Queen Bee 2022
A Worlds Sub-event brought to you by Sanjay
What is Queen Bee?
Queen Bee is a title for the best Bee player at Worlds. It is my brazen and unabashed attempt to influence the meta by bribing people into putting more bee cards in their deck.
Why?
I like bees.
Are they your favorite animal?
Not even close. I just like them.
Have you ever done this before?
Of course. I have overseen the crowning of two Queen Bees:
What’s an APAC Continentals win or two compared to this?
Is this Jaxon’s best bee related accomplishment? Not for sure!
Additionally, Percomis is also a reigning Queen Bee so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
What do I get if I participate?
Firstly, you get a chance to win the title of Queen Bee, and a nice little bee pin.
Secondly, while supplies last, all Queen Bee participants will be sent a bee themed Na’Not’K in the mail:
How do I participate?
Firstly, you have to go to Worlds. The event is October 7-9th weekend.
Secondly, you need to email me at sanjay @ cowbirdsinlove dot com and let me know you are participating.
But most importantly, to participate, your decks that you are playing at the main Standard event at Worlds need to be sufficiently bee-themed.
How do I make my decks sufficiently bee-themed?
It’s extremely simple. All you have to do is get 6 bee points between your runner and corp deck. You get bee points by including any number of bee cards in your deck from the following list. You get the full point value for including even a single copy of the card, with no additional benefits to playing multiples. Here’s the list:
| Card | Points | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| API-S Keeper Isobel | 6 | I’m still flabbergasted we got this amazing support for bee enthusiasts in Reign and Reverie. If you play Isobel at Worlds, that’s your bee credentials locked up (almost)* no questions asked. |
| Chrysalis | 4 | I don’t really associate chrysalises with bees, but one cannot help but appreciate the winged hymenopteran in the art. I haven’t been especially interested in distinguishing between bees and their wasp and hornet cousins, you dig? |
| SDS Drone Deployment | 4 | Given that drones’ main role in a hive is to fertilize an unfertilized queen, you might not have realized how charged this agenda is to a bee. |
| Drone Screen | 4 | This is what queen bees use when they set up a dating profile. |
| Recon Drone | 4 | Drones are mostly useless and if you can put one to work on recon, good for you. |
| Gold Farmer | 4 | This card is currently banned in Standard, but if it becomes legal, it is absolutely a bee card. What are our honey-making friends if not gold farmers? |
| Project Yagi-Uda | 4 | There’s a lot of hexagons in the art, and Yagi-Uda is named after a type of antennae. Very bee-friendly! |
| Na’Not’K | 4 | Robot bees are still bees! And robot wasps are especially still bees, because there are no messy issues of phylogeny to distract. |
| Sting! | 4 | While this card is undoubtedly a scorpion card, and while it is equally undoubtable that bees are good, despite President Obama’s reassurances, bees may, in fact, sting you. |
| Bloom | 2 | What bee would not love to encounter a deck full of blooms! |
| Hortum | 2 | Your garden certainly appreciates the bees, just as a bee appreciates a good garden. |
| Lotus Field | 2 | Yum yum yum. This card is an all you can gather buffet. |
| Trick of Light | 2 | To me, Trick of Light evokes the fact that often flowers that appear quite plain to us humans are actually quite exciting looking to pollinators, who see at different wavelengths than us. And that’s why it is on this list. |
| Maven | 2 | Nothing quite reminds me of bees like a hexapod with expertise. |
| Always Be Running | 2 | Good include from Percomis. More like Sometimes Bee Flying, am I right?** |
| Always Have a Backup Plan | 2 | All credit to Jaxon for pointing out that this card, in fact, thematically represents a Plan B. |
| Mutually Assured Destruction | 2 | Another plan B, this card is designed by the inaugural Queen Bee winner, Eric Keilback. Additionally, sometimes when you sting a large animal you die yourself, which is what this card represents to me. |
| Kakugo | -1 | A virus was named after the term Kakugo and that virus hurts bees. I know this card is banned at the moment, but if it becomes unbanned, you will suffer a penalty to your bee-ness if you play it. |
* Given the point system, the one question asked, if you have no other bee cards, is whether you included Kakugo in your deck.
** Typically you’d have to have this as part of your decklist, but I am also ruling that if you sincerely play this as a starting directive in a majority of your games, it also counts. Also, bless you.
Aren’t you forgetting some really good bee-friendly card?
Yeah, maybe! I’d love to hear about them but I don’t know about whether the logistics of adding them to the list will work out.
I look forward to seeing you at Worlds!
I think you’re going to have a great time. Unfortunately I won’t make it, but I think I’ve convinced my friend Pouchsurfer to award the bee pin in my absence.