Spotlight: lessqq's Basilisk Confessor deck

If you play Rivals in the leagues up to Masters, you will see all kinds of Tech decks -- and many of them. So much that I recently wrote an article on how to beat Tech decks.

But if you look at higher Tiberium (e.g. the Nod Top 50), you can see that "up there" basically no one is playing Tech. A notable exception is lessqq with his Confessor-Basilisk deck (currently on rank 14 with Nod).

Who is lessqq? He's a prolific Twitch streamer with more than 100,000 followers and YouTuber withmore than 100,000 subscribers (German language). Whilst he focuses on other games, he also plays Rivals since January, seemingly as a passion rather than a seriouus part of his Twitch/YouTube business.

What's his deck like?

• Starting out with a single harvester, and trying to get a second one out depending on the opponent and how the game goes. Especially against aggro decks, lessqq wants to delay the game, so might sometimes forego the second harvester until the first nuke is decided.
• Militants to open the game before or after the single harvester to scout and as a cheap unit to delay the charging of the nuke and fight enemy infantry.
• Scavengers as the cheap anti-vehicle / anti-air option. Lasers are an alternative. An upside of scavengers is the opportunity to earn some extra Tiberium (to get Tech out). Also, Scavengers can force the opponent into hard decisions, e.g. between accepting delaying the nuke and gifting lessqq some Tiberium. This can psychologically help delay the nuke compared to lasers.
• Chem Buggy as the early-/mid game counter to enemy infantry if & where the Militants don't cut it. 
• Stealth Tank as the counter to vehicles and air where Scavengers are not strong or fast enough,  or are countered (e.g. Venom, Talon).
• Confessors as a very strong anti-infantry unit that is also good against most air units. They e.g. can beat Chem Warriors, and against the current "Jade meta" deck, lessqq will try to delay the game so much that he ideally can play Confessors instead of Chem Buggy as a counter to Chem Troopers, as he knows the Jade decks have the Laser Drones against the Chem Buggy.
• Basilisk as the option against fortress decks (e.g. Giga, MLRS defended by other units), opponent heavy Tech (like Mammoth) or APCs.

I'd go out on a limb and say that besides the GDI "Air Mammoth" deck (described here), it's one of the more viable Tech decks right now. GDI has some more options e.g. with Sandstorm, but in Nod, you barely see Tech played except for Artillery in tournament games.

Below, find a sample video of how his deck plays (apologies for the mediocre sound quality). Here, lessqq plays against top Rivals player Suzaku, who commands the very deck named after him ("Suzaku APC"). 

Some notes on the game:

• A skilled Rifle vs Militant fight in the centre, that in this case benefits lessqq, as he prefers the game to go on longer.
• lessqq probably could have built his harvester one Militant earlier, and at the end of the Militant/Rifle fight got a bit popcapped whilst charging the nuke for Suzaku -- but overall, good start for lessqq, as the first nuke goes off late at 1:45m
• The first Orca doesn't get the harvester, but then a bit later gets a ton of damage done afterwards, killing a Stealth Tank and Chem  This is trademark Suzaku with this deck, he often gets so much utility out of a single Otca.
• This map is great for Strongarm because of the spot of the turret chosen at 2:39m. Yet, in this case, it's so late that lessqq alread has his Confessor/Basilisk late game combo out, against which Strongarm isn't that scary anymore.
• The rest of the game is then favored for lessqq thanks to the strong late-game combo, illustrating the general issue of Aggro decks against Tech if they don't make the game fast enough (see this guide on how to play vs Tech).

I chose this game to illustrate that lessqq can go head-to-head even against top opponents playing a strong deck on a map that fits the deck (Strongarm turret is strong on this map).  Admittedly, lessqq lost more games against Suzaku than he won in the recent session.  I selected this game for this article to show a great win with it. :)  Look up lessqq and Suzaku in the app in the Nod top rankings to see more of their games!