MC Beef (Good) (1st APAC MC)

Somehow, Asa returned

5-0 undefeated at APAC Megacity Online, beating 3 Hoshikos, Mags, and Seb. Runner was Reg Sable ft. Airblades - the secret sauce that all TAIBs in the cut had in their decks - also going undefeated over the weekend, beating Ob, Nuvem, and Auco twice.

Replays: None here, but I streamed my perspective on my YT channel over the weekend. Check it out here.

Diet: Coffee and cream crackers, both days. Lunch is a misplay, friendos!

An aside, if you will: Megacity season is over for me, and I'm looking ahead to Continentals and beyond. If anyone's interested in targeted gameplay improvement at the same time as helping a brother out with his travel costs, check out the bottom paragraph!

Despite the success that Auco has had this season, I never could really vibe with the ID. Reading the discourse on gameplay and such was helpful, but in all my pilot games it felt like I was winging it with what I was drawing, rather than executing an intended gameplan.

After taking a break from J testing to play some W Rush (to some success), I turned my attention back to Egg with fresh eyes. Armed with a month's additional gameplay and matchup data, I got back to work... And felt exactly the same way, lmao. Sure, I was getting the Ws, but it all felt like a Random Bullshit Go situation, combined with Jnet casual impaling themselves on random Archives or Anemone runs.

So I decided, you know what? I'm gonna lean into it. We'll build a deck that lets its pilot shape its gameplan and its scoring pattern based on the tools you have access to on any given board state. So, with some prompting (shoutout to rubenpieters), I pulled out my signature boardstate development tools and got cooking.

This deck is an unholy amalgamation of three other TAIB Auco lists:

• HaverOfFun’s MC Grindah Âu Cơ, and its baseline inf suite;

• xiaat’s BEEF., for its ice suite and placement patterns;

• and sebk’s Good deck, for its agenda suite and scoring ideas.

It's not completely fair to attribute these decks to single authors, to be honest: the information flow and exchange of ideas this Elevation season has been incredible, and there are more secondary contributors from both within TAIB and without than I can reasonably name. Just know that wherever you are, your efforts are appreciated, and there's a little bit of your work in this result. This one goes out to all of you.

I will note that the deck scored out 5 times over the weekend (in various different ways), and the only flatlines I've gotten are in my proof-of-concept matches on Jnet casual. Despite all the discussion about scoring decks being dead, I refuse to resort to murder being the primary win condition. Call me scoring's strongest soldier

As usual, massive shoutouts are due to Kror and the stream team for putting up a show all weekend, and to TAIB for all the deck exploration and groundwork that led to this Frankenstein of a construction. We’ve had an amazing run this Megacity season, and there’s still so much more to go!

One last thing before I sign off. As part of an effort to help out the Netrunner community with gameplay improvement, and to help with my travel costs for the rest of the season, I'm starting a series of community-submitted replay reviews, in exchange for donations to my ko-fi. If you're interested in helping out or even just learning more, you can read more here!

SHAABR friendos

Jai out