THE “DEEP” Thule (22nd @ EMEA)

The weather in Bergamo is hot so I wanted to bring this super chill corp. If you wanna have a mega chill time with this, I can’t recommend the SOUL SCREAM album called THE “DEEP” enough! There’s nothing more relaxing and vibey to drag your opponents below the depths to.

I was originally going to bring Santa’s Thule list from APAC but after an evening agonising over slot choices and Council messaging Santa and London for tips (and both sending back extremely generous paragraphs explaining the possible choices) on modifying slots for the Thule I ended up taking out 2 Ikawah Projects and 1 Distributed Tracing for 3 Ontological Dependences, reasoning that it both helps me a bunch against the scary Esâ matchup (that didn’t come to pass because Esâ was not as highly picked as I expected for EMEA) and that more agendas can only be good for Thule because it prevents the runner from being able to only steal 1 agenda once they get to 4 points. The other change was to swap the Manegarm Skunkworks for a Djupstad Grid. This was partly because I wanted to be cool and flashy but also because I was a little bit unsatisfied with installing Hyperloop Extensions in the earlier version and then just having them sit on the board doing nothing unless the runner ran them.

I made a bunch of youtube shorts going over each of my rounds during the day where I talk a little bit about each round.

Ontological Dependence

This card was hella cracked at EMEA cause a number of times my opponents would stop engaging with my board after taking 2 or 3 core damage and if I couldn’t find any MCAs to push out an Ikawah in the old build then I found that I would still be in trouble in the old version of the list. Cause of this I managed to score out in one of the rounds. Another big win is that for people who had been following some of the published Thule decks, seeing an early Orbital or Ontological could help to make them think that I was not on the other. Also a big one is the inclusion of Djupstad allowing some wicked Blood in the Water PE type scoring/flatline lines.

Djupstad Grid

This idea was floated (bahahahaha) in the TAI Breakers and by London so I gave it a shot but after the first 4 rounds I had not seen it once and kinda thought it was a bit of a waste of a slot. But then in round 5 it popped off like wild. I managed to get 4 (s)core damage off that Djupstad, putting the runner into solid Public Trail + End of the Line range. The rez cost is high but the high trash cost and wild pressure that any unadvanced card on a Djupstad creates makes it defs worth!

Overall the list went 5-2 although one of the losses was to time. I beat 1 Sable, 2 Lat, 1 Hoshiko, 1 Kit and lost to 1 Hoshiko on time and 1 Akiko. I ended up playing all 14 games in the tournament which was far off from my original hope to just 241 from round 3 or 4 onwards but in hindsight I was defs happy about it! (Jai’s words of stay hydrated defs in my mind the whole day as I went through one drink after another)

I similarly came 21st at APAC this year, which was wicked enough but even though it’s always a little rough to come close to a cut and missing it, I’m still super excited with my result in such a scary field (although my opponents both during Standard Swiss, the Startup side event and the Throwback Team Tournament the day before were superstars). I’m also hugely lucky to have had both my local APAC friends hyping me up throughout the swiss day as well as the TAI Breakers crew both online and offline to check in with between rounds and keep the vibes high! Both the testing team apartment and all the other Breakers at the event were super good fun between group food trips and just chatting about anything during the weekend! This was a wicked as experience and not one I’m gonna forget!

SHAABR you cool people!!!