Pirate Nasir: 3-1 Harlequin's Store Champ

lilelia 323

What to take to a Store Champ that you've decided on that morning to go to? Why not an untested deck you made couple nights ago on a whim, in an ID you've never played before, in an archetype you've never played before? Sounds good!

Pirate Hayley looked interesting to me from the get-go, but ultimately a little too mundane (read: effective). I started thinking about what that would look like in Nasir instead, with a couple changes to shore up his weaknesses. What resulted was honestly the most fun I've had playing netrunner in a really long time. Is this just straight-up better in Hayley? Before the tournament I would have said definitely, after the tournament...probably, but Nasir can hold his own.

Card choices:

3 Fall guys: The best and most necessary cards in the deck. These let you get back money after Nasir has screwed you over, or you intentionally went low expecting him to. I would put more in if they let me.

Xanadu: Nice to get more money and drain them, did some work in the tourny but not enough to justify the influence. Would swap for legwork or turning wheels.

Algo Trading: Place to stash some money, but not good enough to justify more than 1 slot. Pop it either when they have most of their ice ressed and you want to get in with normalish breakers, or when you want to Rubicon and you lost the money to do it.

Rubicon Switch: Goes absolutely lovely with Nasir's ability if they're not on tiny ice. Bonus points if it's just etr and you don't even have to break it.

Paricia: Put in to help against asset spam or trashing upgrades, I meant to go down to 1 but forgot. Swap 1 for another Same Old Thing.

Escher: I wanted some HQ pressure and didn't have influence for anything real. Plus it can help sometimes when they try to position ice to screw with your ID. Not sure if worth keeping.

Cerberus rather than inti: You generally don't float lots of credits during a run unless the barrier they just ressed is high strength. Being able to break a just ressed Vanilla etc without using up your resources is good. Paying the 4 to install is fine, as it's generally credits that would be lost otherwise.

So how does it play?

Like a puzzle within a puzzle. The bad news is that it's super hard to work out if you can get in somewhere, and what it'll cost you. The good news: it's not much easier for your opponent to work out :P Especially since a lot of people have never played against Nasir. On the day it beat Azmari (was sad when I installed Lady and they realised most of their remote ice was barrier), ASA (snagged an early attempted rush in the remote, another agenda from single HQ accesses and another from RnD), got a timed win against Biotech (super long game with me Rubiconing everything in sight and Deep Data Mining whenever he couldn't afford many snares. Ended 6-5 with 3 brain dmg and 3 cards left in the deck), and lost to AgInfusion (really close game where I managed to take the 2nd Nisei from the remote and another from RnD, but couldn't find enough stuff quick enough to stop him scoring out).

I'm never going to pretend this is top tier, but it is a really fun deck to play, and I recommend you try it out for a casual night.

1 comments
25 Mar 2018 ErgoMagnificent

Nice work! I love Nasir and keep trying to make it work. This seems like a solid take. I cut Savant out of my latest version, but it was a mess for a variety of reasons.