World Forest Wu: A Love Letter to Eternal (1st @ ESL)

This is the absolutely mad multi-World Tree Wu that I brought to a barely first-place victory in the inaugural Eternal Super Leauge, an event run by Wowarlok and Aanarchomushroom where nine eternal lovers played and streamed a round-robin tournament in celebration of my favorite format in Netrunner. (You can check out all of the VODs here!) Anarcho and Wow put on a fantastic event, and I can not thank them enough for their effort and drive to bring attention to a format we all love. Every other player in the league also deserves a thank you for playing through all of it and giving great ideas on how to make my decks better.

A love letter to Eternal:

I haven't been playing Netrunner all that long in the grand scheme of things, a bit over a year now competitively, but I found myself drawn into eternal from early on, wandering the ancient NRDB decklists and old expansions. I'm naturally drawn to complex games and formats; when faced with too many options to comprehend, I love nothing more than forcing intuitive choices to cut those options down. Twilight Imperium, Sidereal Confluence, John Company, and more are all regular favorites of mine. Games that allow and encourage self-expression not through diligent analysis of every possible route but through game sense and high-level strategic gambits. Eternal is just that. Eternal is a format of fast punishment, big swings, but most of all, endless possibilities. Often, one of the most challenging puzzles is just solving what the game plan of the opposing deck is. Are we playing into a combo that will kill use through any tech, score from no board state, or lock out the runner with an unexpected combo? Finding out through victory or defeat is the joy of playing. Eternal is a hard mode to get into, but as I worked through standard and spent hours looking at old card reviews, I started to understand how to make new combos and renew previously garbage tier cards. The flourishing of possibilities and the awe of seeing others do the same is the magic of eternal. There's always something new, something to find, and something to discover. The paths blossom out, creating a decision tree of unimaginable size, each path offering valid strategic options and potential for triumphant victory or crushing defeats. I only found myself seeking to understand the tree better and better, learning how to prune the worst options and how to best guess which path would bring us to victory. All the while, I make things harder for myself by making the tree bigger and bigger.

Everyone should give Eternal a try at some point; it's an excellent way to explore the limits of your netrunner skills and brings teaching moments for players of any skill level. I can never thank enough all the players who spent their time in Jnet lobbies or DMs discussing arcane combos or unforeseen interactions. It made me fall in love with the format beyond what standard could ever do, and it made me love the Netrunner community even more. I'll always love Eternal, and I look forward to the day when the first NSG set enters the welcoming arms of the Eternal community. To help get into the format, I wrote a (for the moment out of date) introduction doc that you can check out!.

World Forest Wu

This is by far the most absurd deck I've ever put together; with a staggering 225 total cards spread amongst 104 unique cards, it offers the ability to beat any type of tech to beat any corp deck. All the while it sports the best cards ever printed, alongside the worst current and negative value resources. The core of the deck uses Kabonesa Wu's ability to search a deck of any size to find Coalescence and SMC on turn one which provides exactly enough money to search for a permanent World Tree that is used to search the massive deck for the perfect solution to any situation. We can then double up this value by installing a second World Tree and milling through 0 cost hardware, programs, or resources turning it into an unbeatable board state. This deck is nigh unbeatable; it should be able to beat any deck with any draw, no matter what the corp does. However, this is only true if you can play it perfectly, which I nor anyone else I know can. Hundreds of games have taught me innumerable tricks, outs, plans, and strategies, but every game also teaches me something new. Every defeat provides a lesson on how this game could have been a victory. It's a golden deck that provides unlimited skill expression, with most turns presenting literally hundreds of viable lines. I encourage anyone to give it a try and/or DM me with questions. If you're interested in trying this list under the new points list, cut Aumukua, Snitch, and Film Critic, then add The Source and Saci. I will list some of the most notable strategies and notes before, but it is a far cry from everything I could write about the deck.

Dhegdheer/Leprechaun: At first glance, a deck that runs so many cards and attempts to install 4 MU of World Trees is the lack of available MU. Without the ability to always find early hardware, I may end up in an MU shortage; luckily, the Daemons are here to save us. After the first WT, we will use WT to find Daemons, which will host all of our expensive programs for the rest of the game. WT provides the solutions to the problems that WT solves. As a bonus, an early Dhegdheer increases the profit of clicking for a Coalesce from +3 credits to +4 credits.

Bloo Moose: This is one of the most important resources in the deck. The early investment of installing one (or sometimes two) World Tree can leave us too poor to challenge the corp boardstate. Bloo Moose fixes this problem by providing massive drip econ. The 3 credit discount provided by WT means that the profit is almost instant, and it enables us to spend less of our early time clicking for credits or installing econ and to turn to pressure very early.

Scheherazade: In matchups where there is an unprotected central on turn 1 we can spend our extra click using Wu to SMC out Scheherazade. She instantly provides enough value to pay for the 2 credit SMC install and keeps providing big value after that. The chain of installing a program with Wu and then swapping that program with WT for another trigger means that she can print in the range of 20 credits in most games. Just watch out for the various punishment cards that can cause the entire stack of programs to crumble.

Snitch/Aumakua: This combo of cards provides a simple breaking combo that tears apart small/medium ice board states while providing riskfree runs if there are any punishing ice out there. This combo is especially valuable against Mti, forcing them to decide the ice they want to install and then giving us a chance to jack out instead of face checking potentially lethal ice that we can't break.

Levy AR Lab Access: Levy may seem like a silly card to include in a 225-card deck; what use is recursion if we never draw the same card twice and never hit the bottom of the deck? The answer is simply econ. Clicking for Coalencense from the deck is so ridiculously good that we're happy to pay 5 credits to get to do it 3 more times; in addition, all of the cards that we love to search for with WT and then get trashed get recharged, so we can search for them all over again.