[Neo] Midas Ivanov (1st & 4th @ 1st Neo online tournament)

Drago rejoiced in his new power, which he hastened to put to the test. He touched an oak twig and a stone; both turned to tags. Overjoyed, as soon as he got home, he touched every rose in the rose garden, and all became tags. Upon discovering how even the food and drink turned into tags in his hands, he regretted his wish and cursed it.

Fresh off the top spots of the first (ever?) Neo tournament, here's an asset spam NEH list, with a kill plan as its sole win condition. Because prison works in every format?

When I first heard of an NSG-only tournament, I immediately thought of what kind of decks I'd like to play. Something that would do great, right? Seeing as the time to prepare was pretty limited, inventing and testing new some new combos was off the table. The next best thing was taking the best current Startup decks and best Ashes Startup decks and mashing them together into some sort of atrocious hybrid.

I've gathered together my testing mates and off we went, searching for the meanest decks and adapting them to the small banlist. First ideas we had for Corp were tempo decks: with both boat and turbine banned those theoretically would go unchallenged by Runners. These were doing ok in testing, hiding the Vacherons behind Engram Flushes. However it was tough to defend against both Anarchs trashing your HQ and Crims running centrals for free.

A recent monster of a deck in Standard, Arctic Blood by @maninthemoon, was still fresh in my mind after taking both 1st and 2nd spots in the top cut of Russian Nationals 2023. I wanted to play something similar and never worry about Miss Bones, but how do you do that without punishing Runners on low credits by HHN?

Enter @TugtetguT's / @ataraxis' amazing 'Don't you remember?' Parhellion Startup deck. That was the golden ticket. With some changes to make the agenda suit more prison-y, getting rid of other win conditions, and making the ice suite more robust, the list really started to shine. Also, there's no better feeling than slapping one broken card on top of another. It reflected well in our tests, with my personal record of 17-0.

With the deck's worst enemy probably being Shaper (of which we expected to see none), @Mortivor and I decided to bring NEH to the tournament. The list here is what @Mortivor ended up taking the first place with, congrats! Mine was pretty similar except I went -1 Tiered -1 Subliminal -1 Ping -1 Tithe +1 Funhouse +1 Gaslight +2 Planogram, that version took me to the 4th place. This NEH went 7-1 on the day combined, with the only game dropped was me losing to @Mortivor himself who knew the list inside out as well as its weak spots.

For Runner, I chose @lostgeek's Matryesâ with some subtle changes to better suit my playstyle: -1 Pinhole -1 Marrow -1 Matryoshka -1 Creative +1 Dirty Laundry +1 Legwork +1 No Free Lunch +1 Bankhar (no Ashes cards ended up in this one, so basically a Startup deck). It went 2-2, both losses I feel like could go either way, one of those being against this cursed NEH list.

That's it! Huge thanks to my testing partners: @Amarum @Mortivor @emmel and thanks to @Dunsch for hosting such a great event and for awesome prize support. Always Be Running!