The Family Business – 1st at EC Nats

First of all, massive shoutout to Steven (Chromatically) who has been integral to every step of my netrunner journey and has shaped me into the player I am today. He introduced and taught me the game, spent countless hours in-person and online playing with/mentoring me, lent me cards, pulled me into his testing group, gave me the decks I played at Nationals, reconstructed and taught me the lines against the Asa decks on the morning of the cut, advised me on my matchups between rounds, and supported me in more ways than I can list here. I cannot thank him enough and I truly could not have done this without him.

Also huge thank you to the other members of our testing group, Chris (Icecreamcollege) and Bryce (ripnetrunner), for being absolute legends. I’ve been incredibly privileged to have learned from and played against both of you. Shoutout to Brenda who kept us sane throughout the entire weekend and just was an absolute rockstar. Finally, thanks to the Pittsburgh meta for all the support!

Why Outfit?

Mainly because of that ↑. Combining all deck variations, I’ve played 257 games on jnet with Outfit. The second highest is Azmari at 222 games but Outfit was better for the meta.

When I started playing, I almost exclusively played Pigeon Fighter/LauraAzmari and Whiteblade’s Tagme Zahya for 3 months. Steven then told me that I “spend enough time on jnet to try other decks” so I tried all the decks from ysengrin’s meta breakdown video. Maybe because it’s similar to Azmari in many ways, Outfit was the deck I ended up reaching for the most.

To be honest, I might have played asset Ob if I was better at it but I wanted a deck that I knew well and Outfit was a solid meta choice against all the bigshikos we expected. It turned out to be a very good meta call.

What is the deck?

This deck is based off the Muntal Bost Outfit list. The main changes we made were Magnets, no Mausolus, and a cheeky Ark Lockdown.

Magnet: Outfit has some big ice that are prime Botulus targets. Particularly, Trebuchet is very difficult for MkUltra to deal with (9! credits to break) so binbreaker runners often try to resort to Botulus or Bankhar. Magnet takes care of the botulus, double layering takes care of Bankhar.

Ark Lockdown: This is a nice gotcha during swiss if runners discard their binbreakers too early and doubles as clot tech. It’s helpful even as a tempo play to make them dig for their spare breaker. In the cut, Ark Lockdown was also reasonably awkward to play around. I had briefly considered playing Digital Rights Management in this slot to tutor for agendas but Ark Lockdown was more universally useful in the Anarch meta.

Mausolus vs Afshar: This was a small point of debate. Steven suggested playing 2 Afshar instead of 2 Masolus. I liked Masolus and in the Muntal Bost deck, it felt good to put on R&D. 2 Afshar was definitely the right call though since it’s a net 5 cost to get through with BOrch, impossible to Hippo and the standard bad pub ice (Bulwark, Trebuchet) was plenty for R&D.

Otherwise the deck is standard outfit stuff. Get a ton of money fast (ideally with Too Big to Fail or Hostile Takeover). Try to score out an Atlas with a counter behind a strong double-iced server. Get to 4 Bad Pub and/or rush out your agendas. Fetch the winning agenda with Atlas counter and fast advance to win the game. If the runner spends too many credits getting through the hefty ices, then they get Economic Warfare + Hard-Hitting News-ed.

Tournament Results

This deck was only one of two corp decks to go undefeated in swiss. It dropped a single game against DeeR’s Hoshiko in the winner’s finals but redeemed itself in the last game of the Grand Finals.

The loss, I felt, was at least partly due to a bad draw. The first 3 agendas I saw were the 3 regulatory captures which makes life pretty difficult. I struggled to get to 4 bad pubs and scoring out 6/2 is not viable. When this deck gives you a draw like that, the lines do get fairly limited. Sometimes you Outfit other people and sometimes you get Outfitted.

Closing Remarks

Wow, holy shit. I can’t believe that happened.

Going into the tournament, I thought aiming to make it into the top cut was a little too ambitious so my goal was to not miss any triggers. It’s absurd to think that I not only made the cut, but also went all the way.

I had so much fun at the tournament. I met awesome people and sat across from players who I have long admired. I got to play some incredible games of netrunner. Thank you to everyone who helped make it happen.