Classic Is Back

Edit: Shortly after I put this up, they banned Slot Machine (as well as several other cards). Swap in Funhouse.

I have, for the first time since I started playing Netrunner all those years ago, a pair of decks that I'd describe as competitive, that I came up with on my own. To celebrate, I'm publishing these.

This. This a rush deck.

There's more.

Not much more, admittedly. You've got enough 2/3 agendas to reliably score out a few of them, Bellona defends itself when you try to score it turn two behind a Ping or an Enigma, and refunds you 5 if you score it. If they take it, slam a Hard-Hitting News on them. Tomorrow's Headline also helps with the partial refund because of the tag trigger, keeping you solvent, which is good because this deck wants to go fast.

The promised "more" is that the deck has a mild secondary strategy of messing with the runner's things. Landing a tag normally puts resources at risk: running two copies of Retribution allows you to threaten important pieces like a loaded Pennyshaver, the one-of Engolo, or a Rezeki that's just annoying you. No kill pieces, because High-Profile Target is incredibly expensive in influence, and BOOM! can be trashed, but you can still punish tags. More on this later.

The ice picked supports these two strategies. It does one of three things.

Goal one: it's annoying and expensive to run through multiple times, usually putting a piece or two of this ice on centrals and if enough are drawn on the scoring remote. Slot Machine and Turnpike are here purely for this.

Goal two: it stops the run, letting you score out early before the runner can pull out icebreakers. Ideally, you want a piece of this ice as early as turn two, supporting a score on turn three. This is why the Enigma and Ping are here, though IP Block can also be a hard ETR with clever placement of Ping and Turnpike or if they're sporting an AI breaker.

Goal three: supporting the above secondary strategy of breaking the runner's things, by going after programs. This is where Macrophage and the singular Hagen shine.

The general strategy here is to rush. You want to score fast enough that you're threatening to finish the game before the runner's all set up. The runner then has to gamble on stealing agendas, half of which tax them in one form or another, which threatens HHN because you're relying on quick economy instead of drip economy. If they chose not to steal and instead go for setting up long term economy, you instead switch to playing a waiting game, slapping in cards into a moderately expensive but ultimately breakable scoring remote, and forcing them to ask themselves if this one's a card that doesn't threaten a score, a Calibration Testing or SanSan City Grid to threaten a score with next turn, or an agenda. You're just hoping to tip the economy back your way long enough to either stick a tag to wreck their rig, or have a safe scoring window.

Possible modifications: the most flexible ice slots are the Macrophages. That was a meta call on looking at how many decks were using the new viruses, plus it's nice to have a designated useless card in some matchups if you overdraw and are working on what to ditch from your hand to never deal with again. CVS, on the other hand, I consider vital to beating Clot. In addition, the Biotic Labor is obviously strong, but changing over to have kill pressure from tags might be worthwhile. Alternatively, you could go harder on the "mess with the runner's rig" model and try to see about using Ark Lockdown to lock out the runner from dealing with, say, barriers. It's something I tried, but when I was playing it as a one-of, I too often defaulted back to playing only towards that out, only to have it be near the bottom of my deck. Finally, the economy might be worth tweaking: Rashida Jaheem was a recent suggestion from somebody I faced, and I am curious if playing a Subliminal Messaging is worth the slot for the slow economy. The Nico Campaigns I would actually highly recommend keeping in, at least to start with if you're playing with the deck: the general case I've seen is that either the runner trashes them before they've been rezzed, which nets you 2 credits, or you get to rez them, in which case you're getting 1 credit that turn and the runner would have to run in to pay 2 credits to deny you 6. I've almost never had a runner decide they were that invested in keeping me off money.

I'll be writing up the runner deck I'd pair with this one, a stealth Tenma deck, probably later today or tomorrow. Cheers!