Decklist of the week

Rash Decisions

Identity

Description by the author: Nemamiah 1653

WARNING - the following deck is not guaranteed to be good. It is fun and it is interesting, for reasons that I'm going to tediously expand on below.

Cast your mind back to October 2016, when the world was a definitively better place. Part of the reason for that, possibly even the main one, was that CtM was indisputably the best Corp deck. Now, that iteration was obviously built around certain key interactions, most notably hugely impactful swing plays built around Breaking News, that have since been cruelly denied to us by FFG. That's why the modern CtM lists rely much more on bluffing, forcing the runner in to mistakes and playing a long, grindy game.

However, if you asked me exactly why 2016 CtM was so good I'd have said that it was the ability to out tempo the runner and dictate the pace of the game. You played high value assets which vastly accelerated your board state if left unchecked, then used CtM's ability and Hard Hitting News to wreck the runners tempo if they tried to disrupt you. This approach is notably lacking in the most successful CtM lists since rotation.

Part of that is, again, the loss of two key cards that both generated a lot of tempo, in SanSan City Grid and Sensie Actors Union. We have now seen replacements for both of these cards in the form of Calibration Testing and Rashida Jaheem, so this list is an attempt to see if we can get back to that tempo attack archetype that I miss so much.

Both of those new cards have a significant issue, which is that they create tempo but don't sustain it because they are one use only. That means that we play three Team Sponsorship, because then when everything's going to plan you can turn each burst of tempo in to more tempo, thus accelerating away from the runner.

The cost of all this is primarily in slots, so we have to lose some tag punishment and some ice, but we have more draw so in theory that's an acceptable compromise. The ice, by the way, is the least refined part of this deck. Data Raven, while a key part of most modern CtM lists, is not good at exchanging tempo so might be best replaced with something else.

Our best plan against Val is to score an AR Enhanced Security early, so we have three of these and we also have the full collection of Calibration Testings to help with that. We're moving away from the Install Advance Advance bluff game, so we only have one Quantum Predictive Model and no NGO Fronts. Both of those plays aren't great for tempo, so they don't fit the deck.

Everything else is as you'd expect, and you can fall back on the old taxing remote, never advance plan if your tempo fails to materialise.

There are probably improvements and refinements to be found in this list, but I think it's a good example of a decent Corp, and in particular is built to exploit Rashida, which I'm convinced is one of the best cards we've seen for quite some time. Be aggressive when playing it; every move you make should be made with generating more tempo than the runner in mind.

Most importantly, have fun.

(As an aside, part of the reason that I'm publishing this is because I think there are too many cliques and secret decks in Netrunner. I'm going to publish any deck I play at a tournament straight away this year, and if I haven't been to a tournament but have found something interesting I'll publish that too. I believe the game is a better one when everyone has access to the best decks. Thanks to Alex White, Cat Shen and Alice Rees in particular for helping me formulate this view).