Fantastic Man 🕚 - 3rd @ Fly to EMEA #1

CobraBubbles 1312

Tell me, Tell me, Tell me,
Please tell me how I look!

You looooook so good

Fantastic Man!


🕚


Basically every one of the many Weyland decks I've loved over the years have originated in a bblum list, and this is no different.

I had already come round to the SDS + Seamless school of rush Ob towards the end of last season, so when NSG dropped The Man🕚I was excited to try him out in the Circle of Life shell.

Can confirm: he's Him.

Seamless in Ob already felt great. Saving clicks while scoring is a huge deal in a deck which can cram so much value into a click. I also loved the agenda suite in Circle of Life - SDS gives you a powerful option for interacting with the Runner while you score out, and getting to play 9 agendas rather than 11 makes us much better against Hermes and R&D digs.

Holo Man turbocharges both of these elements of the gameplan, making it easier than ever to score the SDS while also saving us multiple clicks while scoring 3-2s. Plus it's a fast advance closer in a pinch. And it's searchable with the best card in our deck.

This deck is so much fun to play. Between all the tutors and the ability to radically transform your boardstate turn to turn, playing rush Ob is pure creativity. Spending my Saturday afternoon discovering new lines in-game with the spring sun shining in through my window and Mr Onyeabor getting funky in my headphones was an utter pleasure.

I won't try and explain all the cool skateboard tricks you can do in this deck (it would be literally impossible; the diverging lines approach infinity). Instead, I can only recommend that you pick up whichever scoring Ob deck looks most up your street and give it a spin. You'll fall off your skateboard a few times while you're learning, but once you get in the groove you'll be finding ways to win games that you'd never have imagined before. It's glorious.

A few notes on deck choices:

Fitting the Man meant cutting 2 Seamless from Circle of Life for inf, leaving a spare. I initially tried The Powers That Be, which gives us another good Ob target in the sparse 1-cost slot and enables more powerful scoring plays like recurring Border Controls, repositioning ice in tandem with Azef or just jamming Rashida back in the scoring server.

However, in testing against Arruaceiras Crew I made a discovery: Enigma is awful. We need 3-cost code gates to make our Border Controls act as double-gearchecks - I like to have at least two in the deck to keep the option - but Crew just wrecks BC into Enigma. Therefore we need to use our spare inf on the 2nd Magnet, which at 3 strength requires a Crew Runner to deploy another piece of interaction. Having two Magnet is also nice against mulch and Arissana, but really I am just playing it because it's a 3-for-3 ETR code gate. #ObLyfe.

This means we have no inf for Thimblerig, which I used to love in decks like this, but that card is also very weak to Crew, and anyway we got a new in-faction upgrade in our 2-cost ice slot. Descent is a really nice flexible piece for the deck, acting as a Mav-fetchable gearcheck, flood insurance, redeployable Bankhar and Hippo protection, and even as Audacity fuel in a pinch.

Lastly, spending our spare inf on ice gives us one more slot for a non-ice card. I ended up on Too Big To Fail as I was feeling a little too poor at times when making Holo Man plays, and it can be a nice fetch off of Malapert to recover. In testing, not_yeti had advocated for Pivot in this slot as well, primarily as a way to get SDS when you have a good window for it. TBTF was good for me in one game at Fly to EMEA, but Pivot would have been better in at least two games, so I will definitely be trying it going forward. Turning Malapert into an agenda tutor is pretty slick - as everyone knows, tutoring for another tutor is the coolest thing you can do in card games 😎

At Fly To EMEA this deck was 2-1 in swiss, beating xiaat on mulch Hoshiko and NinQT on Ken, and losing to AlPi's Deep Dive Lat. In the cut it went 1-1, narrowly beating Jai's Arissana and losing to OF15-15 on ice destruction Hosh. Big shoutouts to OF15 for taking the W, for an excellent scrappy game that had us taking chunks out of each others board states, and for achieving poetic vengeance - if memory serves, I knocked them out of the cut of a GLC startup tournament years ago playing a similar Chisel-Charm Hoshiko. Funny how things come back around!

Thanks as always to EA Sports 🏅 for making new set season so hype, and particularly to not_yeti for his work on this deck and to davz131 for keeping me company all through the tournament on Saturday.

Stay Fantastic,
Cobra x

6 comments
1 Apr 2024 not_yeti

Your commitment to musical references is fantastic âĪïļ

2 Apr 2024 harmonbee

Congrats on the result, and thank you for the incredibly useful write-up - I've not had loads of chance to test my Eminent Ob so your points about Enigma are really helpful!

I'm also on Seamless at the moment so may have to switch to Holo Man too: I was a little unsure of him because of how expensive he is compared to Seamless, but it seems like your money was fine? Do you worry that dropping TBTF will hinder that?

2 Apr 2024 Fridan

I didn't play this on the day, but from what I understand the extra cost of Holo Man is manageable, but a little tight in some matchups. One thing to note is that you're assuming you'll fetch and clear the Regolith at least once in most games to help with this.

2 Apr 2024 CobraBubbles

Yeah Fridan has it right - one of the innovations I borrowed from bblum was playing a little slower, which we can get away with thanks to our lower agenda density, and making sure we make a plan to empty our Regolith in every game. With a functional 4 copies thanks to Mavirus, that's pretty easy to do.

Even with that money is definitely tight though, and there are some games where being able to search up TBTF to bounce back was really needed. I think we can manage that with smart play - e.g. prioritise not going to below 3 creds while scoring so we can rebuild with Extract - but time will tell! Plenty of room to season this to taste if you find yourself needing more cash.

2 Apr 2024 bblum

nice idea! i will have to try it.

just before the new cards dropped we had been testing out arella in that slot, which seems like a pretty close comparison. seems like the tradeoff would be that arella is cheaper to use but only helps you once you're already scoring.

4 Apr 2024 Council

Love this song

"Why would I want to talk about my decklist? I only want to talk about Jackson Howard."