Congratulations to Stephen “StephenE” Ebery for winning NANPC San Francisco!

Stephen decided to bring his own twist on some established top decks from Jan Tuno, playing altered versions of Tuno’s Ob and Esa deck from EMEA. We caught up with Stephen to ask him some questions about his experience at the tournament!

Congratulations on your win at NANPC SF You chose to bring Ob And Esa to the event, why those decks?

Esa: I brought this deck because I’ve mostly been a Criminal player, but I’m not very happy with a lot of the Crim matchups right now. Aumakua is hurt by Obs all running 2 Maviruses and spicy sentries, and it can be hard for Crim to keep up with the speed of Asa or the glacier or Aginfusion or Azmari. With Esa, I don’t have to worry too hard about individual corp matchups, and can instead force them to worry about my extremely disruptive gameplay.

Ob: I think Asa and Ob are the 2 best decks right now, and I already played Asa at Off the Grid and APAC Continentals.  I figured I’d take Ob to test out whether I liked it better, and it worked out pretty well for me!

How did you prepare for the event?

LA did not have a thriving in person scene for a while, but recently we’ve been getting 7-10 people for our casual meetups, which has been great! I’ve also been testing online with a group of mostly SF based players, and discussing our thoughts on the meta and sharing decklists. The particular lists I picked were mostly inspired by Tuno rather than my testing group though.

Did you have any memorable games or moments on the day?

I played former World Champion Limes once in Swiss and once in the cut, and the cut game was really exciting! Limes had an 8 strength Bran (it’s base 6 strength, and they played Next Activation Command to boost it to 8), and I had to shuffle 2 Running Hot into my 9 card deck deck with Labor Rights, draw them with Nuka on my 2nd click, and play them with my 3rd and 5th clicks to get Begemot to 8 strength! After that, my deck was small enough that I could just shuffle a few Chastuskas in, draw them, and mill the corp. I didn’t really want to run archives because I figured (correctly) that it had an Ablative Barrier on it and it would just install a spin that shuffled back agendas. 

Should we expect you at any NANPC events in the future?

Yes, I’ll be at Cascadia, and I’m running a NANPC event in LA on Saturday, September 7th! It’s very close to the Burbank airport if anyone wants to fly in that morning.

Anyone you want to shout out?

PJ20 has been my most frequent JNet sparring partner, and dezigerator has been my most frequent in person one! They’re great practice partners.

A big congratulations to Stephen for his win in San Francisco! August looks to be another packed month as Cascadia will take place on August 3rd to 4th and NANPC Montreal will take place on the 24th and 25th of August. The competition is heating up as the fight for NANPC circuit points only grows more fierce!