2nd place Linköping Regionals Sweden (32 players)-ClotNoise

I have been playing around with different alterations of this Noise deck for a while now and I'm pretty happy with it's performance. I played Noise for a long while until NEH fastro started to completely crush me, it was by far my worst matchup. So with the release of Clot I was very excited to try and make my NEH matchups better. During my testing before regionals it worked well enough against NEH for me to go ahead and bring it to Linköping.

In swiss I faced: RP, NEXT design, MN, NEH, RP.

The first RP game was a corp agenda flood. Two accesses 7 points... TFP and NAPD in archives and a Nisei MKII on top of R&D. Can't take any cred for that one.

The next game was a tough one. Both decks were almost depleted at the end of it. The corp setup quickly and scored 5 points. They installed a vitrivius in the scoring server consisting of: Turing (innermost), NEXT Silver (with a Knight on it), Unrezzed. I installed a D4V1D from hand and made a stimhack run to install crypsis (with grimoire token) from heap using a clone chip. Turned out the outermost ice was a Grim so I could break server with 2 D4V1D tokens and the knight in order to avoid the corp victory. I remember reading about NEXT relying on FA to win out last agenda and installed a clot as soon as I saw one. Turned out the corp had a sansan in the remote so he purged two times (after Deja vuing it once) to get rid of it. Won by endurance and ice-destruction with parasites.

The third game was vs a trace-heavy MN with Ash and Red herrings for agenda protection. Ice destruction was the main reason for me taking this one as well. I had a hilarious moment when I was facing a remote with a Viper innermost followed by an unrezzed card and the corp just installed no advanced card in it. I thought to myself, "Hey, that is probably some kind of trace ice" and fired off a stimhack as my last click (to avoid losing a click to viper sub). It turned out it was a wraparound so I just lost 9 credits to nothing and got a braindmg haha.

Fourth game I lost to the NEH which was a shell game version. He installed plenty of cards and I chickened out from checking them all, afraid of snares and DRTs. He naked installed and scored an Astro and I was drawing frenetically after a clot in order to start my recurssion. In the end he choo choo-ed to victory with 7-4. My two clots were in the 4 last cards of the deck, the anarch curse.

The fifth game vs RP was lost due to RP awesomeness. I didn't mill anything that hurt him badly enough, he rezzed a Lotus field on R&D and knight decided to chill in bottom 8 cards. ELP took care of all my HQ, archive and remote harrasment possibilities so the game was just locked down, RP style.

In the top 8 Noise performed quite well. I faced off against RP and managed to steal a game winning NAPD off of R&D before his score out turn. Don't think there was anything special about this game, just ice destruction, R&D pressure and some lucky agenda mills.

The second game in the top 8 was against a fastro NEH. He suffered a pretty bad flood but when he somewhat stabilized I had found my clot. With two clone chips out and a trashed virus suite I felt pretty comfortable that he wouldn't be able to score out that easily. Clot threat just lend me time to just mill with installs and pressure all centrals until I won.

The third noise game in the top 8 was against another RP which I had some real nice flow with the mills against. I top decked a Nisei MKII, milled mostly ice which left all servers pretty easy to break into. I put the pressure on with parasites and mills and keeping up economically became too hard for the corp in the end. He never managed to setup the scoring server good enough to be safe.

The fourth game in the top 8 was the first game of the finals. I had crawled my way through the loser brackets and was randomized to play Noise vs NEH butcher shop. An astro was scored pretty quickly while I focused on the open HQ by installing imp and going for killing tag'n'bag combo. I imped 2 scorched and with a I've had worse in hand I felt pretty safe. I managed to steal an Astro from HQ and was handed 5 tags as my reward. I then accessed an NAPD with only 2 credits from R&D and my brain malfunctioned big time. I thought that milling it to archives was a good idea and thus played a cache from my 4 card hand as my last click =_=vvv Ofc he had the 3rd scorched earth in hand and was about to miss out on my hand size hadn't it been for a sweeps week draw hehe.

All in all I was pretty happy with Noise's performance during the day. Some games you're just stuck with a bad draw, all important stuff clogged up at the bottom but that's just life. Disregarding that the deck has answers to many problems and I think the key to playing it is knowing when to start being really aggressive. I usually go for any open central asap; installing datasucker looking up the one card, getting a token, is for instance a pretty nice start. Imp is also such a nice card in anarch in general. Install, go for R&D or HQ and just trash away any annoying card is a pretty huge threat. Clot has worked really well for me (when I find it). Deja vu / clone chip recurssion lets you buy a lot of time vs FA. Purge followed by picking up clot + cache and installing both then doing a run or whatever is a really nice turn. Two mills and you build up a credit advantage. Even in matchups where corp is not FA I usually install it if I can make 2 or more credits of of it. With scheherazade, a cyberfeeder and aesops you usually earn 3 and a mill which I think is pretty good considering.

Not meeting any Weyland made the scheherazade play almost risk free. In a power shutdown heavier meta this might be a dangerous strategy but this time it worked out fine and made me a lot of credits throughout the day.

I had actually already updated this with some changes but totally forgot to remake the physical deck before I went to the tournament. In my new version of the deck I run +1 Imp, +1 Knight, -1 mimic and -1 I've had worse. Felt that Lotus field caused my aggression a little bit too much trouble, thus the changes.

Corp deck over here: http://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/20906/2nd-place-link-ping-regionals-sweden-32-players-butcher-s