Shrike-Clip-Blade Kate (1st Place Reading GNK)

Do you get a kick out of having a big rig for blasting your way through everything? Worried about being locked out by big sentries? Do you want to actually just play netrunner, without all that bullshit ice destruction or siphon spam degeneracy? Then boy do I have the deck for you! This deck came first in a completely stacked GNK in Reading (Including Two UK Top 8 competitors, and shmeguy, SSCI Champ 2016 and Nordic Nats Top 4 competitor) plus numerous other people who have made regional cuts. It was twinned with the CTM deck I took to nats -1 Wrap + 1 Tollbooth.

The shell was imported from vik's UK Nats winning deck, but the Icebreaker suite has been tuned to better suit the increasing numbers of HB being seen in the UK Meta because fucking hell Snowball is painful against Eli 1.0 and stacked Turings/Tollbooths are equally nightmarish for Zu,13. It's also worth noting that both Zu and Shrike are cloudbreakers, so if you have rabbit hole out, you can functionally have 6 mem! Many times, I'd have a pretty sweet Opus/Clip/Blade/Mimic/Shrike rig, relying on Mimic to bust through annoying architects but using shrike for the big sentries like Ichi.

Some of the fringe toolbox cards (Film Critic because who plays TFP nowadays) were cut for more useful things like Beth. Beth is awesome. She's literally the definition of power creep, and the consistent drip of cards and creds is pretty impressive. I kept the Lucky find in because this deck can be a bit slow to set up, and the burst is welcome. This could easily be a Temujin instead if you prefer.

So how do you play this deck? It's honest, basic netrunner. You build up a board state, build up money and go. You have all the classic shaper draw cards in order to help you setup and multiple copies of your key pieces. Opus is key to your economy, so make sure you protect it! Losing opus is a huge setback, which is why you have tools for fetching out things to protect it like Sharpshooter and two sentry breakers + recursion to make sure you get it back. Otherwise, install your breakers as needed; a common turn while setting up was draw install/play, opus opus or draw draw install opus. Cheating Paperclip into play buy overdrawing, dumping it in your heap to handsize, then installing for free during a run is cute, but risky; it nearly cost me a practice game when the HB player chronosed me. Your main game plan is the classic shaper fork: you have the capability to both remote lock and R and D lock (with targeted HQ runs as required). Make sure you don't go low on a R and D run to let a scoring window emerge, though!

Cuts: I never used FTE all day; Ultimately, it might have been worth it against CTM, but honestly, CTM doesn't really protect archives against Kate, and rarely protects HQ heavily, so I'm tempted to go back to Noto in order to better control the pace at which I can win. With FTE out of the way, I'd be tempted to also cut an indexing to go up to two R&D Interfaces - I generally found that the consistent multiacess to lock R and D was very valuable, and won me some clutch games against Russian NEH.

Enjoy the deck, and welcome back to good old Shaper Big Rig Netrunner!