Red Dead Re-Deadcoats - 6th at Slovak Nats

I recently moved to Italy from the US for a year, and decided that as long as I'm here, I should try and hit up some of the Netrunner events. My first foray into this was attending the Slovakian Nationals, hosted in Bratislava. Seeing as I had literally no idea what the meta looked like over here, I decided I'd throw caution to the wind and just bring what I personally have been working on. This is my Corp.

This is the latest version of a deck I've been messing around with for several months, modified for the newest MWL. In case your eyes fail you, the fairly obvious goal of it is to have really annoying to steal agendas, and make the runner need to steal 3 of them. Meanwhile, due to "Clones Ain't Dudes", you only need to score one of them. There's also the lethal win condition of the runner having stolen an agenda, and die for their troubles. This is made all the easier if that agenda was Obokata Protocol.

Agendas

This is pretty self explanatory, but why not. 6/7 agendas are hard to steal from centrals, with the leftover agenda being Labyrinthine Servers. Why Labyrinthine Servers and not some better agenda, like Hades Fragment or Utopia Fragment? Because for some dumb reason that didn't occur to me until the morning of the tournament, and all the rest of my cards were back in Italy. Why not a different agenda, like Nisei MK II or Philotic Entanglement? Those are great cards, but they don't help me directly with my only-score-2-agendas game plan, and I can't threaten Punitive off a 2-pointer, so they really go directly counter to both my win conditions.

As for scoring, if I have a very safe scoring window, I really prefer to score the The Future Perfect or Lab Servers. This is because, once in the remote, they're not safe any longer in the same manner that they are "safe" in the deck. TFP because I no longer have the Psi game to lean on, and Lab Servers because they still need to random access to get it. For riskier scores, I vastly prefer Obokata, because it can turn them into vastly safer scores, or set up Punitive kills. Even in the earlier game when the runner is fairly poor, an Obokata behind a Komainu is almost completely safe. If they eat the Komainu, they can't take Obokata. If they install a Sentry breaker and take Obokata, there's a decent chance they just die. If they don't run, yay, I'm on 3-4 points.

If they install Film Critic and run... we'll cover that in a bit.

Murder Murder Murder Murder

If you've seen some of my other corp deck lists, you'll notice that I'm a fan of meat damage. If you haven't, Hi, I'm Saan, and I enjoy multiple win conditions. In this case, it's Punitive that does the lifting. Having effectively 4 Punitives in my deck through the use of Consulting Visit means that I very consistently have one or more when I need it. The funny part is that I made this deck without seeing anyone doing anything else similar. However, at the Slovakian Nats, the same idea was EVERYWHERE, in the same ID, in Nisei Division, in classic PE... people loved the Okokata Punitive idea (though no one else was on Consulting Visit, so take that, Eastern Europe).

And man, people hated Film Critic.

Most people's answer to it was Voter Intimidation, which makes sense, seeing as it's in faction and all. However, Voter Int gives the runner a 33% chance to keep the FC in play, and I really don't like that. FC turns off both my win cons of having hard-to-steal agendas and murdering innocent runners with imPunity (Puns! I got em.). I went the extra mile and included MCA Informant, which is a card that they can't ignore, and will lead to the death of FC. That's the other reason Consulting Visit is in the deck, is that it's another copy of MCA Informant.

Money Concerns

The deck needs just loads and loads and stacks of fat cash, which is the reason it's in Pālanā in the first place; more money. You need to be able to both score fat, expensive agendas (8 credits with a Clones attached. Gross), and also rez big, fat ICE (8 credits for a DNA Tracker. ...Actually kind of a bargain?), and you need to be able to do both while also threatening to kill the runner with the money you have left over.

This lead to me adding basically every reasonable econ operation to the deck, as well as 2 Launch Campaigns to beef it up even further. The rest of Jinteki's econ options suck (Medical Research Fundraiser gives the runner econ, so that's off the table, and the drip econ options seem very uninspiring for this kinda deck), so thank the Boggs that Celebrity Gift was saved from rotation.

Upgrades

This section is short. Yay! Batty is because he can kill with Komainu if the runner isn't looking, and can end the run after an expensive trip through my scoring remote. He's not as good as Caprice, but I usually don't need him to be, seeing as I only score 2 agendas. Ash does what Ash has always done since time immemorial, and is the last really reliable scoring upgrade, also enabling me to turn my economy into a win condition. Crisium Grid is there to help stop things like Deep Data Mining and Indexing for when I can't find a Mirāju, and also helps me reach that influence limit for Consulting Visit.

Ice

I wanted a good mix of expensive, scary ICE as well as some annoying but cheap options in order to be able to defend servers without blowing my credit pool to shit, and this is where I landed.

My barriers are basically just gear checks that make my opponent install Paperclip, and then tax it a couple bucks after it's in play. I wanted one Himitsu-Bako in order to move an ETR to my scoring remote if I couldn't find one early in order to give Batty something to ETR on, as well as occasionally pad my hand more against a probing runner.

As for Sentries, Pup costs one credit and will tax the runner like 10 credits over the course of the game, if not more. Komainu is really expensive to run through and makes drawing up in order to mitigate Obokata stealing an awkward thing. Snek can occasionally kill programs, and also gives Batty a fun target. Errand Boy... kinda just exists because it's expensive to break, and gives me cards and credits if they don't. Okay, okay, it's really only there because I needed a 1-influence Weyland card to make the Consulting Alliance work, and it had to be an ICE, and all the rest of the 1-inf Weyland ICE suck even worse.

Code Gate time! 3 DNA Trackers belong in any Jinteki deck that can support them, because it's insane. Crick is okay because it still does what Crick does, and that's been fine for me. Lotus Field... is okay? It's 3 to break with almost anything these days, and being unable to be lowered with Datasuckers doesn't matter nearly as much any more. I might look for a better card. 5 for an ETR is a lot to ask. Mirāju is fricking incredible, though. It kills Indexing on R&D (don't rez it until they pay to go back in after the initial Indexing run), it helps both filter additional agendas back into R&D, and it occasionally helps me cycle additional Clones back into my deck for a potentially better card right now. 2 feels like a good number.

How'd The Deck Do?

I lost one game with it in swiss where I never drew one of my 4 Punitives in slightly more than half my deck, and the runner was dead on either agenda steal. Naturally, the first one he accessed was Labyrinthine, and was the free steal, so that wasn't great either. After that, he just sat around and clicked Mopus until there was really no way for me to reasonably score any more. I thought I had found a window for my final agenda, but he was able to eek out just enough credits to get in, to the credit.

I also lost one game in the cut, in what I think was the coolest way to lose a game with this deck. I was against someone playing Hayley with 2 Film Critics, so this was already not the best (I might try and throw in a Preemptive Action to recycle cards like MCA in a future version). He had used one to get an agenda early-ish on, but I found my Consulting Visit and used it to MCA the one that was out. His next turn he places down the second FC (darn), runs R&D, and sees an Obokata. He hosts it on the FC with the MCA on it, and then trashes the MCA'd FC and clicks Opus once. I think "huh," and IAA my final agenda, knowing it's 100% safe in my expensive server with a Batty and an Ash protecting it. The next turn he plays Freedom Through Equility and runs Archives for the win, stealing Obokata.

Basically, I had the win had I not used MCA informant, which I thought was hilarious. However, the chances of all that lining up exactly (me MCAing his FA when he had both drawn his Freedom and there being one of 3 agendas on top of my R&D) was incredibly low, so I don't count that as a case against MCA, because the chances of this happening are still nearly infinitely better than the 33% chance that Voter gives you.

Anyhow, the deck did very well for me, and my only losses happened due to kinda shitty luck. In the future, I might try and find room for a Preemptive (as I mentioned earlier) and/or a second copy of Consulting Visit. That might be going overboard, though, but I'll test it out.

Final thoughts

Hilariously, none of my wins game from killing the runner. All of them came from scoring out. However, I won from scoring out because the runner knew I had Punitives in hand, either through runs or Celeb Gift showing them off, and often declined to steal agendas because of this, allowing me the ability to simply score out under the threat. As I said, I would have won one of the games I lost if I had found one, but such is life =)

After the tournament, I realized that this deck is basically just the old Deadcoats idea, but thrown in Jinteki, where it just makes more sense right now. It wasn't my intention, but damned if it isn't the same. Deadcoats in a red identity? Red Dead Re-Deadcoats (Puns! I got em).