fern and I were both wrong".

LilyPAD is very good and solves the Aniccam deckbuilding issue by allowing us to focus the list on programs which serve both Aesop's and LilyPAD. One interesting point is that the list is on 2x LilyPAD and 3x Dr. Nuka Vrolyck rather than the other way around: this was because I was worried about fast matchups where I would not want to spend 4c on LilyPAD and instead use burst draw. This paid off on the day in a different way by allowing me to keep burst draw on the table vs Kamikami's murder Aginfusion: I kept a Nuka on the table so that I could draw three cards after tanking Data Loop and Snare!. I don't know whether this is the "correct" answer.

This deck has been a long-running project for me: turning from a silly little deck accompanying my transition to a small but performing force in the meta. Cambridge Regionals was my final tournament of this meta, which means it was my last chance to play Akiko in a standard tournament. We'll see what happens with rotation - I doubt that girls (the deck and the concept) will suddenly cease to exist!

I was never expecting to do this well at Cambridge, but I'm so happy that girls got the sendoff it deserved at its final tournament, especially alongside an inherently silly Corp. Winning with this deck in round 1 of the cut surrounded by a crowd was incredible. Even when I lost in round 2 of the cut, I was delighted with my own showing, and even happier to lose to fellow Midlands player ChonkySeal.

Thank you to kikai, not_yeti and J0N4LD for organising and running Cambridge Regionals: the event was incredibly well-run and very fun! Thank you to all of my opponents at the event for the great games, but in particular Kamikami for the incredibly tight games in swiss and the cut.

Thank you to EA Sports for being an incredible force in the community and such delightful people. I know I said at the start of this writeup that my goal for coming to Cambridge was revenge, but it was more motivated by getting to see you all and spend time with you. Even if you did make that Azmari deck...

And finally, thank you to everyone who's been a part of this list in some way or another. Thank you to the new players who picked this up because it looked fun. The players who saw the original decklist description as a sign of how queer this community is and made it their home. The players tweaking the list, whether in Akiko or Lat or with different consoles or economy or whatever. I hope you've enjoyed this list in whatever way you've interacted with it!