Yusuf/Stealth/Aesop's Freedom: 8-0 in Rain City Draft League

syd7 591

This deck carried me to first place in Vancouver's draft league. We drafted IDs and I played this deck with Freedom Khumalo. NetrunnerDB won't let me upload this with Freedom as an ID, but he was certainly the most important card in the deck.

Let me say, if you ever get the chance to run 75-influence-stealth-Aesop's-run-based Freedom, you should take it. This deck has no win condition or multi-access. I had the option to run Bhagat or R&DI, but found it was better to just consistently out-money the corp and grind away their tools with freedom's ID. In our mid-season snake draft, I even passed on drafting a Medium (over Dirty Laundry, I think), and I still believe it was the right choice.

Obviously, there's not too much value in posting a draft deck - beyond my desire to commemorate it - but I figured I could make a couple recommendations to anyone going into their own draft event:

1) Freedom is amazing. I think one of the standouts of draft is how dependent corps are on asset economy. Most corps generally have to float an unprotected PAD campaign, private contracts, etc, and being able to trash those for free is enormously powerful. Its so powerful I think our organizer is going to remove him from the cube for next time (Feels great to get a card banned :P )

2) Run-based economy is the way to go. All the same reasons as 1). In every game, the corp ended up rezzing every piece of ice they installed. Forcing the corp to defend every server usually kept them off of the money necessary to secure a fast-advance win (which was often their only line).

3) If you can get 2+ Aesop's/Hostage, just draft every junk 0-cost card you can find. I don't think Corporate Defector ever revealed a card to me, but he always made me 3 credits.

4) Win conditions are overrated. I suspect you're usually better off securing good money and breakers first, then perhaps only drafting a multi-access option later that fits into that comfortable base. I think I'd rather draft a Security Testing before a Medium, since Medium doesn't do much without enough draw, money, and breakers to run R+D every turn.

5) Crypt won me several games!!! There's no insight here, I just think its amazing and we should all take a moment to note the time Crypt was good. Running archives for sec testing and crypt counters to power Yusuf and Freedom's ID was a winning strategy.

Big thanks to Alpha/RunningParallel for putting all the work in to run this fantastic event over the last 8 weeks. And shout out to my opponent ADumbBrick for playing one of the most methodical, challenging, and fun games of Netrunner in the final round of the top cut.

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