A Worlds Event-Within-An-Event by Sanjay
What is Queen Bee?
Queen Bee is a title given to the best Bee player at Worlds. It is also my attempt to bribe players into playing more bee-themed cards at the most high-level, no funny business, premier event of the competitive season.
Why?
I like bees.
So are bees like your favorite animal or something?
No. Bees are not even in my top 10 favorite animals. My top 10 favorite animals are, in no particular order: humans, brown-headed cowbirds, blue whales, turkey vultures, Canada geese, frogs, crows, gorillas, cats, and ladybird beetles.
How does Queen Bee work?
Players who have bonafide bee decks by virtue of having enough bee points in their decks should email me at sanjay at cowbirdsinlove dot com or reach out to me in some other way (I’m Sanjay on StimSlack and Green Level Clearance, for instance).
I will then follow your performance at the main event of worlds. Whoever finishes the best in the Swiss rounds of everyone with a bonafide bee deck will be crowned Queen Bee.
You said you were bribing players. What’s the bribe?
Prize support! There is a grand prize (besides the title itself) and a participation prize.
The Queen Bee gets a bee pin that I bought this year from a lovely shop I found on etsy.
It looks like this:
Everyone who participates will get a playset of my newest Bee card: Bee-hold!
The backside has a more mundane version with tournament legal text.
If I win Queen Bee, am I joining an elite lineage of Queen Bee champions?
Of course. Previous Queen Bees are Eric “whiteblade111” Keilback, Jaxon Gluck, Percomis, and Morgan “Anzekay” White. And also they are current Queen Bees because once a Queen Bee, always a Queen Bee.
How do I get bee points? How many do I need?
Between both your decks, you need a total of at least 6 bee points according to the table below. Any copies of the cards in your deck gets the full number of bee points.
The general theme of the point system is that unambiguous bee cards are worth 6 points, bee-adjacent cards are worth 4, and bee-friendly cards (and puns) are worth 2.
| Card | Points | Rationale |
| API-S Keeper Isobel | 6 | Isobel is a bee-keeper. This card is a celebration of bees and should clearly be worth 6 points. Fun fact: this was the bee card that qualified Morgan to win Queen Bee in 2022. |
| SDS Drone Deployment | 4 | Did you know that drones tend to congregate in the same place, year after year to mate, despite drones only living for a few weeks? The exact mechanics of how this works are unknown at the present time, but in the future Weyland considers this information worth 3 agenda points. |
| Project Yagi-Uda | 4 | Shintaro Uda invented what is now known as the Yagi-Uda antenna and Hidetsugu Yagi popularized it. You might say that just because Yagi-Uda is an antenna and bees have antennae isn’t enough to make this card worth 4 points. But the hexagons all over the art beg to differ. |
| Na’Not’K | 4 | This was the official prize support card for Queen Bee 2022. I’m really happy about it! |
| Sting! | 4 | This is, of course, in art and flavor text, a scorpion card, but stinging is probably in the top two things that people associate with bees, and whether that is deserved or not, including this card deserves 4 bee points. |
| Gold Farmer | 4 | Okay, so this card is banned. You shouldn’t play it at Worlds. If you do, you are going to get some game losses, which isn’t going to help your chances. But we cannot deny its bee credentials. |
| Bloom | 2 | Great source of pollen and nectar for all your homies. |
| Hortum | 2 | I assume the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was a pollinator garden. |
| Lotus Field | 2 | More flowers. A whole field of them. |
| Trick of Light | 2 | The art in Trick of Light depicts butterflies, not bees, but flowers having exciting patterns that bees see and we don’t is exactly what the card is about. |
| Maven | 2 | As a hexapod, Maven is an honorary bee. |
| Always Have a Backup Plan | 2 | This is a Plan B! Suggested by Queen Bee Jaxon Gluck. |
| Mutually Assured Destruction | 2 | This is a bee card for three great reasons: 1. It represents a Plan B2. It represents when a bee stings some large animal with too thick skin and kills itself stinging.3. This card was designed by the very first Queen Bee Eric Keilback. |
| “Baklan” Bochkin | 2 | Lotta Bs in the name. I don’t know what to tell you. Also, I love this card and I think you should put it in your Mercury decks. |
| Bahia Bands | 2 | See “Baklan” Bochkin. Except for the part about putting it in your Mercury decks. Need to save that influence for Spark of Inspiration. |
| Acacia | 2 | Acacia has some nice flowers that bees enjoy. |
| Attini | 2 | Let’s talk bee evolution and close bee relatives. We include a lot of wasps on here and don’t worry too much about it, because ultimately, bees are just wasps with good PR. But some ants are closer relatives to bees than some wasps. And if we are going to award bee points for waspishness, it seems only right to also throw ants a bit of a bone. Even if some of them are a bit of a timing nightmare (not this one). |
| Formicary | 2 | See Attini (this is the one). |
| Ayla “Bios” Rahim | 2 | I know these are just cyber-memory flowers, but I really like Bios and wanted her on the list. |
| B-1001 | 2 | That’s a lot of bees. |
| Beatriz Friere Gonzalez | 2 | You might think this card is just on the list because the first syllable is “bee”. But it’s more than that. I can tell you first-hand that science teachers are allies to bees. If they print more science teachers, I’ll probably add them to the list too. |
| Behold! | 2 | On the other hand, this card IS just on the list because the first syllable is “bee”. |
| Flower Sermon | 2 | This is what you call it when a bee does a dance to tell the other bees where the flowers are, but it gets a bit preachy. |
| Wage Workers | 2 | A bunch of workers with the Clone subtype are very bee-ish! |
| Buzzsaw | 2 | A new suggestion from Jaxon. Buzzzzzz! |
| 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. |
| Rubicon Switch | -1 | Nothing to do with bees. I just am using what influence I have to oppose this awful card. This is called praxis. |
Aren’t you forgetting some really good bee-friendly card?
Probably! It’s too late to add them to the list now, but I’d love to hear about them.
Great. Cool. So I’ll email you to let you know I qualify for Queen Bee, and then I’ll meet up with you at Worlds for my prizes, right?
Yes, except unfortunately I won’t be able to make it to Worlds this year. In my stead, the inestimable Dee (DeeR) will conduct bee operations. As a bit of trivia, Dee actually knows a lot about bees. They are a million times more qualified than me to fill this role.
Dee will award the pin and hand out the Bee-Holds. If you can’t get in touch with them during the event, let me know and I can mail the Bee-Holds to you.
Always Bee buzzing