Last weekend the Bournemouth-based Beachhead Achroma Tournament saw 8 players battle it to claim the top spot. The winner in the end was Fairybread, who’s been a player of the game for some time now, and I was really pleased to see him take the win.

I reached out to him, and he kindly shared his deck and a mini-writeup of how he found the palette, which he’s dubbed Hex Clunker Likes to Steal Cards:

Here’s what he said:
“The deck on the day was quite powerful and multiple games I won quite quickly. However, there was one match that took quite a long time and was very intense, as well as the final, coming back from a one match loss.
I was quite lucky to get a match against a precon palette (SaraJane) who was covering for uneven numbers, but the final was against another Salum palette meaning there was a lot of back and forth between characters and locations.“

I love the concept of the deck. I’ve built full-on steal/erase decks from Salum before, but I don’t think I’ve ever taken it quite to this extreme. It is a risky strategy: if you face a deck with high value cards which decides not to play cards and trade instead, you’ve only got a handful of cards to carry you over the finish line (though to be fair, the short list do each pack a punch). However, most decks are trying to build a board state, and constantly having your cards erased or claimed makes for a difficult match for many decks. I’m sure this palette was a lot of fun to play, and massive congratulations to Fariybread for taking this unique deck to the top.

The final was against Junghaan playing Ray’s Rube Goldberg Machine, which made me very happy as that’s one of my decks. I was so pleased to see this deck go to the final, and hold Fairybread to a 2-1 finish. You can read my full review of this deck here, but this is the palette (on the day Junghaan swapped a Sea Serpent for a Veil Chaser’s Cat, but otherwise it was the same):

This was a decent match for this deck, as it wants to see a lot of cards on the canvas, any canvas, before it one shots to 30, and nothing builds boardstates quite like Hex Clunker and Corrupted Muon Traps. However, it can be stymied if you fail to draw a key card, or if Cintimani Stone ends up out of sequence, even if it is highly optimised to minimise that probability. Congratulations to Junghaan for doing so well with this palette. It’s not an easy deck to play.

Curiously, the other Top4 decks were also Salum decks. No Spirata in the top cut given Secrets of Spirata had just been released was a surprise, but it was refreshing to see something other than Rayders or Draco win an event.

Congrats to everyone who played in what sounded like a great event with an impressive prize wall. Also, kudos to Realm Runner Studios for going ahead with 4 rounds of Swiss and a Top4 cut despite there just being 8 players. It’s a fair way of running an event, and means all the players get in lots of games of Achroma. Wish I could’ve been there.

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