There were 2 Adams - one of them being Chris Hinkes
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I believe there are a few factors at play here that cause this to happen:
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More top players chose to play NBN and Anarch. Every time I look at what groups of top players tested and brought, they chose Anarch and NBN heavily. In the case of the UK team, they were even kind enough to share data from their testing that showed Criminal was not greatly weaker than Anarch, but they almost all chose Anarch anyways.
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Runners included tech to counter HB more than NBN. I see a lot of NRE + Yog + ICE carver to deal with large code gates, and Rumor Mill to shut down glacier, but very little Networking or clot.
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Conversely, not a lot of corps teched against anarch. Lotus Field would force Temujin Whizz to dig out their NRE to get in, which would slow down many (not all) of the popular anarchs.
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These factions are stronger than the others. I donât think alone counts for the homogeneity of the top 16, but I wonât deny that there is a faction imbalance that favors Anarch and NBN. I think this difference is smaller than many players (inluding those on this board) make it out to be, but a small advantage is enough to motivate a top player to choose Anarch over Criminal.
In the end, #4 feeds back into 1-3, which amplifies even a small difference in power level. I would say that the power gap between NBN and ETF is modest, but on the runner side it feels more significant in Anarchâs favor. But the point is, #4 does not need to be very large for a large effect to be observed. Many rounds of a tournament also amplify these effects, since over more time and a larger pool, even a 3% win rate difference will favor the slightly stronger.
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most common IDs people choose to pair together
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You just have all of the nicest data to share! Thanks!
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this is how the pairings whittle down (note these wont add up when uncommon pairings get into the top echelons such as daive saiyas CTM/Hayley)
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Funny, I accounted for three of those 13 Val/EtF matches! (Assuming that the data is for overall Championships and not just top 96 or whatever.)
Throughout all 11 games I played (Icebreaker and first day of Championships), I ended up playing against 7 EtF. Didnât play against a single CtM deck, and only two yellow decks at all (NEH and Haarpsichord, both on Shutdown-BOOM!). Clearly, I built my decks poorly.
This confused me too - the chart is just saying that 13 people brought both Valencia and EtF.
Thanks for the charts @rojazu, they are very informative!
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Ah! That makes sense then. That makes me 1 of 2 Val/Blue Sun players. Minor notoriety!
I finished watching the day 2 action yesterday. I donât really get the Siphon Anarch game plan against CTM. It seemed to be:
- Go tag me turn 1. And try to trash everything.
- Try to Siphon.
- Try to set up Medium.
- Most likely lost by turn 15 if agendas arenât bunched.
Maybe that worked better in Swiss, because all those players obviously did very well to get to top 16. But, very few could land a decent siphon because CTM players heavily iced HQ, and used Archangel to bounce Medium back. And closed out the win with EoI or Psycho.
Any hindsight insights on how Anarch should play against CTM?
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Part of the idea of Hate Bear was to invalidate a lot of tag punishment with our deck choices: ASI had no targets, Closed Accounts didnât matter because the deck spent itâs money immediately, meat damage couldnât kill through a huge hand size. EOI and Psycho, as youâve noticed, were still very live win conditions. You just had to hope that your start snowballed, you could keep the corp low on credits and unable to score the Breaking News they needed for Exchange, and win off Medium with Obelus giving you fuel. That worked really well in a lot of rounds but fell pretty flat against @beyokenâs SYNC deck (which had Observe & Destroy, too). In fact, it seems like a lot of people changed up their tag punishment and dropped ASI, ran two Exchange.
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Youâre underselling the deck a bit here. That is the game plan, but what youâre probably not seeing is how strong that game plan is.
Itâs hard to Psycho when you donât have much money, and Hate Bear really snowballs if it gets even one Medium rolling because each access draws you cards with Obelus, which then fuel your next access. In practice you have to survive a few turns of Medium Pillaging before your economy will support any sort of scoring.
By top 16 a lot of players had cottoned on to the deck and knew that it was important to stop early Siphons (and that you could hold on to a Sweeps Week for huge bounce back value later in the game), but the deck is still well placed against CtM because Medium big digs are a real vulnerability of that list.
I think all the UK CtM lists had two EoI, for what itâs worth, which did help the matchup.
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Congrats on your win! And thanks for your response.
I can see that itâs a strong plan, it does seem like a great Swiss-killer. But, once the corp knows what youâre on, itâs something that a lot of players have defended against for years. The Medium plan seems a bit worse now, since so much of the top cut had 1-2 EoI. Even if you do get agendas, you can be punished for it, even at 0 credits. Maybe it would have been better to be on Keyhole for that match-up?
I was surprised not to see many Whizzard players with the tech from Regional/National: Slums/Strike, Networking, and stable econ. That seemed like a match-up in the runnerâs favor, but made the game a grind. Maybe in testing it was about the same probability, and people decided to take the quicker route for their mental health.
Keyhole doesnât work with Obelus.
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True, you would change the console of course.
Yeah, in practice you get R&D locked really hard before you can find enough points to get out of the hole. If you are only on three points by the time that theyâre looking at ten cards from your R&D (which will happen sooner than youâd like), even EOI doesnât get you enough points to score out. I found that Psycho and hanging on to a Beale was actually a better answer than EOI.
You certainly play the game differently once you know what the deck is doing. Thankfully I never had to play against this deck in the cut, but if I had my plan would have been to score out Breaking News from hand as soon as you can; if the runner is inevitably going to go tag-me at some point you donât need to fire your punishment following an agenda score, and itâs more valuable to make sure that the 2/1 is in your score area so that you can exchange it later. Your tag punishment all has value, but it doesnât automatically win the game for you like it might in other matchups. And then you have to be really careful about your ice placement to keep the game live long enough to score out.
Itâs not an unwinnable matchup by any means, but I certainly think itâs favoured for the Whizzard player.
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And here is the second Val/Blue Sun 
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I think that chart says 13 players played Val/EtF as their IDs
The Keyhole strat has some anti-synergy with the cutlery though, since you canât cutlery your way into a keyhole run. Also if you change consoles you no longer get the card draw that the Medium digs were getting you, which is whatâs helping fuel your Faust runs. Really, making this a Keyhole deck changes almost everything. Youâd probably land somewhere in the range of @Cerberusâs deck, which clearly also did very well.
As far as practicing went, we simply found Hate Bear to be better vs CTM than just the regular Temu Whizz. Yeah, EoI is live a good portion of the game, but you can make it very hard for them to get up to the 5 points needed to EoI you for the win. Really, the SYNC matchup is the hard one. Despite that, Wes came very, very close to beating Ben. Sadly, Wes lost his top 3 match due to a points counting error â he forgot that thereâs only 18 points in SYNC rather than 20, and decided to go for a Medium dig rather than check HQ on the final turns. I honestly think if he wins that game he wins Worlds, as I think he has a fairly favorable matchups against Bankerâs CTM and an okay match against Temu Whizz.
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Yeah, I can see that there would be a domino effect and the deck will be very different from what was brought.
Given how Top 16 played out, with 9 CTM with most of them on 2 EoI and no ASI and prepared for Siphon, would there be any changes to the game plan and/or deck?