With thanks and love to mcg and Fletcher for running a great tournament. Sheffield continues to be my favourite place to play children's card games, and this was a lovely way to close off the UK regionals season.

Results

3-1 (7th)

With wins against Tāo, Mercury and Sable in Swiss.

Loss to Kit in the Top Cut.

For players who haven't played EAzmari before

EAzmari is a highly competitive deck, and I encourage anyone to consider taking it to a tournament of any level, or to at least play it casually to help learn the lines against it. But if you haven't played EAzmari before then this is not the place to start, and I would recommend this rototurret version instead. The lines are more straightforward, and as a cheeky bonus it has a much better game against Kit as well.

Premise

Contrary to what we (EA Sports🏅) thought after EMEA--where we declared that 39 of the 40 cards were locked in (the 2nd attitude adjustment was somewhat flexible)--we have since loosened things up quite a bit. We've each been trying different permutations throughout regionals to see what works and what doesn't, and this is one such permutation.

Mindscaping

At Cambridge regionals I noticed that runners were floating tags, and I was interested in playing slightly more tag punishment than just Predictive Planogram. This feeling was compounded by facing off against God of War Freedom, and Arruaceiras Crew Hoshiko.

The interesting thing about Mindscaping is that it is both the 3rd copy of Neurospike/Djupstad Grid, and the 4th copy of Punitive Counterstrike. If the runner decides to clear tags then it works as a 4th copy of Predictive Planogram.

It also means that we can play Unsmiling Tsarevna, although, in this case, I would probably recommend playing some number of Piranhas as well.

On the day, mindscaping was only relevant in one of the four games (the game that I lost against Kit), where Kit was forced to clear 4 x tags that they might otherwise have floated. I don't think that you can really argue with costing the runner 4 clicks and 8 credits.

Degree Mill vs Send a Message

The current convention is to play degree mill for the equity it gains us against Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist. However, in this list, I would be tempted to revert back to playing Send a Message and Piranhas (because our Punitive Counterstrike line is made stronger by mindscaping).

If we swap the Djupstad Grid for a 2nd Neurospike, then we can also play Magnet, which would gain us back some of that lost Esâ equity.